Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 purports to guarantee nondiscrimination in education. Nevertheless, it has been subject to a succession of bureaucratic “interpretations” that have practically twisted it into the legal trappings of a quota system. It may now be poised for reform.
One of the fun things about a new year is looking back and razzing the events of the old. January, after all, is named after the Latin god Janus, who has two faces, one looking forward and the other backward. With a new year fast approaching, let us look back on the nuttiest, most ridiculous happenings in higher education in North Carolina in 2002 — and look forward to more of the same in 2003.
“Down with ‘Diversity,'” proclaims the October 2002 cover of New Sense magazine at Duke University, published by the students of the Duke Conservative Union. “Trampling UNC’s Intellectual Diversity,” proclaimed the March 2002 cover of Carolina Review, a conservative student publication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Review cover, which featured a grinning donkey treading underfoot the word “DIVERSITY,” also asked, “If all your professors are Democrats, is Carolina diverse?”
By next June the nation’s highest court could finally issue a much-needed clarification of the constitutionality of using racial considerations in college admissions decisions. The Supreme Court took up two cases in which white applicants argued that their applications to the University of Michigan and its law school were turned down because of their race.
The diversity movement continues apace in North Carolina higher education. Universities continue to expend resources in pursuit of diversity, a term generally used to refer to having an appropriate mix of students and faculty of different races, genders, and sexual preferences, as well as course offerings tailored to that mix.
Every so often, you come across an article that leaves you thinking, “Gosh — I can’t believe he actually said that!” A recent essay that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Sept. 27, 2002) had that effect on me. It was written by a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Randall Collins. Collins entitled his piece, “The Dirty Little Secret of Credential Inflation” and what made it so remarkable was his audacity in speaking a truth so contrary to his professional interest.
One night the comic-strip character Binkley from Bloom County woke his father with the rant, “Well, Dad, I guess it’s safe to say we aren’t exactly a couple of short, Hispanic, Hindu, French-speaking, physically handicapped, Communist, gay, black women.” Binkley’s problem that night was his realization that “in every regard, we’re hopelessly in the majority.”
A recent study of faculty salaries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has revealed a significant salary gap between white male faculty and minority faculty. Now that this pay gap has been proven, it’s time for the university to address this obvious pay bias.
The next step is hard but clear: UNC-CH must take corrective action to pay white males more. The good news is at least they’re now getting paid more than females.
Over a hundred faculty worked with a handful of students and staff members at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to produce a proposed new general education curriculum for the university.
Their report, “Making Connections: An Initial Proposal to Revise the General Education Curriculum,” is a significant step toward the first major overhaul of UNC-CH’s general education curriculum since 1980.
Are claims that some professors use their classes more to indoctrinate students in their own political ideology than to teach them anything true? Or are they like Elvis sightings? Liberal faculty members and administrators often scoff at such complaints, saying that the students who lodge them are just hypersensitive gripers.
