Another UNC-Chapel Hill official gets a sweet send-off
The news last fall of sweetheart deals to exiting administrators of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill placed the institution under unsettling scrutiny of its priorities. Those deals amounted to $520,000 plus travel expenses to two former vice chancellors, Susan H. Ehringhaus and Susan T. Kitchen. They came to light after other UNC-CH officials had spent months making the university’s case against any more budget cuts affecting them, on the basis that the university had nowhere left to cut.
Women’s Agenda Seeks Your Money
In March a group of about 50 women’s rights activists from the North Carolina mountains plans to present state legislators with a “new” agenda on the needs of women in the state.
N.C. State requests delay before vote
Before the Council of State’s vote on North Carolina State University’s proposed hotel and conference center, university officials asked and received a delay in the vote. Chancellor Mary Anne Fox told media that she requested the delay not because university officials were counting votes, but because they had not done enough to answer council members’ questions, especially over the issue of private financing of the project.
Petty UNC-CH officials rebuffed in attempt to de-recognize Christian group
The laurels were still fresh from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s defense of academic freedom and religious pluralism in its requirement that incoming freshmen read portions of the Koran. Nevertheless, UNC-CH found itself facing a lawsuit threat from a Christian student organization, which said the school had threatened to revoke its official recognition on campus.
The Trouble with Title IX
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.
The Top 10 Nuttiest Campus Events in N.C. for 2002
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.
Conservatives on campus speak out against ideological intolerance
“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?”
Supreme Court poised to offer long-overdue clarity on racial preferences
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.
N.C. universities continue to chase diversity, but at what cost?
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.
The problem of credential inflation
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.