A class at the University of California at Berkeley came under fire in February when the public learned participants received college credit for a course that involved, among other things, visiting strip clubs, watching an instructor engage in sexual intercourse, and engaging in orgies at an instructor’s house.
The Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina this week approved a systemwide, $1 increase in student fees to fund the UNC Association of Student Governments. The increase will raise the UNCASG’s budget from $2,500 to $165,000 — an increase of 6,600 percent.
On Thursday, Feb. 28, North Carolina State University Prof. Phillip Muñoz’s political science class on “Law and Justice” was interrupted by a group of black students. The group passed out slips of paper to students as they entered the classroom, then lined up along the side wall of the classroom. The group never spoke, not even to respond to the professor’s repeated invitations to state their case. They were there to offer support, or better stated, intimidation, on behalf of a black student upset about the class.
New courses inspired by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 have been developed on college campuses nationwide. Most deal matter-of-factly with the issues, but some have come under criticism for being “gadfly courses” and “politically correct pseudo-courses.”
On the back page of its Feb. 14-21 issue, the Nubian featured a large picture of “The infamous Darren O’Connor.” A diabolical reddish glow suffuses O’Connor’s face, almost crowding out his features, except for the dark hollows of his eyes, which are exaggerated by the hellish light.
About two out of three college students have changed their behavior as a result of the terrorist attacks of Septemeber 11, according to a poll released this week by the Independent Women’s Forum. Ninety-six percent of students polled report that the attacks had an impact on their lives.
A collection of black student interest groups at North Carolina State University has graded the university on the subjects of enrollment and graduation of black students and recruitment of black faculty. The African-American Student Advisory Council, not surprisingly, gave the university mostly failing grades. In essence, the groups gave N.C. State low marks because the university doesn’t discriminate enough in the way they want it to.
Some illegal immigrants may now pay resident tuition to attend public universities in California, thanks to legislation signed last year by Gov. Gray Davis and a vote this week by the University of California Board of Regents. In North Carolina, a bill before the Senate would create a commission to study doing the same thing here.
Controversy continues to swirl around what the University of North Carolina at Wilmington did to a professor for chiding a student’s mass-distributed e-mail as “bad speech.”
Despite the Lumina Foundation’s jeremiad over the “inaccessibility” of higher education hindering the goal of making college available to all citizens, other research indicates that such a goal itself is not socially optimal.
