UNC BOG: Doing the Right's dirty work

Published March 3, 2015

By Rob Schofield

by Rob Schofield, NC Policy Watch, March 3, 3015.

Defunding the Poverty Center is just one small part of a bigger plan for higher ed

Last week’s decision by the UNC Board of Governors to dissolve three small academic centers at UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina Central and ECU (including, most notably of course, the Poverty Center headed by UNC Law School Professor Gene Nichol) and to limit the activities of the Law School’s Center for Civil Rights has been met with justifiable outrage in numerous circles.

As one group of activists opposed to the Board’s actions put it in a statement this past weekend:

“The full board approved these recommendations on Friday in a unanimous vote over the strong opposition of students and faculty who were present at the meeting. We believe that the Board’s unanimity in approving these recommendations speaks to the purely political nature of their final decision-making process. The last time such ideological fetters were applied to free thought and free conversation at our University was in 1963 with the passage of the ‘Speaker Ban’ law…. During the meeting, approximately two dozen students wore duct tape over their mouths with the words ‘Speaker Ban 2015’ written on it.”

In another powerful response, Nichol himself had this to say:

“The university’s governing board moved to abolish an academic center in order to punish its director for publishing articles that displease the board and its political benefactors. The governors said to a member of the faculty: We cannot allow your writings to go without rebuke. We may not be able to fire you, but we will do all we can to suppress your efforts. Criticisms of this governor and of this General Assembly, at this public university, are not to be tolerated. Were I to have praised the legislature’s war on poor people rather than decry it, the board would have placed laurels on my head instead of boots on my neck.”

From a right for all to a privilege for the few 

As absurd and destructive as the Board’s actions were, however, they are far from the entire story right now when it comes to the debate over the future of higher education in North Carolina. Limiting the free speech of potential critics is, in fact, just one small part of an ambitious agenda to remake academia and crush, once and for all, the idea prevalent not that long ago in America that post-secondary education should be a right for all, rather than a privilege for the few.

Evidence of this hard and noxious reality abounds – perhaps most obviously in the Board’s decision at the very same meeting in which it pulled the plug on the centers, to raise in-state tuition across the UNC system for undergraduates by an average of 4.3% next year and an additional 3.7% the following year.

Many news reports lazily parroted the Board’s excuse that the tuition hike was necessary in order to provide faculty salary increases, but, of course, that’s as illogical and inaccurate as saying that parents of K-12 students most pony up more and more each year for driver’s education, extracurricular activities, basic classroom supplies and PTA “donations” in order to fund teacher salaries.

The plain truth of the matter is that tuition has been going up and up in our public colleges and universities for years because funding support from the General Assembly and the Governor has been going down and down. As the N.C. Budget and Tax Center reported last May:

“Average tuition at North Carolina’s public, four-year colleges increased by more than 34 percent [since the start of the Great Recession] yet those increases have compensated for only part of the revenue loss resulting from state funding cuts. Some of the outcomes from these budget cuts have been well-documented on North Carolina’s campuses: elimination of faculty and staff positions, reduced course offerings, and declining purchasing power with state financial aid, among other cuts. Since 2008, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has eliminated 493 positions, cut 16,000 course seats, increased class sizes, cut its centrally supported computer labs from seven to three, and eliminated two distance education centers.”

And make no mistake; these budget cuts aren’t occurring by accident or as the result of forces beyond the control of state leaders (or even simply as the unavoidable result of an unrelated commitment to slashing taxes on corporations and the wealthy). They are the result of a concerted and well-supported campaign by conservative ideologues and think tanks to shrink and privatize higher education, “financialize” academics and change how we think about the whole endeavor.

A drum beat of reaction 

North Carolinians got one of their first well-publicized tastes of the Right’s plans for higher education during the initial weeks of the McCrory administration when the Governor went on a national conservative radio show to blast liberal arts and describe, albeit clumsily, a new vision in which the overriding emphasis for colleges and universities was on creating worker bees for private industry.

For some, McCrory’s muddled bluster came as a bit of a surprise, but for those who’ve paid attention to the Governor’s friends and allies (e.g. groups like the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy – yet another creation of conservative financier and McCrory’s Year-One Budget Director, Art Pope), the attack was sadly familiar.

For years now, the Pope Center has been churning out reports and commentaries belittling the liberal arts, calling for disinvestment in public colleges and universities, arguing for cuts to federal student aid, deriding professors as underworked and overpaid, promoting for-profit colleges and, indeed, arguing that too many North Carolinians go to college and that attendance is generally overrated. (Denunciations of the Poverty Center have also been a regular feature.)

In the Pope world, academia is overrun with pointy-headed liberal professors spoon-feeding pabulum to shiftless and freeloading students who run up excessive debt while never properly “monetizing” their education and merely delaying their inevitable fate (i.e. to become retail clerks, food servers and telemarketers).

Even if one sets aside the rather stunning inconsistency of a group that fights to lower public investments and raise tuition lamenting the growing mountain of debt that students have been forced to take on, the cynicism of the Pope Center denizens is often quite remarkable to behold.

In an essay published just a couple of weeks ago blasting President Obama’s recent proposal to work toward free community college for all, the author offers up a bitter and scathing assessment of current community college students – a majority of whom she categorizes as “slackers getting free rides.”

In December, another Pope contributor described the University of Georgia student body as little more than a den of drunken debauchery that can only be repaired through tougher admission standards and stricter discipline. He further describes the university academic scene as “a mindless rat race” and attributes this disastrous situation to a combination of “Hollywood” and the twin 1960’s disasters of the “Free Speech Movement” and the rise of due process rights for public university students.

Two or three times a week, these pained and mostly delusional laments for the America of the 1950’s are emailed to conservatives all over North Carolina.

Connecting the dots

Let’s hope that the widespread anger at the Board of Governors’ heavy-handed actions spurs North Carolinians to take a closer look at the issues championed by the disfavored centers. The Poverty Center will host an event today on low wage work in North Carolina that one can only expect will draw a standing-room-only crowd. And happily, Gene Nichol – a tenured law professor – isn’t going anywhere.

That said, let’s also hope that more and more North Carolinians connect the dots between last week’s actions and the Right’s broader and well-telegraphed agenda for our colleges and universities. With Art Pope himself still rumored to be interested in replacing recently dispatched university President Tom Ross (he refused to rule out the possibility in a recent media interview) there should be no illusions about how big the Right is thinking. Unless caring and thinking people stand up and say “no way,” there’s every reason to believe that the ongoing movement to transform higher education from a vital public good into a mere adjunct to capital will continue to pick up speed.

- See more at: http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2015/03/03/unc-board-of-governors-doing-the-rights-dirty-work/#sthash.MFFMazh2.dpuf

March 3, 2015 at 9:26 am
Frank Burns says:

The next step is to get university costs under control and make it possible for an undergraduate to actually graduate in 4 years. I understand that Professor Nickols only teaches 2 classes per year but is paid over $200 k for his efforts. He needs to have his salary cut to a part time professor or he needs to teach more. We also need to look closely at programs of education and jobs created from those programs. How many women's studies or black studies are needed? Are there career opportunities out there in basket weaving? One university should be used to teach those programs, not every university.

We need to keep the NC taxpayer as a big consideration in the decision making over the feelings of the left.

March 4, 2015 at 10:05 pm
Donald Byrd says:

So what has the poverty center accomplished?