Colleges are using a new tool with the frightening potential to shut down open dialogue. They go by the benign-sounding name of “bias response teams.” Bias response teams monitor what students and faculty say. They encourage students to report, often anonymously, comments or behavior that make them feel uncomfortable or threatened, even if the speech … Continue reading “A New Campus Invention for Policing Speech”
The number of part-time and nontenure faculty continues to rise on campus as university officials try to cut costs. So does their dissatisfaction over wages and benefits, which is stirring disruptive pushback. Few question the credentials, knowledge, or teaching skills of adjunct and contingent faculty. But some are exploring whether their working conditions, lack of … Continue reading “With Colleges Shifting to Adjuncts, Teaching Quality May Suffer”
Drone pilots have assumed an increasingly valuable role in military operations. Soon they may be able to leverage their unique experience into academic credits through the North Carolina Community College System. That is just one among a multitude of military occupations and training modules for which the UNC System and Community College System might one … Continue reading “North Carolina Works to Ensure Success of Military Students”
Irwin Holmes was in his living room, a laptop computer in front of him, a pile of reading materials stacked next to him, and his wife seated nearby when he heard the news. North Carolina State University might create segregated student housing for African American women. When he learned his alma mater already had exclusive … Continue reading “Segregated Student Housing: Exclusion in the Name of Inclusion”
James Gates Jr. is a theoretical physicist renowned for his work with supersymmetry, supergravity, and string theory. The University of Maryland professor says he prefers to shun publicity, but his curriculum vitae boasts of many accomplishments and honors, including service on former President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He also is an … Continue reading “Citing Genetics and Power of Rock Music, Physicist Says Diversity Crossbreeds Excellence”
Listening to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill law professor Gene Nichol’s radical riff ripping trustees and the UNC system’s Board of Governors as cowards, and Republican lawmakers as oppressive racists, one might get the feeling he is on a career suicide mission. But in an auditorium half filled with fawning university professor compatriots … Continue reading “Starving the Beast Prompts Choleric Call to Fatten a Sacred Cow”
The UNC System is flush with foundations that raise money for their associated universities, and researchers who have looked at these types of organizations on a national level have called them “slush funds” and “shadow corporations” that too often operate in secrecy, despite spending taxpayers’ money. The unusual practice in North Carolina in which foundations buy property, then lease space back to their universities, has raised eyebrows among some of those experts.
A university president says that America is “losing her way” in higher education