Global Warming Grinches Steal Earth Day
Instead of promoting understanding of the environment as intended, the annual event now promotes the ideology of climate change alarmists.
Author Profile
Jenna A. Robinson
Jenna Robinson joined the Martin Center in January 2007 as campus outreach coordinator and later became the center’s director of outreach. She was previously the E.A. Morris Fellowship assistant at the John Locke Foundation, where she had worked since 2001.Robinson graduated from N.C. State University in 2003 with a major in political science and French. She has studied at the University of East Anglia School of American Studies in Norwich, United Kingdom. She received her master’s degree in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005 and her Ph.D. in political science, with a concentration in American politics and a minor in methods, from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2012. Robinson is also a graduate of the Koch Associate Program sponsored by the Charles G. Koch Foundation.
Robinson’s work has appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Roll Call, Forbes, American Thinker, Human Events, Carolina Journal, the Lincoln Tribune, the Hickory Daily Record, the Gaston Gazette, the Mountain Express, and the (Raleigh) News & Observer. She has taught courses in American politics at UNC-Chapel Hill, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Wake Technical Community College. In 2013, she testified before Congress on the Federal Pell Grant Program.
She has previously served as a member of the North Carolina Longitudinal Data System Board and the North Carolina Advisory Committee for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She currently serves on the board of the Classical Liberals in the Carolinas.
Robinson lives in Cary, NC, with her husband and two sons.
Articles by Jenna A. Robinson
A Dream Derailed
Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society is threatened by government racial preferences.
Rejecting Victimhood for Individuality
Women’s History Month should feature more praise for individual achievement and less whining about men.
Overregulated Law Schools
Pope Center Paper Urges Lifting Restrictions on Legal Education in the State
Attending Mass at the Church of Global Warming
Duke University’ s closed-minded views on the environment
Re-thinking Those Giant Endowments!
Should colleges be required to pay out a percentage of their endowments?
Harry Potter Goes to College
Editor’s note: The latest installment in the wizarding movies, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, will likely make an appearance under many Christmas trees this year. A more important question is whether the books should make an appearance in college courses. This article was originally published in the Charlotte Observer on August 9, 2007.
Universities across the country are adding Harry Potter to the curriculum in disciplines as diverse as English, philosophy, history, Latin, and science. Edmund M. Kern, an associate professor of history at Lawrence University and author of the reader’s guide The Wisdom of Harry Potter, is teaching an entire course on Harry Potter this fall.
The generation of students entering college this year has a mania for J. K. Rowling’s seven-book series about a young boy’s adventures in a fantastic magical world. Harry Potter’s ongoing battle against evil, with its themes of choice and consequences, life and death, and love and hate, reverberates among this generation as Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five captured the students of the 1960s.
But are Harry Potter books good enough for the college curriculum?
Another Battle in the Student Fees War
At most colleges and universities, each student is required to pay fees in addition to tuition and living expenses. Those fees are used to pay for a vast array of things on campus, whether or not the student has any interest in them.
Over the years, there has been a lot of litigation over student fees, with some students arguing that the system for collecting and distributing money is not just unfair but illegal. On November 20, a federal court in New York threw another wrench into the already convoluted legality of student fees.
Student Activity Fees: Who Gets What and Who Decides?
Only a small percentage of student activity fees at University of North Carolina campuses are distributed by students to campus organizations, says a new study. The majority of student activity fees are allocated by university administrators for purposes ranging from repairs to a student center to an undergraduate teaching award.
At N.C. State, only $8.85 out of the $363.50 collected per student for activities is distributed by students. At UNC-Chapel Hill, $39 of the $291.30 students must pay each year is given to student government to disburse to student organizations. “Contrary to the general impression, students are almost entirely excluded from the process of disbursing the student activity fee,” says Jenna Ashley Robinson, author of the study, “Student Activity Fees: Who Gets What and Who Decides?”
Jumping on the Climate Change Bandwagon
The drive to do something about the alleged climate change crisis has been sweeping the world. Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” received an Oscar and he has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his attempt to convince people that we must take drastic action now, or else suffer irreparable harm to the planet’s environment.
As Clarion Call reported in July, Elon University chose the book An Inconvenient Truth as its required summer reading for freshmen. And there is much more global warming action on campuses, in particular the proliferation of the American College & University Presidents Climate Change Commitment.
The Climate Commitment calls itself a “high-visibility effort to address global warming.” It aims at “garnering institutional commitments to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions and to accelerate the research and educational efforts of higher education to equip society to re-stabilize the earth’s climate.” Presidents who sign the Commitment pledge to make their campuses “climate neutral” as soon as possible.