The controversy over minority enrollment in North Carolina colleges gets right to the heart of diversity, the cardinal virtue of academe. Although the issue has been vexing colleges for years, it doesn’t take an outside observer long to realize the absurdly simple crux of the matter. The problem with minorities is just that there are just so few of them.
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.
Although tuition increases have generated the most controversy in the past few months and years at schools in the University of North Carolina System, another increasing cost of attending UNC schools — increasing student fees — has gone unremarked.
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.
Less than a year after hundreds of University of North Carolina students marched to the Capitol to protest UNC budget cuts and large tuition increases, tuition increases are again being proposed for several UNC schools, yet the students are now mute. They were in August when legislators debated a 9 percent, retroactive tuition hike for all UNC system students (which passed Aug. 30) that The Daily Tar Heel wrote a story about it, “Low Turnout for Anti-Tuition Rally Frustrates Leaders,” on Aug. 28. “Despite the possibility of additional charges,” the DTH noted, referring to the tuition increase, “rally organizers had difficulty enticing student involvement.”