No Accountability: UNC System Foundations Operate in Secrecy

Feb 15, 2016 ·

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.

In Troubled Times, Some Important Advances to Protect Student Rights

Nov 16, 2015 ·

In the last few years, the rights of students in North Carolina universities have received some significant new protections. It is important that state legislators and educators continue to do so, for such rights—pertaining to free speech and due process of punitive proceedings—have been under assault on college campuses nationwide in recent years.

A coalition for transparency at the UNC Board of Governors is building

Apr 6, 2015 ·

UNC Board of Governors meetings are hard to navigate for the uninitiated, such as a member of the public. The committee rooms are small, spread out, and poorly labeled. All the people who attend the meetings seem to know each other. Finding a place to sit in the boardroom often means arriving an hour before the meeting begins. And if you don’t get a seat, you’re out of luck. Although the main board meeting is video-streamed into the lobby, it’s hard to hear and it isn’t recorded.

In North Carolina, university-backed political advocacy may be on the way out

Feb 23, 2015 ·

Last week, a working group from the UNC system’s Board of Governors drew national attention and student and faculty protest after it announced plans to discontinue three of the system’s 237 centers and increase oversight of thirteen others. The centers slated for closure are East Carolina University’s Center for Biodiversity, NC Central’s Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change, and UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, which was founded in 2005 by then-U.S. Senator John Edwards.

Should the University of North Carolina enhance its “global brand”?

Jan 12, 2015 ·

Over the past two years, the University of North Carolina has been implementing recommendations laid out by the General Administration and Board of Governors in their 2013 report, “Our Time, Our Future: the UNC Compact with North Carolina.” For example, the system has streamlined the transfer process for students going from community colleges to UNC and defined “core competencies” that all graduates should possess.

The UNC Board of Governors takes action on a leak to the press

Nov 17, 2014 ·

In the past few months, under the chairmanship of John Fennebresque, the UNC Board of Governors has been more aggressive than in the past, drilling down into more topics and increasing its discussions in committees and in the full board meetings. But now the board is being distracted by a spat over confidentiality at Winston-Salem State University, one of the board’s sixteen college campuses.