Movements are underway on college campuses nationwide to cause them to “divest” in holdings that support some cause promoters find odious. The campaigns hearken back to those in the 1980s where colleges refused to do business with South Africa because of its policy of apartheid. The most well-known current campaign is the one seeking universities to divest in Israel, but there is another campaign underway to have universities divest in terror.
The news last fall of sweetheart deals to exiting administrators of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill placed the institution under unsettling scrutiny of its priorities. Those deals amounted to $520,000 plus travel expenses to two former vice chancellors, Susan H. Ehringhaus and Susan T. Kitchen. They came to light after other UNC-CH officials had spent months making the university’s case against any more budget cuts affecting them, on the basis that the university had nowhere left to cut.
In March a group of about 50 women’s rights activists from the North Carolina mountains plans to present state legislators with a “new” agenda on the needs of women in the state.
Before the Council of State’s vote on North Carolina State University’s proposed hotel and conference center, university officials asked and received a delay in the vote. Chancellor Mary Anne Fox told media that she requested the delay not because university officials were counting votes, but because they had not done enough to answer council members’ questions, especially over the issue of private financing of the project.
One of the fun things about a new year is looking back and razzing the events of the old. January, after all, is named after the Latin god Janus, who has two faces, one looking forward and the other backward. With a new year fast approaching, let us look back on the nuttiest, most ridiculous happenings in higher education in North Carolina in 2002 — and look forward to more of the same in 2003.
The diversity movement continues apace in North Carolina higher education. Universities continue to expend resources in pursuit of diversity, a term generally used to refer to having an appropriate mix of students and faculty of different races, genders, and sexual preferences, as well as course offerings tailored to that mix.
A recent study of faculty salaries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has revealed a significant salary gap between white male faculty and minority faculty. Now that this pay gap has been proven, it’s time for the university to address this obvious pay bias.
The next step is hard but clear: UNC-CH must take corrective action to pay white males more. The good news is at least they’re now getting paid more than females.
According to the most recent data, taxpayers in North Carolina pay the fourth-highest per-pupil amount in the nation to subsidize public-college students in their state. Also, N.C. students attending the state’s community colleges or public universities pay the second-lowest amounts in tuition and fees in the nation in either category of institution.
The faculty at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro have provided state legislators and others a lesson in responsibility and charity in the face of dire fiscal times.
Hours and services will be restored to D.H. Hill Library on the campus of North Carolina State University, school officials have announced. Public pressure, student activism, work between library officials and the provost’s office, and the state legislature’s joint conference committee budget report all contributed to a restoration of library services, which will be effective Oct. 16.
