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  The Right Changes for UNC Steven Bachenheimer and Stephen Leonard The UNC Strategic Planning process has always been an occasion to recommit ourselves to the ideals for which public higher education in North Carolina was established. Today, it appears to have become the occasion for implementing radical changes favored by a handful of individuals in the state legislature, on the UNC Board of Governors, and in various Washington and Raleigh think tanks. Against all evidence to the contrary, and against the long and venerable tradition that has made public higher education in North Carolina a model for the nation and the world, the changes being promoted suggest that the widely available, broadly accessible, and readily affordable system of higher education we have is an extravagance North Carolina does not need. For example, Board of Governors member Fred Eshelman, described by pundits at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy as “leading the charge” for radical chan...
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Protecting autocratic snowflakes from freedom of speech

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UPDATE, 2 November 17: There have been several changes to the Board of Governors (BoG) proposed policy (which has now been approved in committee and forward to the full Board for a vote tomorrow). These incorporate some of the concerns raised by the Association of Student Governments, the UNC Staff Assembly, and the UNC Faculty Assembly. The legal staff at General Administration is likely to be responsible for rolling back some of the really bad language and ideas. While some of those changes have mitigated problematic features of the legislation and the Board's interventions in the management of campus affairs, several very troubling issues were made manifest during the BoG Governance Committee meeting, viz: -- Steve Long, the Chair of the Committee, openly conceded that the policy did little more than recapitulate existing legislation protecting freedom of speech. As noted below, laws to enforce laws are almost always an indication that something pernicious is at stake. ...
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No good work goes unpunished

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NC has what is arguably the best system of public higher education in the country, yet (for the fifth year running) there wasn't a single NC public university on the Chronicle of Higher Education's 2015 " Great Colleges to Work For ." (Kudos to Wake Tech for making some of the earlier lists for 2 year institutions, but the absence of NCCC system schools in recent rankings only reinforces the concerns raised here). This of course stands in sharp contrast with the great work that NC staff and faculty have done to make many UNC schools among the most highly ranked institutions -- from a student's perspective. What drives this gap? As I have argued elsewhere in this blog, there is a sense in which the UNC system is (one of) the best in the country despite the problematic policies and laws of the NC legislature and the UNC Board of Governors. There is a sense in which UNC staff, faculty, and administrators have insulated the University from the destructive effec...
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