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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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Silent Sam beats Carol Folt and her feel good gaffe

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IHE says: Stunning Departure at Chapel Hill My choice of headline might have been more anodyne: "Carol Folt breaks the law and flees the scene." So much for commitment to the integrity of responsible academic governance.  Opponents of Silent Sam should be more careful about what they wish for. But on to the analysis. __________________________________ This is way more complicated than knee jerk encomiums for Folt's (irresponsible) action. Indeed, if I didn't know better, I'd be tempted to argue that Folt has done more for the reactionary right than they can do for themselves. But it is pretty obvious that she hasn't really learned much in her short years in NC, so I won't go there. Here is the deal: The neo-authoritarians in legislature passed this monuments law in 2015 to punish Chapel Hill -- and the Faculty Assembly warned the Board of Governors and the Chancellors that it would bring chaos to the campuses. At the time, Tom Ross was a lame ...
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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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