The Higher Unlearning

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. ...

  The Wrong Change for the UNC Boa­rd of Governors Recently introduced legislation (HB 39) aimed at reducing the size of the UNC Board of Governors (BOG) from 32 to 24 members is likely to worsen many existing problems with the Board. Every North Carolinian concerned about the quality of public higher education should urge their representatives to oppose this flawed and politically suspect bill. For many decades, advocates of good governance have warned of the dangers inherent in North Carolina’s practice of giving the legislature the power to appoint BOG members. Only one other state, New York, has a similar arrangement. When the Democrat-controlled legislature created the system in 1971, then-UNC President Bill Friday predicted, rightly, that lawmakers would repeatedly interfere in University affairs, ignoring checks and balances required for good governance. In 2005, the conservative Pope Center for Higher Education Policy commissioned a report noting ...

Many North Carolinians may be familiar with the controversial – and increasingly evident – academic, financial, and governance failings of a number of North Carolina charter schools . This should come as no surprise: more than a few observers predicted that the legislature’s peremptory style, and its dogged determination to ignore facts, evidence, and the rule of reason in the governance of our public schools, virtually assured the corruption of public charter school initiatives in North Carolina. In most places, being called out for bungled lawmaking, especially in education policy, might encourage a bit of humility and self-restraint from legislators. Not so on Jones Street, where the public good is frequently sacrificed to hubris, and power-mongering all-too-often supplants the wise restraint of good governance. And so when many existing charter school schemes were scrutinized and found wanting , and rumblings were heard that many new proposals might not pass muster eve...

Surfing around on the Pope Center site, I came across this provocative exchange. There was a very interesting essay by Robert Lawson , who, in trying to defend so-called "free enterprise" centers against irresponsible forms of interference in academic work, ended up arguing against much of what the Pope Center wants to do about "leftists" on campus. (I address the conceptualization of "leftists" and  "free enterprise" in another post about the Pope Center.)   Former UNC Faculty Assembly Chair Stephen Leonard saw the contradiction and called out this bit of Popery. I am posting Leonard's response here, with permission from the author. 

Pope Center analyst George Leef again proves that ideological fear-mongering using political party identification as a surrogate for actual arguments is just silly. See Leef's essay, "College Faculties are Mostly Leftist and Becoming More So." I post my response here: Anyone who thinks that Democrats are by definition "left of center" suffers from a rather pronounced form of partisan tribalism. My very long experience in the academy suggests that most professors, both Democrats and Republicans, are conservative and liberal centrists, and that there are precious few who can be described as "leftists" or "rightists".

  Alex Contarino once again demonstrates why history and facts are critically important things for talking about the academy -- and especially when cogitating about the state of the academic disciplines. There is something odd about contemporary (so-called) conservative attitudes toward history: they are all for understanding the past, but they always interpret the past in presentist terms.  Lamenting the absence of "balance" in UNC Chapel Hill Economics courses, Contarino makes the all-too-common student mistake of confusing their myopic experiences in college with an authoritative view of what universities -- and especially big, complicated research universities like Chapel Hill -- have to offer. Apparently blinkered by his aversion to courses in the other social disciplines, Contarino takes the Economic faculty to task for not teaching what he wants. What he should have been doing is looking for what he wants in other departments, and if he doesn't like the partic...

Alex Contarino demonstrates how not to think about issues of access, arguing "Yes, There is Such a Thing as Too Much Enrollment Growth."  That may well be true -- if you don't want the privileged to compete with talented folks of modest means.  Follow the link for Contarino's essay; I post my response here.