Tea Party Legislature Targets University of North Carolina In Major Assault On Higher Learning

[applegrove]

Tea Party Legislature Targets University of North Carolina In Major Assault On Higher Learning
by Igor Bobic at the Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/11/poverty-north-carolina-gene-nichols_n_6641450.html

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The state's Republican-led legislature has launched an ideological drive against the state's publicly funded academic institution, the University of North Carolina system. In 2013, Gov. Pat McCrory (R) instructed the university's Board of Governors to identify some $15 million in budget cuts to university research centers -- a move in line with Pope's desire to slash the higher education budget. Pope was named the state's deputy budget director soon after the tea party seized control in the state.

A seven-member working group identified 240 such centers, before whittling that number down to 34 for further evaluation. Of that number, eight are based at UNC-Chapel Hill. The targeted programs include the Carolina Center for Public Service; the Carolina Women’s Center; the UNC Center for Faculty Excellence; the Center for Law and Government; the James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy; the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History; the UNC Center for Civil Rights, the UNC Institute on Aging and the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity. Later this month, a review of the UNC system and its 16 campuses will determine the fate of those academic centers.

"In selecting these eight centers from the hundreds on campus, it is hard not to worry that there is a potent ideological agenda at work here," Gene Nichol, a law professor and director of the Center on Poverty, Work & Opportunity, told the board in September.

The Poverty Center was founded in 2005 by former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who later ran for president on his 'Two Americas' anti-poverty platform. North Carolina has seen record levels of poverty since the Great Recession, and the center studies poverty and work, advocates for policies that mitigate poverty and holds panels on the issue. It is privately funded and runs on an annual budget of about $120,000, none of which comes from the state. It uses some university resources, which enables the university's board to shut it down. It also receives some state grants, which it would need to return if it closed.



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