Republicans want to shut down poverty research in North Carolina

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Republicans want to shut down poverty research in North Carolina

Wonkblog
By Emily Badger February 21
@emilymbadger

The Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill studies, among other things, the depths of poverty in a state with severe pockets of urban distress, the impact of foreclosure clusters on minority neighborhoods there, and the economic impact of legal aid for North Carolina's low-income residents.

Now the center may be shutting down, the target of a Republican-appointed committee recently charged with reviewing the state university system's research centers. The panel's recommendations, announced this week, have caused an uproar in the state over political retaliation against academia — and, more specifically, over the areas of research curiously singled out by the panel. As Inside Higher Ed points out, the three centers the committee wants to ax "reflect scholarly interests in poverty, the environment and social justice."

Conservative officials in the state have long groused that academics from North Carolina's public universities have attacked conservative politicians over policies such as the state's stringent voter ID law. Since 2010, Republicans have controlled both houses of North Carolina's state legislature, and the vast majority of the university board's members have been appointed by the legislature since then. Last year, the New York Times reports, legislators asked the board to reexamine funding for the more than 200 research centers affiliated with state schools.