At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Neel Ahuja is teaching a course on the literature related to the 9-11 terrorist attacks. In response to concerns raised by both the Young Republicans group on the campus and by the Pope Center, the Faculty Council has issued a resolution unanimously affirming the academic integrity of…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following letter in support of the University of North Carolina Law School’s Center for Civil Rights, which the university’s Board of Governors has threatened,was sent on Tuesday. To: The University of North Carolina, Board of Governors Date: July 11, 2017 We write to you in our capacity as law professors,…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Over the past few years this blog has posted a number of items related to the work of the conservative North Carolina-based John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. In March, 2015, John Wilson reported that the center had praised the decision of the University of North Carolina Board of…
The Center for Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s law school has been eliminated by the Board of Governors. As the AAUP noted in a statement opposing this move, “centers must be free to sponsor curricular and extracurricular programs and provide services to the public across the broadest…
An article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a conference held at the libertarian Cato Institute promoting a report from the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, which concludes that conservative-leaning academic centers on college and university campuses founded by wealthy donors “are not just surviving but thriving.” The report estimates…
George Leef of Art Pope’s Center for Higher Education Policy denounces Jane Mayer’s recent profile of Pope in the New Yorker as a “scurrilous attack.” But Leef’s response reveals how accurate many of the critiques were. Leef argues, “it’s no more possible to ‘buy the curriculum’ than it is to corner the silver market.” His…
Jane Mayer has an important article in the New Yorker about the influence of millionaire Art Pope in North Carolina politics and higher education. Pope funds the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, where director of research George Leef has been one of the loudest voices calling for the defunding of higher education…
BY HASSAN MELEHY By now, the decision by the UNC–Chapel Hill Board of Trustees to refuse a tenured professorship to Nikole Hannah-Jones is a well-known story. One trustee, speaking anonymously, made clear that the motive was “politics.” In North Carolina we’re familiar with the right-wing policymaking that governs us: one of its major sources is…
BY HANK REICHMAN A little more than a month ago, Martin Kich posted to this blog a piece on the Koch network that prompted a lively and extensive exchange in the comments section between Conor Gibson of UnKoch My Campus, John Wilson, and Phil Magness, a professor at George Mason University, frequent commenter on this…
“Editorial: Measuring the Payoff of College.” Tampa Bay Times 18 Sep. 2015: A, 10. President Barack Obama wisely abandoned his plan for the federal government to rank all 7,000 American institutions of higher learning, from Harvard to hairdressing schools. But the U.S. Education Department has done something smarter. It has created a vast database…