The UNC Board of Governors Working Group on Centers and Institutes met Wednesday morning to discuss recommendations the committee will be making to the full board next week.
Those recommendations include closing the Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at UNC in the next 12 months. Gene Nichol is a professor in the UNC School of Law and is the Director of that center. He released the following statement to WCHL:
Poverty is North Carolina’s greatest challenge. In one of the most economically vibrant states of the richest nation on earth, eighteen percent of us live in wrenching poverty. Twenty-five percent of our kids. Forty percent of our children of color. We have one of the country’s fastest rising poverty rates. A decade ago, North Carolina had the 26th highest rate among the states. Now we’re 9th, speeding past the competition. Greensboro is America’s second hungriest city. Asheville’s ninth. Charlotte has the nation’s worst economic mobility. Over the last decade, North Carolina experienced the country’s steepest rise in concentrated poverty. Poverty, amidst plenty, stains the life of this commonwealth. Even if our leaders never discuss it.
And, astonishing as they are, these bloodless statistics don’t fully reveal the crush of economic hardship. That resides more brutally in the terror and despondency of the 150 or more homeless Tar Heels living in the woods and under the bridges of Hickory; or in the 1100 wounded souls waiting in line, most all night long, outside the Fayetteville civic center, desperate for free dental care; or in the quivering voice of the Winston-Salem father who describes deciding which of his children will eat today, and which, only, tomorrow; or in the daughter from Wilson fretting for her 62 year old father with heart disease who can’t see a doctor unless he scrapes together the $400 he owes and has no prospects for.
Some believe such urgencies are beyond the focus of a great public university. Bill Friday wasn’t among them. An active and engaged Poverty Center board member, from its founding until the last days of his life, President Friday felt it crucial “to turn UNC’s mighty engine loose on the lacerating issue of poverty.” He constantly challenged our students: “A million poor North Carolinians pay taxes to subsidize your education. What are you going to do to pay them back?”
I’ve been blessed with a long and varied academic career. But none of my efforts has approached the extraordinary honor of working, side by side, with North Carolina low-income communities and the dedicated advocates and providers who serve them. Together, we have sought to focus a meaningful light on the challenges of poverty and to push back against policies that foster economic injustice. No doubt those messages are uncongenial to the Governor and General Assembly. But poverty is the enemy, not the Poverty Center.
I have been repeatedly informed, even officially, that my articles have “caused great ire and dismay” among state officials and that, unless I stopped publishing in the News & Observer, “external forces might combine in the months ahead” to force my dismissal. Today those threats are brought to fruition. The Board of Governors’ tedious, expensive and supremely dishonest review process yields the result it sought all along – closing the Poverty Center. This charade, and the censorship it triggers, demeans the Board, the University, academic freedom and the Constitution. It’s also mildly ironic that the University now abolishes the Center for the same work that led it to give me the Thomas Jefferson Award a year ago.
The Poverty Center runs on an annual budget of about $120,000. None comes from the state. Grant funding has been secured through 2016. These private dollars will now be returned. UNC will have fewer resources, not more. Two terrific young lawyers will lose their jobs. Student education, employment and publication opportunities will be constricted. Most importantly, North Carolina’s understanding of the challenges of poverty will be weakened. These are significant costs to pay for politicians’ thin skin.
Personally, I’m honored to be singled out for retribution by these agents of wealth, privilege and exclusion. I remain a tenured law professor. When the Poverty Center is abolished, I’ll have more time to write, to speak, and to protest North Carolina’s burgeoning war on poor people. I’ll use it.
Fifty years ago, Chancellor William Aycock testified against the Speaker Ban Law, saying if UNC bowed to such “external pressures,” as it does today, it would “forfeit its claim to be a university.” He noted: “our legislators do not look with favor on persons, especially teachers, who express views different than their own.” But no public official can be “afforded such immunity”. Leaders “freely extol the supposed benefits of their programs, but object to their harmful effects being called to the attention of the citizenry…. The right to think as one wills and to speak as one thinks are requisite to a free society. They are indispensable to education.”
Gene Nichol
Orange County Commissioner Mark Dorosin says he is disappointed with the news.
“I think that that is a tragic mistake, given the significance of that issue in our state and in the region,” he says. “I think what we’re seeing is a real encroachment on academic freedom, and centers and the work of the university being put through some kind of ideological litmus test.”
Dorosin works for the Center for Civil Rights at UNC, which the committee is recommending the school review over the next year. He says discussion was held in the meeting, on Wednesday, over the role of advocacy from these centers.
“Certainly, on that idea – that universities or university centers shouldn’t be doing advocacy – is especially troubling because the university is engaged in advocacy all the time,” he says. “The idea that advocacy is problematic for a university is deeply troubling. And, I think, has a chilling effect on the work that the Center for Civil Right and other entities are trying to do.”
Dorosin adds he feels some inaccurate information regarding the center’s funding was being presented at the committee meeting. Listen to the full interview with Dorosin below:
These recommendations will be put before the full Board of Governors at their meeting next week, on the campus of UNC Charlotte.
Congressman David Price released the following statement regarding the possible closures:
“I am extremely disappointed that the UNC Board of Governors plans to close UNC Chapel Hill’s Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, ECU’s Center for Biodiversity, and NC Central’s Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change. With this announcement, the Board of Governors has once again made clear that it will not hesitate to put politics above the university system’s long tradition of independence and diversity of opinion. This ill-advised decision may appease the majority in the General Assembly, but it also threatens the reputation of the UNC system and thereby violates the Board’s mission of protecting our state’s greatest educational asset.”
The final decision on whether the Board of Governors will shut down the centers will come at their meeting next week.
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