Higher Education | 2002 Archive

One of the fun things about a new year is looking back and razzing the events of the old. January, after all, is named after the Latin god Janus, who has two faces, one looking forward and the other backward. With a new year fast approaching, let us look back on the nuttiest, most ridiculous happenings in higher education in North Carolina in 2002 — and look forward to more of the same in 2003.

"Down with 'Diversity,'" proclaims the October 2002 cover of New Sense magazine at Duke University, published by the students of the Duke Conservative Union. “Trampling UNC’s Intellectual Diversity,” proclaimed the March 2002 cover of Carolina Review, a conservative student publication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Review cover, which featured a grinning donkey treading underfoot the word “DIVERSITY,” also asked, “If all your professors are Democrats, is Carolina diverse?”

House Undergraduate Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will receive an endowment worth at least $20,000 from the senior class of 2003. Jon Sanders says UNC-CH seniors decided upon the endowment in an online poll that included two other choices.

By next June the nation's highest court could finally issue a much-needed clarification of the constitutionality of using racial considerations in college admissions decisions. The Supreme Court took up two cases in which white applicants argued that their applications to the University of Michigan and its law school were turned down because of their race.

Academics discussed several challenges facing higher education in North Carolina at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy’s conference in Chapel Hill on Oct. 26. Jon Sanders says those included answering the calls for increasing accountability, restoring liberty and dignity, and translating lofty goals into practical application.

Karen Palasek reports that professors and deans of schools of education heatedly disagreed over the direction of education schools in a panel discussion at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy’s conference Oct. 26.