Higher Education | 2004 Archive

RALEIGH — In January, a campaign began in Michigan to prohibit racial preferences. The campaign for the “Michigan Civil Rights Initiative” (MCRI), is led by executive director Jennifer Gratz. Her name may sound familiar because she filed one of the lawsuits against race preferences in the University of Michigan that led to the Supreme Court decision last year upholding a narrow use of race by universities in admissions decisions. The MCRI states, “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”

RALEIGH — A lack of education and vocational training has left North Carolina lagging in the competitive race of building a competent workforce to attract new corporations and businesses to the state. Community colleges leader Martin Lancaster said the system is doing its best to bridge the gap across the state through tech prep and other programs, but he thinks the state is on a collision course with disaster.“Forty-eight percent of recent high school graduates that enroll in community college need remediation in either reading, writing, or mathematics,” he said. “It’s a very bad sign that puts the North Carolina economic future at risk.”

RALEIGH — Two rival bills under discussion in the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee would get the federal government involved in the debate on higher-education tuition increases. Both bills, however, take different approaches to make college more affordable for students. The Republican plan would call for a College Affordability Index and would give more information to parents and students about college costs. The Democrat plan would also call for an affordability index, however it would punish states that decrease higher-education spending. The bills are part of an effort to reauthorize the Higher Education Act in time for passage of the 2005 fiscal budget.

Teaching students takes a backseat to universities' new emphasis on "economic diversity."

RALEIGH — The president of the N.C. Center for Applied Textile Technology created the appearance of a conflict of interest by accepting outside teaching jobs, the State Auditor’s Office said in an investigative audit released last week. The auditor’s office was asked to review the secondary employment of the center’s president, James L. Lemons, by the president of the State Community College System. Meanwhile, another community-college audit found that Blue Ridge Community College had used state-paid technology staff to perform services for outside organizations in competition with private firms, thus potentially violating state law.

RALEIGH — Since 2002, controversy and UNC-Chapel Hill’s summer reading program for incoming freshmen have gone hand in hand. The university’s book choice for 2002, Approaching the Qur’an, prompted an outcry among some Christian activists. Last year’s selection of the book Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America fanned the controversy as conservative said the book was unscholarly, Marxist, and amounted to liberal indoctrination at a public university. The selection committee this year sought to avoid the outcry of the past years by opening the selection process, and this year’s choice is a book that looks at the experiences of a group of cadets at West Point.