Incoming University of North Carolina System President Peter Hans has accepted a $400,000 base salary — significantly less than the earnings of some peers and predecessors. But the pay, outlined in a five-year contract, is accompanied by hefty, performance-based bonuses. If executed correctly, the contract could be a great model for universities nationwide, says Richard...
RALEIGH — U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, last week accused committee Democrats of an “attempt to silence” the John Locke Foundation — and 106 other organizations that have expressed skepticism over apocalyptic claims of the role of human activity regarding climate change — by demanding the groups surrender 10 years of detailed funding source data.
RALEIGH — It’s an ages-old question, one as old as the athletic scholarship itself: Are college athletes on scholarship primarily students? Or are they more like hired mercenaries, brought in to do a specific job, and students second — or perhaps not at all? Two recent newspaper investigations indicate that, in the major revenue-producing sports of men’s basketball and football, the classroom is not the players’ strong suit.
RALEIGH — A report by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute found that, for the most part, America’s colleges and universities do a poor job of teaching students about American history and civic institutions. Locally, however, North Carolina Central University does a fair job. It was ranked in the 13th among 50 schools included in a survey designed to gauge student knowledge in those areas.
RALEIGH — Welcome to Carolina Journal Online’s Friday Interview. Today the John Locke Foundation’s Donna Martinez discusses liberal bias in academia with Mike Adams, who teaches criminology at UNC-Wilmington and writes a popular column for TownHall.com. The interview aired on Carolina Journal Radio (click here to find the station near you).
RALEIGH — Intercollegiate Studies Institute Vice President for Programs Mike Ratliff uses a story about a University of Colorado student to discuss what he considers to be some of the problems with higher education today. The student had originally intended to study engineering. However, some friends persuaded him to change majors to communication studies in order to have more fun in college. When the student graduated, he found out that the only job he could gain were ones that required a high-school degree. Even the military would allow him to enter only as an enlisted solider and not the in officer training program.
RALEIGH — North Carolina lawmakers could have avoided repeated massive budget shortfalls in recent years associated with economic downturns, if only it had a Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights in effect, according to a study released Thursday. The report, “A Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) for North Carolina,” was written by University of Colorado economics professor Barry Poulson, and was sponsored by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a taxpayer advocacy group. He said that the state, if it had an effective TABOR law in the 1990s, could have established a rainy-day fund of $1.9 billion by 2000-01 that would have helped carry it through tough economic times.
North Carolina’s institutions of public higher education are hardly the only ones in the nation affected by an economic downturn in their home state. A report released this summer shows how many public universities and colleges across the country received cuts, some substantial, in their budgets.
First, knowledge makes you smarter. So says E. D. Hirsch of the Core Knowledge Foundation, an organization he created to articulate and promote cultural and educational literacy. Before you say “duh” to Hirsch’s observation, understand that his simple statement sums up a great deal of research on achievement differences, what Hirsch prefers to call the knowledge gap.
