Taking the Trustees to Task
Sometimes, our work of providing information and commentary on the actions of the UNC Board of Trustees feels a bit niche – hugely important and consequential for Carolina, but not always attention grabbing to the masses. That changed when former Provost Chris Clemens filed a lawsuit earlier this week against the Trustees, alleging that members […]
Trust the Process … When There is One
“This kind of coverage is obviously troubling. It’s not what anybody would want.” Those were the words of UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts after the story “A Leader of UNC’s Civic Life School Is Fired, Adding to Turmoil” headlined the Chronicle of Higher Education’s homepage recently. Carolina has been in the news too often recently for […]
A Commitment to Tenure
With all the uncertainty going on in academia and higher ed at this time, it’s more important than ever that Carolina protect tenure for our talented faculty. A few weeks ago, we covered a recent Board of Trustees meeting where a tenure vote for eligible faculty was conspicuously absent from the agenda. The incident was […]
What the hell is happening with tenure?
Granting tenure at Carolina used to be a routine yet rigorous process. With this Board of Trustees, those days are over. Just read yesterday’s headlines: WUNC: UNC trustees approve faculty tenure after monthslong delay WRAL: UNC Board of Trustees approves 33 delayed tenure appointments after faculty outcry The Chronicle of Higher Education: UNC Chapel Hill […]
Belichick scored big. Where’s faculty’s payday?
We’ve kept mum so far, but surely, you’ve gotten an earful from your Carolina friends: here comes Bill Belichick. And as we all know, it didn’t come cheap. Belichick scored a five-year, $50 million contract – double that of his predecessor Mack Brown. Still, there had been speculation that Belichick might swap his Carolina blue […]
UNC-CH Drops Out of the Top 10 in Faculty Salaries
UNC is falling behind its peers, including Duke University, in faculty salaries. The chart below from the American Association of University Professors shows that: In 2010-11, the average faculty salary at UNC was $109,200, compared to $138,100 at Duke. This year, the gap has more exploded by more than double: $138,200 at UNC compared to […]
Roger Perry Responds to Trustee’s Attack
Marty Kotis of Greensboro, a current trustee of UNC-Chapel Hill, last week published an attack on me, the Coalition for Carolina and the University itself. You can read it here. https://nsjonline.com/article/2023/04/kotis-the-hypocrisy-of-the-coalition-for-carolina/ When I had the honor of serving on the Board of Trustees (2003-2011), trustees put party, politics and personalities aside. We put the University […]
Could This Happen in North Carolina?
The Coalition was founded last summer to support and defend the University and its independence from partisan interference. We rededicated ourselves to the University’s promise of Lux Libertas—light and liberty—and the principles of open inquiry, free speech, academic freedom, equity and inclusion because we saw these principles at risk. Over the past months we’ve stayed […]
Dr. Lloyd S. Kramer: Historical examples of why tenure became so important to academics
There was a famous case in 1900 at Stanford where a sociologist named Edward Ross was fired at the request of the main trustee Jane Stanford, the wife of the founder of the university, after Ross made public comments opposing Chinese immigration and favoring public ownership of utilities. Both of these ideas were deemed to […]
Silence Won’t Save Carolina
To say that UNC Chapel Hill faculty salaries have not kept pace with peers over the past 10 years is quite the understatement. The accompanying graph paints a picture of not just an an ever-widening pay gap relative to peer schools, but an inflation adjusted pay cut. This is concerning and unacceptable. The recently announced […]