Board of Governors recommend Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity to be closed

After UNC Board of Governors member Jim Holmes announced Wednesday that UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity would be recommended for discontinuation, he asked if the board’s working group on centers and institutes had any questions.

Silence ensued before a lone UNC student voice broke through: “Why?”

Public comment wasn’t allowed, but UNC freshman Ebony Watkins stood up and demanded a conversation before eliminating the poverty center. It’s headed by Gene Nichol, a UNC law professor known for his passionate editorials criticizing Republican state leadership.

“If you’re trying to represent the interests of all North Carolinians, it is very important that you hear the opinions of all North Carolinians,” said Watkins, who was admonished by a police officer but allowed to stay.

It was one of several tense episodes at Wednesday’s meeting, where the board’s working group also recommended the discontinuation of the Center on Biodiversity at East Carolina University and the Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change at N.C. Central University.

The review began in September, and the working group has whittled down the UNC system’s 237 centers. The drafted final report included “recommended action” for 16 centers, including seven at UNC-CH.

The impetus behind conducting a review of the centers and institutes came from the N.C. General Assembly, which last summer tasked the board with considering reallocating $15 million from the centers to other campus priorities, like distinguished professorships.

Holmes said after the meeting that he doesn’t know how much money the system will save from the three discontinued centers, plus eight centers that have folded voluntarily.

“Money was a factor; it was not the factor,” he said.

Wednesday marked the group’s last public meeting. The report will now be voted on by the educational planning, policies and programs committee and by the full board on Feb. 26 and 27.

The University’s Center for Civil Rights — which would undergo a campus-level review over the next year, per the group’s recommendation — was a hot topic on Wednesday. Board member Steven Long spent seven minutes criticizing its work, particularly its involvement in litigation against the state, counties and municipalities.

“It’s really not an academic center at all. It’s an advocacy organization,” he said. “I think it’s inappropriate for any center to be suing the state.”

The board should consider a policy to prevent centers from suing governments, Long said.

Mark Dorosin, an attorney with the Center for Civil Rights, interrupted the discussion, acknowledging that he wasn’t allowed to make public comment but charging that “Mr. Long’s presentation was filled with inaccuracies and misleading information.”

“We don’t get any state money,” Dorosin said, sparring with Long — to students’ applause — before being quieted by a police officer.

“When we represent clients, it’s not UNC-Chapel Hill who’s their lawyer. It’s the Center for Civil Rights,” Dorosin said in an interview.

He said he’s concerned that the board will now forbid their involvement in litigation.

As discussion turned to the Poverty Center, Holmes said there are already nearly a dozen other efforts to address poverty at UNC-CH. Board member Doyle Parrish said the center had failed virtually all of the review’s standards.

“The Board of Governors’ tedious, expensive and supremely dishonest review process yields the result it sought all along — closing the Poverty Center,” Nichol said in a statement Wednesday.

Holmes denied that.

“Before we started this process, I didn’t know who Gene Nichol was.”

state@dailytarheel.com