Gov. Pat McCrory would do to well to come sip from the Old Well and get a taste of his state’s flagship University.
Last week, members of the faculty executive committee authored an open letter to the governor in response to his on-air remarks criticizing publicly funded liberal arts degrees.
The committee invited McCrory to visit the University and witness its strengths as a top public university, liberal arts classes and all.
McCrory should come see all the knowledge and advancement that this University’s “butts” are contributing to the state, all on a campus that regularly gets named the best bargain in education.
Or maybe he could sit in on a class that teaches the very job skills that McCrory claims the state’s employers need. Well, that is, if he could find a seat. With such extensive funding cuts, classes seem to grow inexorably larger and harder to enroll in.
If neither of those work he could at least grab lunch with a faculty member. They might even be able to go somewhere expensive; the faculty did just get a whopping 1.2 percent pay raise — their first in four years.
After that he might even be able to swing over to the Office of Business and Economic Development to see how the citizens of his state are being helped by an organization dedicated to researching methods of community economic empowerment. He might have been able to do so, but that office actually no longer exists due to a loss in state funding.
None of this is to say that McCrory is responsible for these problems. They preceded his term in office, after all.
The point remains, however, that cutting funding to the UNC system creates real problems for students, faculty and the state as a whole.
