TO THE EDITOR:
Tuesday morning, Chancellor Carol Folt fined me $20.07. My offense? A trace of frozen precipitation fell Monday. I am taking 16 hours during this 15-week-long semester, totaling 240 hours of instruction. This education comes at a cost of $3,211.50 in tuition, or $13.38 per hour of instruction. So far this semester, 11.5 hours of my classes have been cancelled, totalling a personal loss of $154 in the form of lost instruction. The UNC Fall 2013 Census counted 18,370 undergraduates. Taking that number as an estimate of the current student population and my losses as a fair average, that’s a total of $2.8 million lost during this semester among undergraduates alone.
When we all paid our tuition in December, we entered a contract (of expectations, if not legality) that we would receive the education that we paid for by attending the classes that we had worked so hard to schedule. The Chancellor has reneged on that agreement this semester to the tune of nearly $3 million.
Hurricane Fran caused extraordinary tree damage, and the water at UNC was not drinkable for a week after the storm. The University cancelled classes for a single day. Yesterday afternoon, a hardly-measurable amount of sleet and freezing rain fell, resulting in closure of the University for 21 hours, during which we still managed to hold a basketball game complete with thousands of fans. Something does not compute.
Perhaps it never snowed in New Hampshire during the Chancellor’s tenure at Dartmouth College.
Matthew Zipple ’15
Biology
Political science
