Professor Stephen Leonard, former chair of UNC-System Faculty Assembly, wrote in a column in the Raleigh News and Observer that courageously called the arrogant Board of Governors members scoundrels and questioned the genuine merit of legislature to have more control in the search process to select a new UNC-system president. He also disputed the reason behind reducing the size of board with a bunch of yea-sayers. It is high time we in North Carolina take prudent step to uplift the UNC system with the following ideas.
1. Undoubtedly, easy access to higher education for all North Carolinians, irrespective of race, ethnicity, gender or economic background, is vital, as former UNC-system president William Friday envisaged and advocated during his long tenure at the helm of higher education in North Carolina. His successor Dick Spangler pursued the same course his predecessor took to support affordable higher education for low-income North Carolina people.
2. The backbone of higher education is really the synthesis of research, teaching and public service. This amalgamation of academic freedom got eroded sadly in the recent years in North Carolina. Top-down administration, as opposed to bottom-up governance, stumbled. We must reverse this trend. All campuses must rely on local input, with boards of trustees having unquestioned authority over selection of their respective chancellors with no control by either the legislature or the UNC Board of Governors.
3. I organized a national "Higher Education Forum" in 2017 at the Fulbright annual meeting in Washington D.C. with Tom Ross as one of the three invited speakers. Ross, presently president of Volker Alliance in New York, eloquently explained the pathetic state of higher education in North Carolina. I am of the opinion that we need to make a paradigm shift to improve education process in our public universities in North Carolina.
4. During Spellings’ tenure we saw symptoms of rebirth in minority campuses such as UNC-Pembroke and Elizabeth City State University, which witnessed a significant increase in enrollment with tuition fee reduced to $500 per semester.
5. I am also concerned about basic curriculum in all our campuses. With secularism in rise and academics shifting gear to “unbelief” from “belief, “ as historian George Marsden proved while he was with Duke University School of Divinity, our young graduates as millennials from North Carolina campuses enter the workforce either as atheists or agnostics. Today’s basic curriculum does not expose our undergraduate students to a genuine choice to ethics, morality and a true grasp of wisdom/worldview. I recommend that in the fall semester of 2019, UNC-system’s new president works with all the chancellors across the state to introduce the 2019 book: “Theology and Science: from Genesis to Astrophysics," edited by Joseph Seckbach and Richard Gordon, World Scientific Press.
Robert Y. George, Ph.D.
Professor emeritus of UNC-W
President of George Institute at Wake Forest
