The Board of Governors voted Friday to terminate the Center on Poverty, Work & Opportunity at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law, the Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change at NC Central University and the Center for Biodiversity at East Carolina University.
The board had slated a list of 240 centers across the UNC-System for extensive review and, after months of deliberation, decided to close three centers. The three receive zero dollars of direct government funding, but challenged the ideas pushed by a Republican legislature and a Republican governor in office.
All three centers closed by the board had one end goal: to aid the citizens of North Carolina and empower both them and lawmakers to make informed decisions. Unfortunately, members of the board saw serious conflicts with those goals.
Gene Nichol, a law professor at UNC and director of the Poverty center, has been among the most vocal critics of Gov. Pat McCrory and his allies in the state House and Senate, and in one 2013 letter, compared McCrory to segregationist Southern governors during the 1960s because of his advocacy for tougher election laws which made it harder for minority voters to cast their ballot.
However, the Poverty center isn’t the only center that studies something the Republican Party finds disagreeable.
According to the NC Central Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change, “The institute seeks to increase the community’s level and quality of participation in civic affairs and, thus, its efficacy in addressing racial, gender, economic, and other social injustices.
We’re sure that you all remember North Carolina’s moment in the national spotlight after pushing draconian Voter ID laws in 2013.
Part of the mission statement of the Center for Biodiversity at ECU reads that it is “designed to engage citizens in issues related to the conservation of biodiversity and its relevance to human health and quality of life.”
Ignoring the importance of fostering biodiversity is not the first time the NC Republicans proved their ignorance over serious environmental issues.
In 2014 the state played a starring role on The Colbert Report after the Republican legislature reclassified a 39-inch rise in water level as an eight-inch rise during the last 100 years by banning the use of accepted climate models when considering legislation, as the law made it so that it “shall not include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise.”
The blowback from the legislation prompted the headline, “North Carolina has outlawed sea-level rise,” among many national publications.
Jim Holmes, the chairman of the working group that conducted the center review, said the process was in no way political and that the group individually flagged centers objectively with any prejudice.
The evidence clearly says otherwise.
Of the 32 members currently sitting on the Board, most were appointed by the Republican-Controlled NC House and Senate.
However, the real crime here isn’t that the Board of Governors was playing politics, which is still troublesome. The real crime is it has attempted to circumvent the academic freedom of professors and researchers across the UNC System, and in doing so has prioritized its Republican ideology over the welfare of the citizens of North Carolina.
