Help me reconcile two ideas from university leaders, one from our past, one very much in our present.
“To share the joy and benefit and the creativeness and the goodness of this place, and by that I mean all campuses, with as many people as we could reach. And in the end, before I left, we were touching a half million people a year in one way or another. Which was, I think, a true function. So it’s all those things and it’s a — that’s why it’s the state’s greatest asset in the terms of the single unit of social organization. Nothing contributes to the total force of the state the way the University does. And that’s the way it should be.”
Of course this is Bill Friday, making the case for the public charge of the UNC system, listing, as he goes one, “the great doctors and the great teachers and the great lawyers and the great editors,” “who really make a difference in the way things happen in the world,” as the beneficiaries of the public service component of the university system.
I love to think of the adults in my childhood, in just doing their jobs, as sharing the joy and goodness of the UNC system: my parents are both recipients of the strength of curriculum in the sciences at State; my still beloved fourth grade teacher, a graduate of the mathematics program in education at Appalachian; my twelfth grade Literature teacher, the reason I have studied and worried over the South, is a graduate of UNC-Greensboro; my cello instructors through the years, graduates of Appalachian and the School of the Arts. And the list could go on. My relationship to the UNC system is so personal because the people who have taught me are products of the same system. You cannot help but grow up knowing who is a Pirate, a Mountaineer, a Spartan, a Ram, a Tar Heel. How do I know where all my teachers went to school? They were–and I hope still are–proud to be graduates of programs designed for application in careers in public education in their home state.
“We’re capitalists, and we have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the demand.”
This is Steven Long, vice chairman of the academic planning committee for the UNC Board of Governors, in reference to the decision to cut or consolidate fifty-six degree programs across the system. It’s sure to become one of the most infamous statements uttered in our era of corporatization in education. In this boorish quip, I understand that Long was attempting to convey the complex decision process of how to allocate funds on a dwindling budget while weighing which programs have high costs, faculty close to retirement, powerful donors, or political significance. I understand the dictum that resources for a program struggling to enroll students would better serve a program filling all its classes but lacking in resouces. I understand that the Board of Governors reviews all programs every two years, and through their diligent efforts have, in the last seven years, flagged fifty less “low productivity” programs. I understand that even though degree programs will be cut, promises have been made to keep courses in those programs afloat.
But I cannot understand how forty-six of those programs targeted as “low productivity” could be in teacher education at a time when our state is losing its best teachers without replacing them. At North Carolina’s rate of growth, it must hire 10,000-12,000 new teachers per year. This number forgoes any discussion of the quality of those teachers, or what they will teach. The College Foundation of North Carolina reports that teachers are most needed in math, science, special education, and the middle grades. Farewell Mathematics Education at Appalachian, UNC-Charlotte, and UNC-G. Goodbye Human Biology at UNC-Chapel Hill and Comprehensive Science Education at NC A&T. Adieu Special Education at UNC-C and ECU. We’ll remember you fondly, Middle Grades Education at Elizabeth City State University.
Junius Gonzales, senior vice president for academic affairs for the UNC system, acknowledged that the process for choosing which programs would be cut was “an art, not a science.” A fascinating statement considering the number of arts programs also discontinued: Art Education and Music Education at Fayetteville State University; Theatre and Jazz at NC Central; Composition at UNC-G; Film Music Composition at the School of the Arts; and Music Performance at UNC-Wilmington. The minutiae of details, meetings, and data that lead to discontinuation of each program might be an art, but the slaughter of arts education at our smallest and most vulnerable universities is a reckless science.
This dismantling of education and arts programs comes at a disastrous time. The News and Observer reports that enrollment in UNC schools of education has declined by 27 percent in the past five years. This news, coupled with the graduation of the last class of the Teaching Fellows program, is heart-rending. It is hard to be a proud graduate, hard to imagine my teachers, all of them, throughout my life, as proud graduates, when demand for jobs can do such violence to the state’s greatest asset. “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results,” Milton Friedman told us. “We’re capitalists, and we have to look at what the demand is,” Steven Long said bluntly. Capitalism in North Carolina, it seems, is code for willful blindness and indulgent ignorance concerning the definition of demand.
And this is one of the things that you learn as you grow older and grow more — you’re more educated in the sense of what experience gives you and what confrontation teaches you and what challenge can teach you. And it’s all out there if you stay busy with your mind…But it’s not easy to do. You look at the great doctors and the great teachers and the great lawyers and the great editors. The people who really make a difference in the way things happen in the world, and that’s the difference. And that takes all the ingredients that a good education can give you.
I read this section of Bill Friday’s interview, and I think of all the people in my life who are or are becoming great doctors, great teachers, great lawyers, and great editors. People who will make a difference in the way things happen in the world. People produced from the UNC system, who understand how important it is to protect. It does not keep me from worrying what the rest of the summer will bring, but strengthens my resolve to protest, to do what I can to change the direction of my state.