#dear bog

[ncstudentpowerunion]

Don't let the Board of Governors eliminate the centers that link the UNC system to NC's most vulnerable communities. http://chn.ge/1G60uIW

[ncstudentpowerunion]

UNC-Chapel Hill is being investigated by the federal government for violating Title IX protections for women. How can the Board of Governors consider shutting down the Carolina Women's Center? http://chn.ge/1G60uIW

[ncstudentpowerunion]

Editor’s note: Today the UNC Board of Governors, which has been examining non–academic centers at UNC campuses for possible closure, narrowed the list of targeted centers to 34. The following is a response by Richard Lindayen, a member of the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Governors Democracy Coalition, reprinted with permission.

"I was at the Board of Governors meeting today. I sat there as they voted on which UNC centers they would revoke the funding for, pending a final plea that each center will be able to present next week.

As they progressed down the list of centers across the Carolina university system that would be cut, the political motivations of this act became clear. The board was focused on cutting centers with names containing ‘urban,’ ‘education,’ ‘environment’ or ‘women.’ My suspicions were confirmed when, after the meeting, I spoke with an official at the university. The official told me that this all started when the director of UNC’s Poverty Center (Gene Nichol) accused North Carolina of "waging a war on poor people." According to the university official, the board realized that it would be "inappropriate" to publicly censor Professor Nichol. At this point some genius on the board realized that they might as well try to take on all of the liberal, left–leaning centers at once. It seems like there’s a good reason that the board’s Working Group on Centers and Institutes is known as "The Gene Nichol Censorship Committee" by university administrators.

The way in which the board is cutting centers is wickedly clever. They use "metrics" (which, by the way, is their favorite word. As a game I counted how many times the board used it: 87) to determine which centers are on the chopping block.

When they came to Chapel Hill’s list of centers, I wasn’t surprised when they decided to further investigate TWO THIRDS of the centers on their hit list. This is more than any other school. When the individual compiling these centers’ finances (the only metric thus far used to judge whether these center will remain open) commented that one of the centers had rectified how much of their financing came from grants and would have therefore passed an early test to determine which centers would be cut, the board decided to disregard this and keep it on their list.

Chancellor Folt was a strong voice in support of UNC’s many centers throughout this process. During yesterday’s working group on University Governance, she was literally laughed at and ridiculed by a room of rich, white, old men. Today, as UNC’s centers were named one after the other to be subject to cuts, she made her opposition to the board plain.

The student representative to the board was mysteriously mute throughout the proceedings. The student representative to the board is the president of the Association of Student Governments (ASG), elected by the student body presidents of the different campuses. The student representative does not have the ability to vote; their only weapon is their voice. Our current representative to the board wasn’t even present at the Working Group on Centers and Institutes meeting. During the official meeting of the full board, he spoke only once, saying that students "had concerns" about raising tuition at UNC’s Elizabeth City and Winston Salem campuses. His mouth was open for most of the meeting, but in a expression of pure stupefaction.

At one point, this student was given a few minutes to present. He took this time to discuss how the ASG had started to become involved in these board meetings only a few years ago. He spoke of how difficult it was for the ASG do anything, as leadership changes out on a yearly basis. He said nothing of the impending cuts to UNC centers. After he was done, only one board member commented. He said that the board was happy that students were engaging in a dialogue instead of protesting. The entirety of the Board began to laugh in agreement with this statement.

Unfortunately, it would seem that the Board of Governors does not take the voices of their students seriously. Let’s make them.