Wealthy, vindictive, Republican UNC Board of Governors silences law school's Poverty Center

by DocDawg

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(This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday, Feb. 23, 2015 Monday, Feb. 23, 2015 at 6:12:43am PST

no image description available — Because in the right-to-work paradise of North Carolina no child goes to bed hungry or without electricity...right? I mean, that's right, isn't it?

Because in the right-to-work paradise of North Carolina no child goes to bed hungry or without electricity...right? I mean, that's right, isn't it?

In a move that surprised no one, last week a working group of the Republican-stacked University of North Carolina Board of Governors recommended the closing of the UNC Chapel Hill law school's Center On Poverty, Work & Opportunity. The full Board of Governors is expected to vote affirmatively next week on the working group's recommendation to close down this academic center, which has proven a thorn in state Republicans' side for its long efforts to educate North Carolina citizens regarding the ever worsening plight of the poor, the unemployed, and low-wage workers in our state.

Board of Governors members who formed the working group issuing the recommendation to 'discontinue' the Center include:

Mary Ann Maxwell (white Republican), whose family-owned business, Maxwell Foods, is one of the largest pork and turkey factory farming operations in America and owner of a 50% share in the Butterball brand. According to USDA records, through 2012 she personally received over $170,000 in federal farm subsidies
Peter Hans (white Republican), senior policy advisor at lobbying firm Nelson Mullins and former advisor to Republican U.S. Senators Richard Burr, Elizabeth Dole, and Lauch Faircloth
W. Edwin McMahan (white Republican), a real estate developer, former state House member, and former leader of George W. Bush's 2000 North Carolina campaign. In 2008 he assisted now-Governor Pat McCrory's first campaign bid for the governorship of North Carolina. McMahan's son, Ed Jr., is a partner at Falfurrias Capital Partners
Steven B Long (white Republican), partner at the Parker Poe law firm specializing in tax law and executive compensation, and former member of the board of directors of Art Pope's ultraconservative North Carolina 'think tank,' Civitas Institute
R. Doyle Parrish (white Republican), hotel chain CEO. According to a 2013 email from NC's junior U.S. senator, Thom Tillis, "he is directly responsible for more than $100,000 in financial support through personal contributions to my campaign committee."
Joan Templeton Perry (white Republican), physician, whose husband James is a substantial contributor to Republican Senator Thom Tillis's campaigns according to FEC records
James L Holmes (white Republican), managing partner of Sentinel Risk Advisors

Aside from their obvious personal interest - as North Carolina caucasian captains of commerce and Republican king-makers - in keeping our poverty-level workers invisible and unchampioned, what led these members of the UNC Board of Governors to recommend the shuttering of such an obviously benevolent effort as the Poverty Center? Join me below the fold for the unseemly history of this embarrassing moment in North Carolina Republicans' war on academic freedom.

According to the Poverty Center's director, Gene Nichol (Boyd Tinsley Distinguished Professor and former dean of the UNC Chapel Hill School of Law):

We have one of the country’s fastest rising poverty rates. A decade ago, North Carolina had the 26th highest rate among the states. Now we’re ninth, speeding past the competition. Greensboro is America’s second-hungriest city. Asheville is ninth. Charlotte has the nation’s worst economic mobility.

Obviously, trumpeting statistics such as these is not the way to ingratiate onself with the Republicans who are, today, in solid control of North Carolina's government...and thus directly answerable for the plight Nichol calls attention to.

And that, of course, is the heart of the problem which Republicans like Governor McCrory, state Speaker (now U.S. Senator) Thom Tillis, state President Pro Tem Phil Berger, and their shadowy paymaster, wealthy businessman Art Pope, have with UNC's Poverty Center: it's director just won't shut up about the alarming growth of poverty in the teapublican paradise they are fashioning from the bones of once-respected North Carolina.

Nichol's Poverty Center has many scholarly merits. As but one example consider its The State of Low-Wage Work in North Carolina web site - product of a 2014 collaborative project of ten Masters of City and Regional Planning students, and a masterpiece of the art of making otherwise dry yet vitally important statistics powerful and accessible. But among the Center's many merits, its director's calculating political savvy is perhaps not one. Throughout 2013 Nichol drew the ongoing ire of Republican lawmakers with his hard-hitting twelve-part series in the Raleigh News & Observer, Seeing the Invisible, whose challenging and deeply disturbing articles featured such titles as In NC, poverty pervades as we evade, In a growing state, growing hunger, In urban North Carolina, deep pockets of misery are masked, and From silence to savagery, pain for the poor intensifies. The damn-the-torpedoes bluntness on display there appears to be one of Nichol's signature intellectual characteristics. As president of Virginia's College of William and Mary a decade ago, Nichol led notably successful efforts to boost student aid and increase the diversity of its faculty and student body, but ran afoul of Virginia legislators and some influential alumni first when he directed a tradition-steeped cross removed from permanent display (explaining that it made some students of other religious traditions feel unwelcome at a public university), and next when he declined to censor a student-sponsored Sex Workers' Art Show. When a prominent alum withdrew a $10 million pledge in reaction, Nichol was given the boot by the university's Board of Visitors, which offered him a substantial sum to publicly deny that the termination was ideologically motivated. He declined the offer.

While Virginia's loss was North Carolina's and UNC's gain, here too Nichol pays for liberally stepping on wealthy and powerful ultraconservatives' toes. In an October 2013 News & Observer op-ed piece penned in response to the United States’ decision to sue North Carolina for violating the Voting Rights Act, Nichol cited Governor Pat McCrory's booed receptions at numerous high-profile events, branded the governor "a 21st century successor to Maddox, Wallace and Faubus" and "the leader of what has now effectively become a white person’s party," and referred to him as "hapless Pat." According to a subsequent news article, UNC Board of Governors member Ed McMahan responded by emailing fellow Board member, Peter Hans, "Gene Nichols [sic] is at it again!! [Governor] Pat [McCrory] called from Mississippi this morning," and Hans, in turn, emailed the UNC system's president "Calling the Governor a racist = not helpful." As noted above, both McMahan and Hans are among the members of the Board of Governors working group recommending the closure of Nichol's Poverty Center.

No doubt to avoid the appearance of staging a kangaroo court, the Board of Governors working group set out to review not merely Nichol's Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity, but all 240 of UNC's centers and intstitutes across its 16 campuses. Of these, 207 were summarily "validated" by the working group, 9 (identified as "coastal- or marine-related") were set aside for a separate future review (North Carolina Republican legislators have well-known difficulty with coastal science, having in 2012 barred the state from basing coastal policies on scientific projections of future sea level rise), and in the end subjected just 27 centers to a thorough grilling (including inviting each to submit a one-page document justifying the critical nature of its mission and making a 15-minute presentation to the working group). In the end, just three centers were recommended for "discontinuation": East Carolina University's NC Center for Biodiversity, historically black North Carolina Central University's Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change, and (of course) Chapel Hill's Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity (despite the fact that it receives no direct state funding). The group's report (read it here) further recommends banning UNC center employees from engaging in "political activity in the name of a center." Referring to Nichol and his News & Observer articles, which carried his academic title as part of his byline, working group member McMahan has stated, "It bothers me greatly that someone in his position at the university would use the media to criticize public officials."

In his 1931 inaugural address, UNC President Frank Porter Graham said that academic freedom includes

the freedom for consideration of the plight of the unorganized and inarticulate peoples in an organized world in which powerful combinations and high-pressure lobbies work their special will on general life. In the university should be found the free voice not only for the unvoiced millions but also for the unpopular and even hated minorities.

It is a tragedy that the once great University of North Carolina system has now strayed so far from the wisdom of perhaps its most revered President. But, as political commentator Rob Christensen wrote Sunday in the News & Observer:

The [UNC Board of Governors] members would have to be a quart low of oil not to understand that their job was to go after Nichol’s center. Defenders argue that even if the center is shut down, Nichol still will be a tenured law school faculty member and he would be able to speak out. But the action would be the political equivalent of putting a bloody horse’s head in Nichol’s bed in the middle of the night. There is plenty of evidence that the Republicans have been seeking to intimidate Nichol.

Asked to comment for this article, Gene Nichol responded: "The Board of Governors review process was a supremely dishonest, utterly predictable, partisan farce. These folks are unworthy of the University of North Carolina or any other decent institution."

Epilogue:

Perhaps, like me, you are one of those who are not much impressed by the potential for modern-day boycott calls to affect social change, but who nonetheless are ashamed to give their custom to ultra-conservative captains of industry who use the wealth we provide them to de-democratize our society. If that's the case, then corporate brands you might wish to avoid buying because of their intimate relationship to this sordid affair might include: