Posted by TDot on Jun 9, 2010 in
Student Government The psychological trauma of losing a fifth of your classmates is still sinking in for a lot of us, so tonight’s entry is going to focus on the state budget for North Carolina since I can write about it from memory with minimal effort 
Unfortunately the trauma with the budget is a bit more serious…
About a month ago I mentioned to y’all the Senate’s version of the state budget and its implications for students. I was pretty happy that Senators adopted UNCASG‘s request to repeal the 8% student tax enacted last year — a request highlighted on Forbes.com and endorsed by Governor Perdue after petitions were signed by 22,000+ students at our 17 constituent institutions.
The catch? The Senate also authorized the University system to unilaterally approve additional tuition increases of $750-per-student to offset budget cuts 
Unlike the student tax, the universities would keep the money raised from the tuition increases instead of it going to the state’s General Fund. But with no cap at all and no approval required by a campus’s Board of Trustees or the system’s Board of Governors, it essentially guaranteed tuition rates would go up nearly $1K apiece at many campuses… a ~25% increase in a single year for UNC Chapel Hill, which is already the most-expensive University in the UNC system (the % is even higher for other universities, including my alma mater).
Needless to say that’s a huge amount for a tuition increase in a single year. Those kind of jumps force students to drop out of school.
Well the House of Representatives had their turn last week, and the Representatives seemed to be perfectly fine with that 
Historically the House has been unkind to the University, using draconian budget cuts to the university system as a bargaining chip with the Senate when the budget goes to a joint House-Senate conference committee for its final edition. But even knowing that as the backdrop, I was still totally floored at how aggressively the politicians pillage the people’s universities.
You can see the House version beginning on Page 25 of the House budget report on S897. The first entry alone blows my mind: ~$150,000,000 in permanent budget reductions starting this year, on top of the ~$100,000,000 in permanent reductions that began last year. That means the Legislature is chopping a quarter of a billion dollars (with a B) in less than 2 years’ time.
Representatives apparently weren’t content there, so they decided to follow up by providing only a fraction of the system’s request for need-based financial aid — the $$ universities will have to use to help kids avoid dropping out when the Legislature’s budget cuts inevitably lead to substantial tuition increases. Then the House decided to go a step further and cap enrollment growth to 1% a year, which will exclude thousands of academically qualified North Carolina students from the very universities their parents’ taxes are financing 
I’ve seen the same House-Senate budget dance play out for 11 years now, but this really has to be the single most outrageous proposal I’ve seen. It will utterly decimate each of our universities for years to come.
So back on Monday I woke up, checked my email, checked Facebook, read the news… and decided I was sufficiently pissed off that I needed to vent publicly. I prefer doing work behind the scenes when it comes to politics and lobbying, but my blood was sufficiently heated that I fired off a letter to the Raleigh News & Observer. They were kind enough to post it on their Education blog, which got spread around via email among some chambers of the Legislature.
Here’s their entry:
A student voice on UNC budget cuts
Submitted by eferreri on 06/07/2010 – 10:45
Tags: Campus Notes | Erskine Bowles | Greg Doucette | N.C. Central University | N.C. State University | T. Greg Doucette | UNC system
Greg Doucette knows better than most just how tough it can be to pay your way through college.
Doucette, an N.C. State grad and current N.C. Central University law student, recently stepped down as the president of the Association of Student Governments, the group of student leaders from across the UNC system.
In that role, Doucette served on the UNC system’s Board of Governors, where he routinely put a face to the budget-cut issue by telling his own story about struggling with tuition payments while at NCSU. He dropped out for a while, putting his college career on hold for several years.
Now, he writes of budget cuts to the UNC system proposed by both the state House and Senate. The Senate spending plan, while generally easier on the university system, still proposes a $50 million cut and would increase tuition $750.
And the House budget calls for a far larger cut. UNC President Erskine Bowles says it would result in the elimination of 1,700 jobs across the public university system.
In a letter submitted to the News & Observer, Doucette lays out his concerns.
Here it is:
It was during North Carolina’s previous recession, roughly a decade ago, when the General Assembly last considered such deep cuts to our state’s public universities comparable to those now proposed by the House. Unsurprisingly, those cuts led to dramatic increases in tuition rates (similar to the $750+ per student increase now proposed by the Senate) to make up for the losses in revenue.
Also unsurprisingly, those huge spikes in cost forced students like me to drop out of college entirely. It took me 5 years working low-wage jobs in the “real world” until I saved enough to return to NC State, where I graduated with my degree in Computer Science last year — and where resident undergraduate tuition had surged 120% from the year I started until the year I came back.
How much more tax revenue would I have contributed to the state treasury had I graduated in 2004 instead of 2009? How much more tax revenue would the many students in my situation have contributed over that same time span?
I understand legislators’ impulse to protect K-12 education and the other areas spared by their current budget proposals; this is an election year, after all. But legislators should understand the cuts they’ve proposed to the University of North Carolina will condemn many students to years of reduced earnings (especially those who live outside of the Triangle or Triad), mortgaging North Carolina’s future economic health for the sake of re-election.
Students and their parents deserve better.
With warm regards,
T. Greg Doucette
The writer is a student at the N.C. Central University School of Law, and President Emeritus of the UNC Association of Student Governments.
God bless them for using my old profile photo from when I was President of the NCSU Student Senate — and still had hair
In all seriousness, I can’t be the first person to point out the effects of these types of cuts and their attendant tuition increases. I spent 5 years working as a college dropout earning a salary of someone with a mere high school diploma, when I could have already wrapped up my J.D. and been earning a lawyer’s salary; or, in the alternative, skipped getting the law degree and been working as a computer scientist.
Either way, I would have paid far more in taxes to the state in just 1-2 years than I paid over those 5. And I know of at least a dozen students who dropped out of NCSU the same semester (indeed the same week) that I did, and there were undoubtedly dozens upon dozens upon dozens more — sufficient numbers that we undoubtedly would have covered the state’s marginal cost increase for teaching us.
We’re in a recession; I realize and accept that. Budget cuts needs to be made, which I realize and accept too.
But the University system already took a disproportionate share of the budget cuts last year, and the decisions at this point are going to reduce the long-term economic health of the state — and crush the dreams of hundreds of University students who, like me years ago, will find themselves forced to interrupt their college education and search for a low-paying job just to make ends meet.
Here’s the list of legislators who are on the House-Senate conference committee. If you happen to be a North Carolina student, or you’re a taxpayer who realizes this short-term budget cure is going to cause far more long-term budget harm, please get in touch with these conferees and tell them: students and their parents deserve better.
Your support is greatly appreciated 
That’s it from me y’all. Have a great night! 
Tags: Tuition & Fees, UNCASG
Posted by TDot on Mar 15, 2010 in
Student Government My apologies in advance to the new readers here at law:/dev/null. This is a long post and has nothing to do with my 1L tenure at NCCU Law. Regular law school postings will resume tomorrow
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I. INTRO
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When I got elected President of the UNC Association of Student Governments back in April 2008, winning by a 1-vote margin after a 3.5 hour debate, it turned out I was the first conservative Republican elected to the presidency in at least a decade.
I wasn’t surprised by the discovery, but it did make me a bit skittish considering the Association had been known for bitter political divisions in the years immediately preceding my election. For a group representing 215,000+ students from 17 institutions — including 5 historically black universities, 1 historically native american, 1 historically female, a fine arts conservatory, a residential high school, and a number of other universities across the state ranging geographically from the mountains to the coast in both urban and not-so-urban areas — trying to forge consensus is a tall order even in the best of circumstances.
And back then wasn’t “the best of circumstances.”
So when the other ~80 student leaders in the Association worked with me to put together one of the most successful years in the group’s 38-year history, I took it as a point of personal pride.
We had folks from all 17 institutions regularly attending for the first time in history. We set records for attendance. We restructured the group to focus on areas where it could have a tangible impact, and actually did have a tangible impact in the areas we focused on.
There was occasional drama throughout the year of course, but it was often over easily-addressed issues of transparency (the more the better) and accountability (perform or get fired). The political divisiveness was largely absent — folks were mature enough to accept that they have different political opinions, and that those different opinions have approximately -0- relevance to whether people can work together on higher education issues.
That success was reflected in my reelection: instead of 3.5 hours and a 1-vote margin, the vote was unanimous after about 20 minutes
You can probably imagine my amusement then, when — after successfully unifying seven-dozen college students from across the political spectrum — I found my reputation trashed by so-called “adults” for being either too conservative or too liberal depending on the issue. It’s even more mystifying when those attacks are apparently manufactured out of whole cloth, completely and totally refuted by the very sources of information cited to create them.
One of those hit pieces came out last week during Spring Break, from the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. In their Commentaries piece “Other People’s Money,” Pope Center authors Jay Schalin and Jenna Ashley Robinson go out of their way to condemn the Association of Student Governments and do their best to run my own reputation through the mud for good measure.
When I first read the full piece yesterday, I had no intention of responding in writing to the Pope Center itself — and I still don’t. The column has multiple factual errors that could have easily been corrected with a 2-minute phone call to me, several of the quotes cited/paraphrased are deliberately stripped of context, and the qualitative conclusions it makes demonstrate the yoga-like rhetorical skills of the authors by condemning in the opening paragraphs what it embraces in the closing.
Writers have to make a deliberate effort to twist facts that much, and that typically translates into having no interest at all whatsoever in any honest dialogue.
But for better or worse we live in the age of Google, and I’ve already had politically-minded folks asking for explanations. So rather than repeat the same “This is wrong. This is wrong. That is wrong. That part right there? Wrong. Here? Wrong too.” over and over again, I figured I’d offer a line-by-line dissection with links to supporting documentation.
So are Jay Schalin and Jenna Ashley Robinson crazy? Or are they just lazy? You be the judge…
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II. BACKGROUND MATERIAL: DOCUMENTS
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I’m a big fan of the Fox News “We Report. You Decide.” model of debate, so in dissecting any editorial it’s necessary to have all of the objective facts first. Reasonable people can disagree on the conclusions drawn from those facts, but if those same people are arguing from two different sets of facts then they end up talking past each other.
Fortunately, my undergraduate degree was in Computer Science — meaning over the past 2 years UNCASG has generated a boatload of documentation on its operations
Here are some items you may want to either review online, print out, or just have ready at your fingertips:
1) Pope Center commentary “Other People’s Money” (03/07/2010): [HTML] | [PDF]
2) Pieces cited by the Pope Center –
- UNCASG’s Tuition Petition event listing on Facebook: [HTML]
- Durham Herald-Sun article “UNC panel OKs tuition increases systemwide” (02/11/2010): [HTML]
- Carolina Review article “Waste, Bureaucracy, …and the ASG” (September 2009, pages 8-9): [HTML]
- Daily Tar Heel article on tuition (October 2008): [This DTH piece is conspicuously absent from their online archives, but I recall the story -- if I can get my hands on a PDF copy I'll upload it, but for now you'll have to check the physical archives in Chapel Hill]
- Facebook correspondence between myself and Jenna Ashley Robinson (02/08/2010): [PDF]
3) Pieces cited by me –
- UNC Board of Governors policy on the Association of Student Governments (10/11/2002): [HTML]
- 2010-2011 Proposed Tuition Rates presented to the Board of Governors (02/01/2010): [PDF]
- Pope Center commentary “The High Cost of Low Tuition” (12/10/2007): [HTML]
- UNCASG Resolution 29 on tuition and fees (01/30/2010): [PDF]
- UNCASG Finance Bill 14, amending the budget for FY2009-2010 (09/26/2009): [PDF]
- Pope Center piece “Myths of the Ivory Tower” (03/10/2010): [HTML]
- Facebook note by me re “pornstar healthcare” (03/09/2009): [HTML] | [PDF]
- Facebook note by me re “pornstar healthcare” update (07/08/2009): [HTML] | [PDF]
- N.C. State Technician column “Could Higher Tuition Actually Be a Better Deal? (Part I)” (09/12/2005): [HTML]
- N.C. State Technician column “Higher Tuition a Better Deal? (Part II)” (10/03/2005): [HTML]
- Raleigh News & Observer letter “Look elsewhere, UNC” (07/28/2006): [HTML]
- N.C. State Student Senate Resolution 26, “Tuition Certainty Act” (03/14/2007): [HTML]
- “The Clock is Ticking…” campaign platform (04/19/2008): [PDF]
- UNCASG Resolution 18 on tuition and fee increases (10/25/2008): [PDF]
- UNCASG Resolution 23 on tuition and fee increases (01/24/2009): [PDF]
- Federal estimate of median income for a 4-member family (03/13/2009): [HTML]
- “Four families” charts from UNC General Administration (01/26/2010): [PDF]
- Facebook note on the Daily Tar Heel and UNCASG (09/04/2009): [HTML] | [PDF]
- Facebook note on tuition stand-in media coverage (02/09/2008): [HTML] | [PDF]
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III. SECTION-BY-SECTION ANALYSIS
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Enough background, let’s get on with the analysis.
People who have worked with me at NC State, NCCU Law, UNCASG and out in the “real world” will tell you I’m usually a pretty good sport when it comes to folks disagreeing with me about a political issue. I appreciate being challenged because it forces me to reexamine my arguments and make them stronger.
I’m not as forgiving for people who intentionally make arguments in bad faith, particularly when they cite factually wrong data for support.
But again, I’ll let you be the judge. Below are blockquotes from the Pope Center piece (directly copy/pasted with no editing by me) with my notes underneath.
***
Snippet #1:
Understandably, the UNC Association for Student Governments (ASG) is also battling the legislature’s tuition plan. The student organization, which purports to represent UNC students in general, has circulated a petition with over 20,000 signatures that decries the legislature’s plan as a “backdoor tax increase on students and their families to balance the state’s budget.”
There’s no “purports” to it — the Association is the student organization “designated to represent the interests of students in the deliberations of the University of North Carolina Board of Governors.” See the very first section of the Board’s policy on the Association (Item 3(a) above).
How effectively UNCASG fills that role is certainly a topic for debate. I’m confident I’ve executed my minor role in the group well over the past two years, though I’ve also readily accepted criticisms that I haven’t.
But let’s not pretend like the Association’s claim to represent students’ interests is a false one. It’s a bit like claiming the U.S. Congress “purports to represent taxpayers” — it does represent taxpayers, regardless of whether you personally like Congress or any of its actions.
The quote cited is a copy/paste from UNCASG’s Facebook event listing for the Tuition Petition (Item 2(a) above).
***
Snippet #2:
However, the ASG is oddly in favor of the universities’ proposal to raise tuitions nearly as much-—even though it also hurts “students and their families.”
The “nearly as much” weasel words should be a giveaway that this particular statement makes no logical sense, but just for the sake of argument I’ll pose a question to you:
Let’s say you’re a student at a random UNC institution like, for example, UNC Charlotte. The state legislature has already decreed that you’re going to pay $200 more (~8%) in tuition starting Fall 2010. Would you be in favor of an alternative proposal to only pay $103 (~4%)?
See Item 3(b) for rates at other universities.
Now yes, it’s true that 4% is “nearly as much” as 8%. And if you’re above a certain income threshold I’m sure it’s also true that $100 is “nearly as much” as $200.
But I’m having a hard time seeing how favoring a plan to pay half as much as the N.C. General Assembly has already decreed is “odd.”
The argument seems particularly disingenuous coming from an organization that has opposed low tuition rates (see Item 3(c) for an example), but I digress…
***
Snippet #3:
In a recent Durham Herald-Sun article, ASG president Greg Doucette declared that “all the students are on board” with the tuition hike—-obviously overstated rhetoric. In November of 2009, students at UNC-Chapel Hill protested when the trustees voted to raise tuition by 5.2 percent.
The weasel words in this snippet? “In a recent Durham Herald-Sun article.” Go take a minute to read that particular article; it’s Item 2(b) above.
Notice anything unusual?
That’s right, it’s an article on what was said at the UNC Board of Governors meeting. The very meeting that Jay Schalin attended right before he asked me questions about the petition afterwards (we’ll get to that in Snippet #10).
So why quote the newspaper article instead of his first-hand experience?
You see when I made the statement “all the students” were on board with the increase, I was referring to the members of the Association — the same people who unanimously adopted a resolution on the tuition/fee increase proposals (see Item 3(d)), two dozen of whom were present at the BOG meeting and were asked to stand and be recognized.
That should have been obvious considering my presence at the podium was by virtue of the committee chairman recognizing me to give UNCASG’s position on tuition/fees.
Folks who were present at the meeting (like Jay Schalin) know that’s who I was referencing, but it’s not clear in the writing of the Herald-Sun news article. So rather than quote from his personal experience and then get exposed as a fraud, Schalin instead chooses to reiterate a context-free quote in another publication so he can claim he’s still accurate.
Now no one’s ever accused me of being a genius, but if I know there’s going to be differences of opinion among the 80ish students in UNCASG (see the 2nd paragraph of this post) I’m pretty sure I know there’s going to be differences of opinion among the 215,000+ students UNCASG represents
Hopefully you’re willing to believe me on that
***
Snippet #4:
And some students are not happy about paying for others’ educations. N.C. State student Quinten Farmer emailed the Pope Center to say he was adamantly against “the plan to use 50% of the tuition increase only to benefit students on need-based grants.” He said “this policy hurts thousands of students who don’t qualify for financial aid, but are still struggling to pay for college themselves.”
This is the same rhetorical device as the Herald-Sun snippet #3 above.
I have no doubt Mr. Farmer said the policy “hurts thousands of students who don’t qualify for aid” — but is there any actual empirical evidence that it actually does so?
On that, the Pope Center piece is conspicuously silent.
Mr. Farmer’s presumably self-initiated correspondence also begs the same question I posed to you in Snippet #2. Is he aware that he’s already slated to pay $200 in the General Assembly’s budget enacted last August, of which $0 will go to his University? Which “hurts thousands of students” more — paying 8% with $0 going to the University, or paying 6.5% where the University keeps the funds raised?
***
Snippet #5:
Indeed, there are indications that the ASG does not serve as an independent advocate for students, but instead is functioning like an arm of the administration (perhaps due to administrative pressure). In this case, the ASG appears to be “astroturfing,” in which the petition provides fake grass-roots support for the administration’s plan.
The weasel words here are “indications” and “appears.”
Go take a look at my responses to Jenna Ashley Robinson’s questions for this piece, where she specifically asks about whether I’ve talked with UNC General Administration (it’s Item 2(e) in Section II).
Not only do I point out to her that the campaign was “entirely student-conceived, student-created, and student-run” — I also point out that “there hasn’t been any collaboration or detailed discussion with” University administrators, and even provide a detailed history on the entire project’s genesis! 
When I notified UNC General Administration of our plans in mid-December, I got 2 responses. The first was “We recommend that you hold off”; the second was “With all due respect, your plan is not going to be helpful in getting what is most important to NC resident students, i.e., an alternative plan in place.”
With responses like those, does it “appear” to you like UNCASG is “functioning like an arm of the administration”?
I don’t know where those administrators’ opinions stood two months and 20,000 signatures later given the total lack of coordination between ASG and UNC General Administration, but deploying a project opposed by them doesn’t seem all that collusive to me…
***
Snippet #6:
The petition does not reveal what the administration’s plans are, only that “the money raised through higher tuition rates should go back to the students through higher University funding.” The omission of the administration’s intent certainly suggests the appearance of a deliberate attempt to mislead.
By this point in the post you can hopefully figure out who’s doing the “deliberate attempt to mislead” — but I digress…
This particular snippet prompts me to ask 2 questions:
1) Where would it go?
The quote was pulled from the Facebook event listing for the Tuition Petition, but go to the downloads page for the campaign and download the petition for any campus.
Where exactly would you put the language regarding the Administration’s plans? Bear in mind the proposal voted on by the Board of Governors was 13 pages long (Item 3(b)).
Had we put something in the petitions to that effect, no doubt the Pope Center would condemn us for unduly summarizing the plans.
2) Would it even matter?
I’ll again reiterate the same question from Snippet #2. Which would you choose?
==> Pay $200, with 0.00% going to your University
==> Instead pay $X < $200, with 100.00% of $X going to your University
This is a binary decision; the $200 increase is already in place, enacted in the August 2009 budget bill. Barring an effort from UNCASG, the Board of Governors and UNC General Administration to convince the Legislature to change it, students will be paying those rates in August 2010.
I might be wrong here, but I suspect the University could propose spending the money on hookers & blow and students would still prefer the cheaper University plan to the more-expensive General Assembly plan
***
Snippet #7:
Also, ASG members receive considerable stipends—-some as high as $4,000-—from the administration for their service. This almost automatically creates a conflict of interest for the members.
Weasel words here: “from the administration” and “almost.”
It’s true, I receive a $7,000 stipend for my service as UNCASG President. The organization’s budget is a public record that’s been available online throughout the session (see Item 3(e) in Section II above, line item 2101).
I’m not sure how “considerable” I’d consider it, considering I had to give up a $19,000 internship working for the N.C. General Assembly to take the position. But I digress…
The broader point is that the stipend comes from students — not the administration. UNCASG’s budget is in the form of a $1/student fee, a fee that I’ve had to pay myself along with thousands of others in the University.
I can’t speak for anyone else in the Association, but the fact I’m paid by other students’ money makes me more cognizant of my obligation to do a good job, not less. It’s the entire reason why I’ve gone out of my way to solicit student feedback, promote absolute transparency in UNCASG, and be a good steward of the students’ trust.
In other words, there’s no conflict of interest at all — hence why it’s only “almost” a conflict.
On an unrelated side note, the University administration is actually forbidden by policy from “assert[ing] control” over the Association (see §4 of Item 3(a) listed in Section II above). Surely someone like Jay Schalin, who notes in another Pope Center piece that he’s been a “paid observer of academia” for three years (see Item 3(f)), should know that by now.
***
Snippet #8:
Plus, there is the possibility that general administration officials have pressured Doucette for support. Doucette himself told the Carolina Review, a student publication, that “Bowles cussed me out” when there was a difference of opinions about student health care policies (referring to university system president Erskine Bowles).
Weasel words here? “Possibility.”
Schalin and Robinson here are quoting the September 2009 edition of the UNC Chapel Hill’s Carolina Review, a conservative/Republican publication known as much for its factual errors and limited readership as any incisive analysis.
See Item 2(c) in Section II above to read the piece yourself.
I stand by my comments in that particular column, which related to the UNC system’s decision to implement mandatory hard-waiver health insurance for all students system-wide. University President Erskine Bowles did have some choice words to share with me relating to ASG’s position on the proposal…
…but that was exactly my intent
Students didn’t like the health insurance plans, and I felt like the student opinion wasn’t being listened to adequately. So I labeled the proposal “pornstar healthcare” and wrote a widely-circulated note blasting the plan. See Item 3(g) in Section II above.
My Facebook note was sufficiently flamboyant that it got the attention of several folks, even someone at Fox News who wanted to pitch the issue for a segment on Hannity (I declined). It also resulted in more questions being asked than UNCGA could answer at the time, delaying implementation of the program by an entire year.
Frankly I’d have been surprised if I didn’t get chewed out given the note’s contents. But the bigger point is that I didn’t care — I’d gladly take a verbal beating in exchange for getting what my organization wanted on behalf of its constituents, which was a year-long delay and several tweaks to the program.
That’s exactly what we got, as you can read in Item 3(h) of Section II above.
Knowing the context of this particular situation, coupled with the administration’s comments regarding the tuition petition noted in Snippet #5, should sufficiently expose as shamelessly false the idea that I care one iota about “pressure” from “general administration officials.”
You regular readers here at law:/dev/null know I’m a formerly homeless college dropout who not only fought his way through a bachelor’s degree but is now excelling at law school. I’ve worked for a former prison warden when I was an Assistant Clerk of Superior Court in Wake County. I’m training to become a United States Marine. I work for 215,000+ of the finest scholars in the country.
Someone using salty language towards me because they dislike a policy choice I made falls pretty low on the totem pole of things I care about in life…
***
Snippet #9:
When Doucette took over the ASG presidency in the fall of 2008, he initially opposed tuition raises. The main newspaper on the Chapel Hill campus, The Daily Tar Heel, quoted him in October of 2008 as saying, “I hate seeing tuition increases anytime,” and “I think it [increasing tuition] runs a great risk of pushing people out of the university.” At that time, Bowles reproached the ASG for coming out against tuition increases before the chancellors made their own recommendations. “I don’t think that’s the way business should be done,” he chided the student group, according to the Daily Tar Heel.
There are no weasel words here — the “analysis” is just plain wrong 
The particular DTH news story is missing from their online archives, but I have no doubt I made that particular comment and I continue to stand by it. Raising tuition impedes access and I hate seeing increases. In my perfect world, those increases wouldn’t happen.
But I also know rising costs are an inevitability of life, and because of that I didn’t “oppose tuition raises” when I took over the ASG presidency. The Pope Center is basically playing make-believe to suit their interests.
Don’t take my word for it though, I’ve got plenty of documentation to reiterate the point:
- Two separate editorials I wrote in the N.C. State Technician back in September and October 2005, the first (see Item 3(i)) noting that higher tuition wasn’t inherently bad, and the second (see Item 3(j)) suggesting the Student Government advocate for “fee caps” and “aggregate increase limits” — the very policy the UNC Board of Governors adopted two years later in 2007 (that I purportedly opposed).
- A letter I wrote to the editor of the Raleigh News & Observer in July 2006, advocating a policy that “[gives] universities more political cover to raise their tuition rates, but… also protects students and their families” (see Item 3(k))
- A resolution I wrote in November 2006, adopted by the N.C. State Student Senate, calling on the University to adopt that very same type of policy (see Item 3(l))
All 4 of those items were written long before I ever became Student Senate President at N.C. State, and even longer before I ever considered running for ASG President in March 2008.
But just to clarify the point for anyone who thinks I might have changed my mind at some point between then and the ASG Presidency, I’ll offer the following:
- Media coverage from a “stand-in” I led at the February 2008 UNC Board of Governors meeting supporting limited tuition increases. A meeting attended by… Jay Schalin (see Item 3(s))
- My April 2008 campaign platform for ASG President, where I advocated for the same thing (see Item 3(m) page 11)
- Two separate UNCASG resolutions on tuition and fee increases, the first in October 2008 and the second in January 2009 (see Item 3(n) and Item 3(o)). You might notice Item 3(o) bears a striking resemblance to Item 3(d) — that’s because the resolution text is largely the same, since the political opinions of most rational people don’t suddenly change in a year’s time.
If there’s one trait I’ve had on tuition and fees over the last 5 years, it’s consistency. Both Jay Schalin and Jenna Ashley Robinson should have easily seen any of these within even 10 seconds of actual research — Robinson in particular, since most of these items are linked off my Facebook profile that she used to contact me about the piece.
But just in case, I even made the effort to note my philosophy on tuition and fees in my ensuing correspondence with Robinson via that Facebook profile. Go back to Item 2(e) and read the last section of my response.
And yet they somehow got it completely, totally, and irrefutably… wrong
***
Snippet #10:
And this year, Doucette has a completely different attitude. After the recent BOG meeting, he dismissed students who do not qualify for aid as “rich” and said they “can get loans” if they can’t afford the tuition.
The commentary from this snippet presumably came from an impromptu interview with Jay Schalin at the February meeting of the Board of Governors, when he approached me after the Budget & Finance Committee adjourned.
We just covered in Snippet #9 that the Pope Center completely fabricated my “different” attitude from whole cloth, despite half a decade of digital evidence to the contrary. So I think I can safely skip dissecting the first sentence.
Two points on the sentence following it:
1) The median income for a family of 4 in North Carolina is ~$64,591 according to statistics published by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services annually in the Federal Register (see Item 3(p)). Financial aid breakdowns provided by UNC General Administration show that even families making $90,000 receive significant grant aid (see Item 3(q)).
Folks, that means if you’re at the point where you don’t qualify for any financial aid then you or your parents are pulling in six figures or more — and are substantially above the median income for a typical 4-person family.
To me that qualifies as “rich,” particularly for folks attending college who come from college-educated families. And my (admittedly unscientific) suspicion is that the overwhelming majority of the taxpaying public would agree.
2) Regardless of the above point, all students — rich, poor and in between — should be willing to get loans if they want an education and can’t pay tuition. My education was funded largely through loans because earning a degree was important to me. An education is an investment in yourself, and it makes sense that you personally should bear a significant chunk of the cost in the form of a loan you’ll need to repay.
I made the same point in my correspondence to Jenna Ashley Robinson (see the end section of Item 2(e)).
Now I may not be widely supported in that belief, but it seems comically asinine for a purportedly conservative organization like the Pope Center to chastise me for believing in personal responsibility…
***
Snippet #11:
Criticism of the ASG’s allegiance is neither new nor limited to one side of the political spectrum. Both of UNC-Chapel Hill’s major student publications, the liberal Daily Tar Heel and the conservative Carolina Review, have called for an end to the mandatory funding of the ASG for its failure to represent student interests.
Two points here:
1) Calling the low-circulating, error-filled, poorly-edited, monthly-published Carolina Review a “major student publication” is laughably ridiculous on its own. That goes double when the sentence indicates it’s 1 of only 2 such “major” entities on the UNC Chapel Hill campus, with the other being the widely-circulated, sufficiently-accurate-for-use-by-most-of-Orange-County, professionally-edited, daily student newspaper.
2) Jay Schalin and Jenna Ashley Robinson also conveniently fail to put a time horizon on the Daily Tar Heel’s criticisms or note any of its changes in opinion over time. Fortunately I did that work for them months ago so you don’t have to — take a look at Item 3(r) in Section II.
***
Snippet #12:
Several former UNC-Chapel Hill student body presidents have refused to attend ASG meetings and have called it “inefficient” and “unscrupulous.”
Another convenient absence of a time horizon. Let’s review:
===> The current 2009-10 Student Body President, Jasmin Jones, has not only regularly attended UNCASG meetings but also came up with the entire Tuition Petition idea (see the first section of Item 2(e))
===> The 2008-09 SBP, J.J. Raynor, attended as well (see Item 3(r) again)
===> The 2007-08 SBP, Eve Carson, attended as well (since that’s how I met her)
So at least since April 2007 when I became a part of the Association in my role as N.C. State’s Student Senate President, every Student Body President of UNC Chapel Hill has attended ASG meetings. I know because I’ve seen and talked to them in person — as have a number of other delegates.
Now I can’t speak for any Student Body Presidents going back more than 3-4 years, but really if you have to reach back that far to criticize an organization it should be a clue that your criticism is probably unfounded
One last point of interest: the UNCCH 2010-11 SBP-elect, Hogan Medlin, has already asked for info so he can plan to attend UNCASG meetings. By contrast one of his 5 opponents, Nash Keune — the editor of the Carolina Review who included a “withdraw from ASG” plank in his platform — came in a distant 4th place in the campus’s election last month with a whopping 12% of the vote.
***
Snippet #13:
The legislature and UNC system also need to go back to the drawing board. There are countless alternatives better than either existing proposal. For instance, tuition increases could be limited to the amount needed to maintain academic quality, helping out the tuition-paying students. Or the legislature could take it easy on the people who really foot the bill, the taxpayers who provide some of the nation’s most generous higher education subsidies. In this scenario, UNC schools could raise tuitions and keep the money, but only if their state funding was cut by the amount of revenue produced.
This is where the yoga-like flexibility of the authors’ rhetorical skills go on full display, and those of us with even a vague semblance of logical thought processes get left in the lurch.
Read those last 2 sentences. Then re-read them again. Now go read the opening section of the Pope Center piece (Item 1). Then come back and re-re-read those last 2 sentences.
Notice anything?
Yes folks: the very Pope Center piece that spent the past 1,400ish words (i) condemning what UNCASG dubbed a “backdoor tax increase”, then (ii) condemning UNCASG itself, wraps up with… (iii) an endorsement of the very same backdoor tax increase it condemned 1,400ish words earlier.
You see, a scenario where universities “raise tuitions and keep the money, but only if their state funding was cut by the amount of revenue produced” is EXACTLY WHAT IT IS NOW IN THE STATE BUDGET.
Existing state appropriations are reduced by the exact same amount that tuition rates go up. In other words, the state is raising tuition and keeping the money.
I don’t really have any analysis I can offer here. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried…
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IV. CONCLUSION
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I used to be a big fan of the Pope Center, and their sister think tank the John Locke Foundation. QuietStorm worked at JLF for quite awhile, as have a number of other friends and an Economics professor I had at N.C. State.
But now having experienced first-hand how aggressively some of its personnel will either (1) twist or (2) invent “facts” to support an argument — even if it means writing a piece that is self-contradictory in the process — I can’t really take any of their commentary with anything less than a warehouse-sized volume of salt.
Fortunately for the Pope Center, I’m not a contributor so they lose nothing from my distaste. They even get to keep the moral high ground since I’m a net debtor to society given my ample student loans and relatively inexpensive law school tuition. They’ll probably even get some more hits on their website from the folks who happen to swing by law:/dev/null, and may even garner a contributor or two out of the bunch.
Even so, I expect better from folks who complain of the very same tactics purportedly employed by academicians in the ivory tower.
The sanctimony is amusing, to be sure. But whether it’s the result of laziness or mental instability I’ll leave up to you.
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Sorry again for the rant. Have a great night folks!
Tags: NC State, NCSU Student Senate, NCSU Technician, Pope Center, QuietStorm, SG, Tuition & Fees, UNCASG, UNCCH Carolina Review, UNCCH Daily Tar Heel
Posted by TDot on Mar 1, 2010 in
NotFail Hey y’all!
Sorry for missing my self-imposed weekend deadline for writing. My monthly UNCASG meeting was Friday-Sunday on the NC A&T State and UNC Greensboro campuses, so the evenings when I usually write were instead spent enjoying the company of some folks I hadn’t seen in awhile. Hopefully y’all will forgive me
Here’s a quick 5-point update on the past few days:
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MBP BRAIN TRANSPLANT SUCCESSFUL
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Last Monday my 4-year-old MacBook Pro got shipped off to Texas for a new logic board, and wasn’t slated to be back in my hands until tomorrow.
Apple somehow got everything repaired and sent back to the Southpoint Apple Store by Friday — I got a text on my phone from FedEx around 10am when it was dropped off, and promptly skipped out of class to go pick it up
I’m pleased to report the surgery was a success! In addition to the logic board it needed, the folks replaced the RAM chips, the fan assembly, the SuperDrive, and cleaned both the keyboard and the screen… all for the same price
I already officially :heart:’d Apple. But all that made me 
them even more. 
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WHITE GUY WINS BLSA TRIVIA CHALLENGE
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No one was surprised last semester when I joined the NCCU Law chapter of the Black Law Students Association. I was active in the black community at my alma mater, had 3 roommates for years who were even more active than I was, etc.
And even if I wasn’t active, Delta the 2L was going to shake me down for dues anyhow
So when BLSA had a trivia contest for Black History Month, I sent in an answer on a whim. Turns out I was the first one to reply with the correct answer on that particular day, which prompted a pair of challenges: a nice “Now you know I expect you to win this right?” from Delta, and a snarky “What do you think you know about black history?” from a colleague I’ll leave nameless.
I don’t know much, but I do know I got declared the winner on Friday
Here’s how the final scorecard turned out:
- T. Greg Doucette @ 7 points
- Melanie Bates @ 3 points
- Whitney Frye @ 2 points
- LaKeeshia Austin @ 1 point (tie)
Lori Hale @ 1 point (tie)
Stephanie Locke @ 1 point (tie)
Alyssa Moore @ 1 point (tie)
Ashleigh Parker @ 1 point (tie)
Demetria Watkins @ 1 point (tie)
Oluseun Williams @ 1 point (tie)
The contest had a $25 gift card as a prize, but I’m getting more joy out of proving a point 
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UNCASG COLLECTS 22,000+ SIGNATURES
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That meeting I mentioned was one of our busier ones of the year as I try to wrap up everything I want done before my term ends April 30th.
The Tuition Petition stack... and this is without a handful of universities!
One of the highlights has been the UNCASG Tuition Petition campaign, where we’ve been getting students across the state to petition the North Carolina General Assembly to repeal a mandatory 8% tuition increase (with $$ going to the state’s budget deficit) and replace it with lower rates set by the UNC Board of Governors (with $$ staying on each campus).
We gathered up the petitions from most of the universities this weekend, and it looks like we’ve gathered over 22,000 signatures — well over our goal of 21,500
Now comes the “fun” part: verifying names, erasing contact information, duplicating petitions, getting them bound into volumes, then distributing them to key legislators.
I think I’m gonna delegate that part to someone else
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MIDTERM PANIC SETS IN
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Midterms start on Wednesday with Property II. CivPro II and Torts II are next on Thursday, then we wrap up on Friday with Ks II and CrimLaw I.
Thought I was freaking out before finals? Imagine what I’m like after not having my outlines for a week
If my posts over the next few days sound more and more like the rantings of a delusional mind, I’ve probably gone crazy
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AND MORE @#$%ING SNOW…
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Oh and it’s scheduled to snow again starting tomorrow. This will be the 2nd time in less than a week, and at least the 5th time in 5 weeks.
Last I checked North Carolina is still firmly part of the South and Durham is still part of the generally snow-free Research Triangle. I love snow — once or twice a year. This is getting a bit excessive…
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That’s the past week of my life in a nutshell Hope all of you are doing well, and enjoy the rest of the week!
Tags: BLSA, Delta the 2L, I ♥ Apple, NCCU Law, Tuition & Fees, UNCASG
Take it to get looked at ASAP.
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