Voters with questions on election day can call a toll-free hotline staffed by faculty and students from the UNC Chapel Hill School of Law.

The non-partisan hotline will be staffed between 6:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. on election day, Nov. 4. The hotline is part of Election Protection, a national voter advocacy effort.

In North Carolina, voters can call 1-866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683). Assistance will be available in English and Spanish.

File this under "no kidding."

UNC Chapel Hill has once again been named the "best value in public higher education" by Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine. No, the magazine isn't on the university payroll, but it has given Carolina top honors each year since it started the ranking in 1998.

The ranking will be part of the magazine's Nov. 11 issue. 

N.C. State ranks 18th on the list; UNC Wilmington checks in at 25 and Appalachian State is 29.

The top five are UNC, Florida, Virginia, Georgia and the College of William and Mary.

 The Kiplinger ranking evaluates 100 public universities on a mix of affordability and academic quality.

Apparently, all this construction dust the folks in Chapel Hill have been inhaling for about seven years now have caught the eye of this magazine's evaluators. Of UNC, the magazine fawns thusly:

"UNC students of every background have equal reason to be thrilled at the opportunity to share classrooms with other high-achieving students and learn from a nationally acclaimed faculty. The historic campus is undergoing a major refurbishing that includes the FedEx Global Education Center, a hub for international studies, as well as a state-of-the-art physical sciences complex."

A fire official in Greenville says a recent fire in a classroom building at East Carolina may be a case of arson.

According to the daily newspaper there, an accelerant may have been used to start a fire in a bathroom of the Bate classroom building.

There were no injuries. 

Tuition for in-state students at public universities rose more than 6 percent last year, and tuition for students at private universities increased almost that much as well, according to an annual report from The College Board.

In a companion report, The College Board found that financial aid is increasing as well. For example, the number of Pell Grant recipients jumped by about 5 percent, the study finds. 

The nitty-gritty: The average total cost of college - tuition, fees, room and board - for an in-state student at a public university in 2007-08 was $14,333.

For out-of-staters, the total cost average nationally was $25,200.

 By way of comparison: a UNC Chapel Hill student from North Carolina paid about $13,514 in tuition, fees, room and board last year, according to this university website. An out-of-state student paid $30,412.

Students at private universities across the nation paid $34,142 last year in tuition, fees, room and board. While not a perfect comparison, Duke this year charges $47,810 for tuition, fees, room and board.

It should be noted that none of these numbers reflect the cost of books and other personal expenses, which universities generally estimate and tell applicants about.

N.C. Central Univeristy has joined a resource-sharing consortium with eight other universities aimed in part at improving the academic performance of African-American male college students.

The project is called Interlink Alliance and joins eight historically black institutions with Ohio University to share ideas and resources and will include faculty and student-exchange programs.

Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte is the other member from North Carolina.

More information is available here.

Historically black institutions have long struggled to improve the academic performance of black, male students, a challenge the leaders of this new initiative acknowledge.

"We felt that the African-American male was an endangered species and that we needed to do something that would allow the matriculation and graduation of more African-American males throughout our institutions as well as others," said Roderick McDavis, Ohio University's president, speaking to Diverse, a higher education publication.

Less than 34 percent of black, male freshmen at North Carolina's public historically black colleges who enrolled in 2000 graduated after six years, according to UNC system data.

At NCCU, 34.7 percent of black, male students graduated in that time frame, according to the data.

Earlier this month, two Campbell University students and a buddy from Virginia Tech were up in Virginia Beach for a John McCain rally.

It was their lucky day. The Straight Talk Express rumbled by, they waved it down, and the candidate himself got out and chatted them up. McCain even gave them some hot chocolate - after his secret service detail had inspected their cell phones.

The Campbell students are Eric Paul Hardy and Michael Meredity and their Virginia Tech buddy is Brendan Ahurns. Their tale is recounted in a recent Campbell University press release. I can't find a link to the release, so here are the essentials:

 "We were just out and about and driving up the boulevard on Ocean Front approaching the Hilton Hotel," said Hardy, who is a junior government major from Shoals, NC. "There was no one around, but when we looked to our immediate left, there was the Straight Talk Express."

In Maryland, historically black public universities lag behind other institutions in technology, facilities and retention and graduation rates and need an infusion of public money to catch up, according to a new report issued this week.

Since 2001, the state has sent $400 million to the campuses - Bowie State, Coppin State, Morgan State and the University of Maryland - Eastern Shore - but the results haven't followed, according to the report.

Like in North Carolina, Maryland's HBCUs struggle to retain students and battle high dropout rates. The report found that 80 percent of HBCU students "need further preparation to succeed in college."

Michael Munger, the Duke political scientist running for governor under the Libertarian banner, gets some pub in Reason Magazine.

At UNC Chapel Hill, campus leaders want some ideas on how to strengthen the university.

A forum is scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 30 at 2 p.m. in Gerrard Hall. It's free and open to anyone with an opinion on the subject.

The forum is one piece of a larger initiative run jointly by student body president JJ Raynor and John Ellison, a trustee. The duo is charged with leading an examination about UNC-CH's future and develop a set of recommendations about how to make the university stronger.

"Our job is to listen," Raynor said in a UNC-CH press release. "We're asking students, faculty and staff to bring their ideas and energy for a discussion about the univesity's future."

This will be the first campus-wide event related to the initiative. More information is available here.

A New Jersey man has been indicted in the death of Jason Ray, the UNC student killed in 2007 while walking along a busy roadway in northern New Jersey.

Ray was the popular UNC student who proudly donned the Rameses costume for football and basketball games. He was in New Jersey in March 2007 with the Tar Heels men's basketball team, and was struck by an SUV driven by Armen Hovsepian, a Paramus, NJ resident who was driving with a suspended license.

Ray's death hit hard in Chapel Hill, where Ray was well-liked and widely known. In death, he did some good. His organs and tissue were donated, and about 80 people benefited, including a diabetic who, after nine years of dialysis, received Ray's kidney and pancreas.

His life was also the subject of a feature story on ESPN and a multimedia project on ESPN.com.