N.C. Central University's law school has some heady company atop a new list of the nation's most popular law schools.

NCCU's law school ranks ninth on this new list, from U.S. News & World Report, that evaluates schools on the percentage of students admitted who choose to enroll. Basically, if lots of students you admit decide to show up, you're popular.

Topping the list? Yale, followed by Brigham Young and Harvard.

NCCU's the only North Carolina law school in the top 10. Its acceptance rate - the percentage of applicants it offers to enroll - is 20 percent, far better than the national average of about 39 percent, said Raymond Pierce, the school's dean.

This is the latest ranking to raise the profile of the law school at this small, historically black institution. It has previously been tabbed the nation's best value by National Jurist Magazine.

The honor illustrates that legal education is headed away from high-price, high-debt schools and towards affordable options whose grads pass the bar at a high rate. Pierce said.

"Affordability is a big piece of this," he sasid. That's where legal education is going."

Note: This blog has been edited, 3/25

A medical school professor at UNC-Chapel Hill believes the faculty there should be far more diverse.

Sue Estroff, the outspoken former chair of the UNC-CH faculty, told campus trustees Thursday that the faculty could be far more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity and gender, and could be more welcoming to people with disabilities.

"Our student body is much more inclusive than our faculty," she told trustees.

In a later interview, she said the university needs to be smarter and more aggressive about recruiting minorities to campus.

"It's not about being politically correct," Estroff said. "It's about a richness enrichness to the campus."

Estroff, a social medicine professor, made particular note of a campus she believes is something of an obstacle course for prospective faculty members with physical disabilities.

"We are not a destination campus for people with disabilities," she said. "We're in compliance. But we need to reach out and be that place."

Estroff is co-chair of a new, long-term academic planning effort that includes components to improve the faculty.

Here's some context on faculty diversity. According to this chart, white men accounted for 42 percent of the entire UNC-CH faculty last fall. That's 2,120 white male faculty members. There were 1,884 white females, or 37 percent of the total.

To compare, there were 111 black male faculty members, which is about two percent, and 202 black women, which is about four percent of the total.

There were 1,263 tenured white faculty members, (male and female), compared with just 56 black male and female profs.

UNC-Chapel Hill wants to institute new permits and fees for night and satellite parking to spread the burden of rising transportation costs.

In the next five years, the university hopes to begin charging for day parking in satellite park-and-ride lots and in campus spaces at night. There's no charge for either currently, but officials say it's needed in order to meet costs expected to rise $6.1 million by 2015-16.

"We're facing some significant financial commitments,"  Jeff McCracken, UNC's public safety director, said Wednesday following a meeting with UNC trustees. "The real effort is to try to equitably distribute costs."

McCracken's proposal, developed with a private consultant and created with input from students and staff, would for the first time charge university workers to park in the several commuter lots around town.

Those lots, including the Friday Center lot on N.C. 54, are used heavily by UNC employees who either can't park on campus or choose not to pay to do so.
Those lots are costly to operate, McCracken said. The cost of the new parking permits would cost between $227 and $390 a year depending on the employee's salary.

McCracken acknowledged there would be some sticker shock for workers unaccustomed to paying for the park-and-ride option.

"But it is one of our most expensive endeavors," he said. "You have to have very frequent bus service or people won't use it."

Read more on this in Thursday's News & Observer.
 

A little late on this, but here's the full story from yesterday on the UNC system's scrutiny of cheating, academic tutoring, the role of admissions in college athletics, and other issues.

Prompted by last fall's UNC football issues, the university system office put a task force together to try and improve the way all its campuses deal with athletics.

The group meets again next month and is expected to issue a report later this year.

Fascinating conversation going on right now at meeting of UNC system athletics task force.

The group is talking about how to improve academic support for athletes and reduce the chances of cheating.

A comment by Carrie Leger, N.C. State's associate athletic director for academics and student services, elicited some knowing head nods from other officials from UNC system campuses.

It speaks to the minefield athletics officials attempt to navigate in training and placing their trust in tutors.

"I think we feel as good as we can in terms of tutoring," Leger said. "But also recognize a determined individual can do a bad thing."

Read more about this in Tuesday's News & Observer.

Last week's lecture at UNC-Chapel Hill by controversial Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf seeemed to strike a chord with people - at least judging by the many comments in my email in-box.

We weren't able to live-stream the lecture as it happened last week, but we have it now.

A quick refresher: Abdul Rauf is the driving force behind the controversial proposal to build an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan.

Known to many as the Ground Zero Mosque, the project has supporters and critics and has touched off a massive public debate about the role of Islam in America.

Here's our coverage of Abdul Rauf's talk last week.

And here's a link to the video.

Looking for something to do this weekend? Got a hankering for some history?

The history department at N.C. State is holding "History Weekend" on March 18 and 19. The topic: "The Tea Party in American History."

Events are free and open to the public, and the featured speaker is Jill Lepore, a Harvard history professor, TV and radio commentator who also writes for The New Yorker.
 Events include:

On Friday, March 18 at 7:30 p.m., "History in the Media: From the Adams Family to Simpsons"  Using episodes from PBS series on the Adams Family and a Simpsons' episode on history and commemoration, Prof. Lepore will lead a discussion of the way history and media interact.

And on Saturday at 10 a.m., Lepore will discuss her recent book. The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History and take questions. 

After the lecture, she will sign her books, which will be available for purchase.  Part of the proceeds help sponsor future History Weekend events.

All events will be in Withers 232A on the NCSU campus. Click here for more information.

It’s a chaotic time at NCSU, with three separate, but interrelated processes going on that all will play major roles in reshaping the university.

This morning, we wrote about a plan developed by Provost Warwick Arden and Vice Chancellor for Finance and Business Charles Leffler at the request of Chancellor Randy Woodson. It’s a broad outline for reorganizing several major parts of the campus.

 In passing, we mentioned the other two processes in play now. One of those is budget planning, which of course is an annual event but this year is particularly serious, with university leaders bracing for a loss of as much as 15 percent, or $80 million, of the state allocation. A hefty cut is all but certain, given the state’s dire budget problems.

The other process going on now is a long-range strategic planning effort for the campus that has been under way for months and  formed much of the underpinning of the reorganization plan.

The reorganization includes merging several administrative offices and setting up a process to consider streamlining facets of academics. Among the biggest likely changes is a reorganization of the three colleges that many of the university’s science courses:  Agriculture and Life Sciences ; Physical and Mathematical Sciences ; and Natural Resources.

In interviews, Woodson and Arden were careful to stress that faculty will play a major role in determining how the academic units are retooled.

“Those things that are largely administrative, that we can make clear decision and take action quickly, we’re doing,” said Arden in an interview.  “But when you move into the more academic things such as how we deliver science academic programs, or evaluating graduate and undergraduate degree programs, those are things where you need to lay out  an agenda, but have the 2,000 faculty member s on the campus enter vigorously into the discussion, because we need to tap into their expertise to develop the solutions.”

University leaders said the sciences have evolved so that the academic structures in which they’re taught have become outmoded in some ways. Science is so central to the university’s role in the state, that it’s crucial to keep it vigorous, even in the face of repeated state budget cuts.

“We’ve thought about this, about how you deliver those programs  and actually perhaps strengthen those departments by perhaps having fewer,  and make them more effective  more effective,” Leffler said. “That’s not a small change by any stretch, and will take a lot of discussion.”

Leffler said that planning a reorganization of parts of the campus in the middle of a budget crisis was a case of “not wasting a crisis.,” Some of the changes would make sense even in a good budget year, but the efficiencies to be gained get more important with every dollar cut.

“There’s a  real understanding on our campus now that any dollar we can save by doing these things that’s not required to respond the to the budget reduction, that’s a dollar we can reinvest  in the campus,” he said.  

This promises to be an interesting week at UNC and Duke.

No, I'm not talking hoops. I'm talking about speaking appearances at both universities by the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the controversial Muslim leader of an effort to build an Islamic center near the World Trade Center site in New York City. The project has been referred to as the Ground Zero Mosque.

The imam will speak Wednesday evening at UNC's Hill Hall. A Christian group will protest the imam's appearance by attempt to counter-program some attention away by showing a movie about families affected by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Abdul Rauf's stop at UNC is part of a speaking tour, and he's being paid $20,000 plus travel expenses from a private fund. Not taxpayer dollars, to be clear.

Abdul Rauf also speaks Thursday at noon at Duke Chapel on the Duke University campus.

A N.C. Central University professor has been appointed chairman of the state's African-American Heritage Commission.

Gov. Beverly Perdue has named Freddie L. Parker to the post. Parker, currently the interim chair of NCCU's history department, joined the commission at its formation two years ago.

The General Assembly established the commission to advise and assist the Secretary of Cultural Resources in preserving, interpreting and promoting African-American history, arts and culture.

An NCCU alumnus, Parker has lent his time to a number of organizations related to history. He is past chairman of the North Carolina Historical Highway Marker Commission and currently is chairman of the African American History Project Advisory Board at Tryon Palace in New Bern.

Last fall, he was elected vice-president of the Historical Society of North Carolina and will become its president this year.
 
In January, Parker won entry into the North Caroliniana Society, a nonprofit group that selects as members North Carolinians who meet the strict criterion of "adjudged performance" in service to the state's heritage.
 
Parker received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from NCCU in 1975 and 1977 respectively, and the Ph.D. in American History from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1987. He is the author of “Running for Freedom: Slave Runaways in NC, 1775-1840,” and “Stealing a Little Freedom: Advertisements for Slave Runaways in NC, 1791-1840.”