UNC-Chapel Hill ranks as the No. 1 value in American public higher education, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine reported today.

For the 11th time in a row, UNC-CH ranked first on Kiplinger’s list of the 100 universities and colleges that provide the best value to in-state students. The magazine also listed Carolina No. 1 for the value offered to out-of-state students.

The new ranking appears in the February issue posted along with a related story this morning.

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Wells, the dean of Duke Chapel since 2005, will leave Duke early next summer to become the vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London, he announced today.

“I’ve loved being a part of Duke as we have explored together what faith means to head, heart and hand in a diverse culture at a challenging time.” Wells said in a statement. “It has been an amazing privilege and joy to lead the ministry of the Chapel and share in the vibrant Duke and Durham communities. I shall miss it more than I can say.”

Wells will return to England to lead a prominent church that enjoys a close relationship with national leaders. Located in Trafalgar Square beside the National Gallery, the church is renowned for its high profile in the arts and engagement with poverty, often appearing in public broadcasts tied to issues of social justice.

Neighbors of UNC’s Bingham Facility will meet with university officials Monday to discuss the latest plans for the animal holding center west of Carrboro.

The facility was in the news last year when UNC planned to add three buildings and expand from 85 dogs to up to 450 dogs and 150 hogs. After repeated leaks of treated wastewater, it shelved the plan and returned a $14.5 million federal grant when it determined it would need another $20 million to make the plan work.

Now UNC is rebuilding the facility’s wastewater treatment system. There are no plans to expand, the university says, but neighbors in the group Preserve Rural Orange are wary. The state last week granted their request for a public hearing on the university’s application to modify its permit, which calls for spreading treated wastewater over a larger area than before.

In an interview, Associate Vice Chancellor Bob Lowman emphasized that UNC is not expanding and that the facility's three buildings are probably all there will ever be, he said. There likely won’t ever be more than 85 dogs or any hogs permanently housed there, he said.

A building that was expected to house specially bred golden retrievers for a muscular dystrophy researcher who is now leaving the university will likely be used for mice, Lowman said.

Look for more on this story coming Sunday in The Chapel Hill News.
 

A Bush administration official who led and then changed her mind on federal education reform will speak at 6 p.m. Monday, Oct. 3, in Page Auditorium on the Duke University campus.

Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. She has written 10 books on education, most recently last year’s “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.”

From 1991 to 1993, she was Assistant Secretary of Education and Counselor to Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. In that position, her website says, she led the federal effort to promote the creation of voluntary state and national academic standards.

From 1997 to 2004, she was a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal testing program.

“As No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) accountability regime took over the nation's schools under President George W. Bush and more and more charter schools were launched, I supported these initiatives,” Ravitch wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “But over time, I became disillusioned with the strategies that once seemed so promising. I no longer believe that either approach will produce the quantum improvement in American education that we all hope for.

"On our present course, we are disrupting communities, dumbing down our schools, giving students false reports of their progress, and creating a private sector that will undermine public education without improving it. Most significantly, we are not producing a generation of students who are more knowledgeable, and better prepared for the responsibilities of citizenship. That is why I changed my mind about the current direction of school reform.”

Ravitch's appearance is presented by Durham Public Schools and the Duke University Program in Education. Tickets for the Page Auditorium talk are free, but must be obtained in advance. They are available on-line at tickets.duke.edu, by calling 919-684-4444.

Confidential student records were stolen from a UNC building that houses the Honor Court.

Officials discovered the break-in to the student judicial system office in Student Academic Services Building North this morning. Thirty students’ confidential records were stolen, according to a news release.

The office contains the Honor Court, which was discussed at last week’s board of trustees meeting. The Honor Court disciplined football player Michael McAdoo for receiving impermissible help on a paper from a tutor last year but failed to catch McAdoo’s plagiarism. (Read Dan Kane's story on that here.)

UNC-CH declined to comment on any possible connection between McAdoo’s case and the break-in.

If you know anything about the beak-in, police ask you to call Investigator Ross Barbee at 919-962-0564 or Crime Stoppers at 919-942-7515. All callers may remain anonymous.
 

From Duke Office of News & Communications

For the fourth consecutive year, Duke has been named as one of the best colleges in the country to work for by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

After an independent survey of employees for the 2011 "Great Colleges to Work For" program, Duke earned high marks for its commitment in five workplace categories. Duke was among colleges highlighted for programs and achievements in:

• Professional/ career development programs (Employees given opportunity to develop skills and understand requirements to advance in careers).
• Facilities, workspaces and security (Facilities adequately meet needs, appearance of campus is pleasing and the institution takes steps to provide a secure environment).
• Job satisfaction (Provides insight into satisfaction with job fit, autonomy, resources).
• Work/life balance (Policies give employees flexibility to manage personal lives).
• Supervisor/department chair relationship (Supervisor makes expectations clear, solicits ideas).

This year, 310 colleges participated in the program, and Duke was one of 111 institutions that received recognition in various categories.

State lawmakers have repealed legislation that allowed the UNC Board of Governors to create an airport authority to replace Horace Williams Airport with another airport in Orange County.

Senate Bill 593 eliminates “certain state boards and commissions that have not met recently, are duplicative or are not deemed critical.”  The airport legislation is on that list.

Three years ago, lawmakers authorized UNC to look for and site a new airport in the rural county (See our story here.). A consultant estimated a new airport could pump up to $53 million into the local economy, more than four times what Horace Williams generates. (See our story here.)

The search caused great concern in the Bingham Township area, where possible sites included land some families had lived on for generations. The group Preserve Rural Orange collected 1,100 signatures on a petition opposed to the search (See our story here.) Chancellor Holden Thorp eventually ended the search, and UNC decided to move airport operations to Raleigh-Durham International Airport, where a new hangar was recently completed.

Preserve Rural Orange member Laura Streitfeld says board members Tom Schopler and Cliff Leath met recently with state Reps. Verla Insko and Joe Hackney, and state Sen. Ellie Kinnaird to thank them for helping to repeal the airport authority legislation, which remained on the books.
 
“The repeal of the airport authority legislation gives us all a cause to rejoice and thank our legislators for listening to us," Heath says. "It also reminds us that people working together for the common good can and do make a difference.  The formation of Preserve Rural Orange, meetings held at White Cross Community Center, petitions that neighbors signed, news articles and letters to the editor, and communication efforts by Orange County Voice, local businesses and other community groups were all a testament to our resolve over this issue.”
 

Duke will host a club day beginning at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday (July 2) at the Blue Devil dry land practice facility, where Olympic champion Greg Louganis will talk with local divers, coaches and fans.

UNC School of the Arts chancellor John Mauceri has released a new studio recording of the George and Ira Gershwin 1930 Broadway classic, "Strike Up the Band."

An earlier version of the score was released in 1991, but the final score, which was extensively revised by the Gershwins, was never fully tracked until now.

The disc was released by PS Classics, a label devoted to American theatre music and popular song.

Mauceri conducted the 28-piece orchestra featured on the score. The final project was completed this spring. You can get more details at Playbill.

Mauceri has been the chancellor at UNCSA since 2006. He was a consultant for music theater at Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for more than a decade, and for 18 years, Mauceri worked closely with Leonard Bernstein and conducted many of the composer’s premieres at Bernstein’s request.

A couple months back, I ran into a UNC employee who asked me if I had been sick the previous week.

I had, and I asked him what made him suspect as much.

Well," he said, "There wasn't as much stuff on the blog last week as there usually is."

This was encouraging news, since it meant that Campus Notes was gaining some sort of foothold. It was flattering that at least one person followed it regularly enough to notice an occasional gap in service.

I've tried to use this blog to bolster my higher education reporting for the News & Observer in print and online. The blog and its twitter feed, @campus_notes, have helped me reach new audiences. They've also taught me what's popular on the web. For example, people seem to like videos of silly college kids engaging in what I like to call "planned spontaneity" in the campus library.

And blog posts about controversial Muslim leaders headed to town are popular too. And of course, the Granddaddy of all Twitter Trash Talk, UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp's Krzyzewskiville blast. That was an amusing day.

I'm really going to miss it all.

It's bittersweet for me to report that I'm leaving the News & Observer, my third newspaper in a 15-year journalism career, for a new job with the news office at Duke University.

My last day is Friday.

These are tough times for newspapers, which struggle to make money. (You're probably reading this on your computer. For free.) But the News & Observer is committed to its coverage of higher education here in the Triangle, one of the nation's most complex and dynamic higher education markets.

And the blog will remain as well, with contributions from a number of reporters and editors.

I've spent most of the last dozen years writing about universities here in the Triangle. I've learned a lot and I hope my reporting has been useful. I'm leaving this beat just as it's getting interesting, with sweeping changes to public universities beckoning on the horizon.

I'll follow all the twists and turns in the newspaper. I hope you will too.

Thanks for reading.