This past Saturday, founders of Union Independent School, a private-becoming-charter school on Dowd Street in Northeast Central Durham, launched a unique college prep program for 54 handpicked black students at Hillside and Southern high schools. This is the third of 3 parts of a story in progress for Sunday's Durham News and Chapel Hil News. Read parts 1 and 2 on this blog. 

“From the streets to the suites” is how UNC business  professor James Johnson described Union Independent School in a fall 2009 issue of Kenan Institute News.

The idea for the school began almost a decade ago, when Johnson and the Rev. Kenneth Hammond of Union Baptist Church began talking about growing a tutoring program at the church.

The school, serving K-3 and adding a grade each year, bases its programs on research to help students succeed.

Johnson said studies show two things often separate young people who fail from those who succeed: 1) Mediating institutions – Think Boys and Girls Clubs. Actor Denzel Washington often credits the clubs with keeping him out of trouble growing up, Johnson said. 2) Bridging social capital – To succeed, disadvantaged youths especially need networks to connect them to opportunities.

“At the end of the day it’s not so much what you know, it’s who you know,” Johnson said.

Got a spare buck this weekend?

Here's an idea: Bring it to the UNC/N.C. State men's basketball game Saturday at the Smith Center and donate it to a good cause.

The UNC Dance Marathon, a student organization that has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years for the UNC Children's Hospital, is hitting up Tar Heel fans this weekend.

Organizers hope each fan will contribute one dollar.

The game's at 2 p.m.

Though Carolina's opponent is NCSU, the Dance Marathon is competing with Duke and its Crazies Who Care, a collection of Duke students that raises money for the Duke Children's Hospital & Health Center and the Emily Krzyzewski Center.

The Duke student group will be raising money Saturday, Feb. 5 when Duke hosts NCSU.

At UNC, the basketball team is behind the effort.

Check out the video below:

So it turns out Barack Obama and Holden Thorp share a love of science fairs.

Who knew?

In his State of the Union address earlier this year, Obama pushed for a smarter citizenry, saying he yearned for a day when science fair winners are held in the same regard as Super Bowl winners.

That rang true to Thorp, the UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor who snared a few science fair titles in his day.

The Fayetteville native was a science whiz kid growing up. Speaking to the UNC-CH Board of Trustees Thursday, he said Obama's words were inspirational.

"I spent the rest of the night looking through my closet for my old middle school science fair trophies," he joked.

Thorp also said he was heartened by Obama's hope that federal funding for academic research not be cut. UNC-CH is a research goliath, reeling in more than $800 million in grant-funded research last year.

And with projects paid through federal stimulus money now reaching their end, university researchers say it's critical that traditional sources of that grant money remain intact or even grow.

"I'm upbeat that research is going to be okay," Thorp said. "Obviously, the president is committed to it."

Research funding is high on the university's annual policy agenda, and Thorp said Thursday it is a key indicator of the university's level of national prominence.

It's a story the university tells often. With new leadership in the General Assembly, it'll get told even more often in weeks and months to come.

"With new people in the legislature, we think it's important to help them understand the research activity and impact on the economy," he said, adding that total grant-funded research last year totaled $803 million.

"That's money they don't have to provide," he said.

UNC-Chapel Hill has a new dean of dentistry.

Jane Weintraub, a faculty member at the dental school at the University of California, San Francisco, was chosen Thursday to lead the school at UNC-CH.

She starts work July 1.

Weintraub has earned national recognition for work to reduce oral health disparities and is among the leaders in her field, said Chancellor Holden Thorp.
"She is ideally suited for this job. She is a distinguished and stellar academician," he said. "We are ecstatic."

Weintraub was a faculty member at Carolina for seven years before starting at UCSF in 1995. She is the Lee Hysan Professor of Dental Public Health and Oral Epidemiology in the School of Dentistry and chair of the oral epidemiology and dental public health division in the school's preventive and restorative dental sciences department.

She also holds a professorship in the UCSF School of Medicine's department of epidemiology and biostatistics.

This past Saturday, founders of Union Independent School, a private-becoming-charter school on Dowd Street in Northeast Central Durham, launched a unique college prep program for 54 handpicked black students at Hillside and Southern high schools. This is the second of 3 parts of a story in progress for Sunday's Durham News. Read part one here.

The Saturday academy comes as the Durham Public Schools faces growing pressure to improve the achievement of black males, who make up 27 percent of the school district’s 32,500 students.

In 2004, Superior Court Judge Howard Manning threatened to close Hillside, Northern and Southern high schools, along with others in the state, if the district didn't raise the number of students performing at grade level to at least 60 percent. Hillside is 4.6 percentage points away from that goal. Northern is almost there, at 59.6 percent, and Southern continues to lag at 43 percent.

In addition to having low test scores, black males overall comprise the largest group of students who get suspended and drop out, Superintendent Eric Becoats told last weekend’s panel.  

Many factors contribute: poverty, single-parent households and lower parent education levels, said panelist Loren Harris, founder of Thinking Man Consulting.

But something else is going on, said Donna-Marie Wynn, an investigator with the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center in Chapel Hill.

“I think where we struggle is in having all schools be ready to teach African-American boys,” she said.

The teacher at Oake Grove that day, who was white, told Marcus black teachers may be better at teaching black children. Panelists said there can be a disconnect when young black men, often raised by single mothers and feeling pressure to be “the man” of the house, face a white female authority figure in the classroom.

But they said, white or black, teachers do children no good when they accept sub-par work.

“The bar has been lowered as to what success means,” said Harris. “We have to stop the hypocrisy of lower expectations. There’s a lower expectation of African-American performance and African-American male performance in particular.”

Becoats unveiled a strategic plan for the Durham Public Schools Wednesday night that included a focus on raising black male achievement. Last weekend he listened as Harris described “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” He listened when Marcus told her story about the elementary school teacher.

He said that has to change.

“At some point we need to say [to teachers], ‘This is not the bus you need to be on, and maybe it’s time to get on another bus.’”
 

 UNC Chapel Hill does not anticipate a major academic restructuring – a la N.C. State University – to deal with ongoing budget cuts.

"We’re going to continually make changes," Robert Winston, chairman of the UNC-CH Board of Trustees, said in a recent interview. "There will be some restructuring here and there. But nothing that will shock people and blow them away."

Last week, NCSU Chancellor Randy Woodson announced a sweeping plan to eliminate some degree programs and merge departments and, potentially, entire schools.

The announcement was an indication that after four years of budget cuts, that campus could no longer get through the annual budget-cutting exercise by nipping around the periphery.

Woodson wants to rethink the entire university structure instead of gradually slicing away at every department’s budget, as it and other public universities have done for the last several years. At NCSU, budget cuts have already led to the elimination of jobs, class sections and other academic resources.

In Chapel Hill, UNC-CH's strategy is to assume cuts are coming and prepare for them as early as possible. To that end, Provost Bruce Carney pushed deans last October to start planning for cuts of 5 and 10 percent for next year, which for UNC-CH would be $26 and $52 million, respectively.

Normally, that wouldn't take place until March or April, Carney told trustees Wednesday afternoon. UNC-CH officials accelerated the exercise to allow more time to prepare for the cuts.

And UNC-CH Chancellor Holden Thorp has already announced a five percent permanent budget cut effective July 1. That gives deans and department heads a half year to plan for the reductions.

"We’ll try to shield teaching and research and protect our ability to provide need-based financial aid," Thorp wrote in an e-mail to faculty and staff. "Admittedly, however, that will be harder to do moving forward because of the cumulative effects of the cuts we’ve taken so far."

Keep in mind: These cuts are for the next budget year. On top of that, universities have been asked to return to the state 3.5 percent of their spending for the current year, which, of course, is already half over. They must do so by March 1.

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

This past Saturday, founders of Union Independent School, a private-becoming-charter school on Dowd Street in Northeast Central Durham, launched a unique college prep program for 54 handpicked black students at Hillside and Southern high schools. This is the first of 3 parts of a story in progress for Sunday's Durham News.

The teacher was reviewing her first-grade students’ writing.

“The children is playing,” one student, a black boy, had written.

Good, the teacher told him and moved on to the next student.

Later, Keisha Marcus, who was assisting the teacher that day, asked why she had not corrected the boy’s grammatical mistake.

“Well, it’s ebonics,” she replied. “That’s how his parents talk, and I don’t him to have low self-esteem.”

When Ackland Art Museum director Emily Kass returned after attending a meeting of the national Association of Art Museum Directors in Puerto Rico last week, she went up to the Ackland's second-floor study gallery and looked at the comment book for David Wojnarowicz's video installation, "A Fire in My Belly."

"To my disappointment," she said Wednesday, "there were no comments."

To be fair, it had only been a week since the exhibit went up, and less than that since the local media spread the word, and the museum was closed Monday and Tuesday. Kass hopes a panel discussion Thursday will help spark more awareness and interest. 

Wojnarowicz's film has prompted a great deal of discussion nationally since it was yanked from the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery last November under pressure from the Catholic League and some members of Congress, who called it offensive. The unfinished film, which the late Wojnarowicz made in 1986-87, in part in response to the AIDS epidemic, is a hallucinatory montage of images, one of which — a brief segment that shows ants crawling on a crucifix — was the focus of the criticsm.

Many in the art community subsequently blasted the Smithsonian for removing the piece, and the Ackland at UNC is one of dozens of museums and galleries nationally that are showing it in the wake of the controversy.

"The more I thought about it and read about the piece and the issues surrounding it, the more I thought it seemed like a pretty great teaching opportunity," Kass said. "So many departments at the university study these issues —media, censorship, dissent, filmmaking, religious art, visual arts. I asked a number of faculty if they'd be interested in using it as a teaching tool if we showed it, and they were enthusiastic."

The Ackland is showing several versions of the film, which Wojnarowicz never completed — Kass likens it to an unfinished manuscript or rough film footage — as well as documents and a timeline related to the Smithsonian controversy.

The panel discussion is set for 6 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 27, in the Ackland's Yager Gallery. Panelists include Rich Cante, associate professor of media and cultural studies; Michelle Robinson, assistant professir of American studies; and Randall G. Styers, associate professor of religious studies. It is free and open to the public; RSVP is recommended. For more, see www.ackland.org.

The spending freeze President Obama called for in his Tuesday night State of the Union address would largely spare higher education.

Obama's  proposed five-year discretionary spending freeze would spare education and research, which are too critical to the nation's future to sacrifice, he said.

"Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine," he said. "It may feel like you're flying high at first, but it won't take long before you'll feel the impact."

Obama indicated a desire to invest in biomedical research, information technology and energy. He proposed paying for those initiatives by cutting oil company tax breaks, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

This sits well with higher education backers.

"We agree with the president that the nation needs to take strong action to reduce budget deficits, and that as we do so, we must continue to direct additional resources toward research and education to ensure America's economic competitiveness and global leadership," said Robert M. Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. "It is our hope that sustained investment in research and education, even as we reduce deficits, is something Democrats and Republicans can agree on."

But as the Chronicle reports today, that investment may not go over well in the Republican-led House of Representatives.

Read on.

In Connecticut today, a staggering example of one booster's sway - or at least desired sway - over a collegiate football program.

At the University of Connecticut, football booster Robert Burton has set tongues wagging with a recent letter to Jeff Hathaway, director of athletics. In his deliciously labeled "personal and confidential" letter to Hathaway - a public employee - Burton makes quite clear that the millions he donated to UConn over the year have strings attached.

(A refresher: Burton is a longtime donor to UConn athletics; his $3 million gift a few years ago funded a massive indoor football practice facility on the Storrs campus, a supposed necessity for a university pouring resources into a burgeoning football program.)

Well, it appears Burton didn't like the athletic director's recent hiring of a new football coach.

The letter starts thus:

Dear Jeff:

When I called you on Monday, January 3rd, I made two things very clear to you, as the largest donor in the UConn football program. I told you that I wanted to be involved in the hiring process for the new coach. I also gave you my insight about who would be a good fit for the head coaching position as well as who would not. For someone who has given over $7,000,000 to the football program/university, I do not feel as though these requests were asking for too much.

Somewhere, a professor just developed a nervous tic.

Later in the letter, Burton demands his family's name removed from the building he funded, and he wants his $3 million back. He further pledges to no longer make various donations to the football program, buy advertising in the football programs, transfer scholarship donations from athletics to the business school, and even stop using UConn's business school for workforce training.

Instead, he's going to enlist the help of Syracuse's business school, he says.

For good measure, he points out he also paid for pictures and other art to decorate football offices, as well as an audio system for the weight room.

All of this because he feels disrespected and left out of the loop.

At this point I ought to reinforce the fact that Burton is not on the UConn staff nor a paid search consultant.

But 7 million bucks ought to buy him some face time with the boss, right?