As we've noted over the past week, the politics of the UNC system's Board of Governors is changing.

A Republican majority is now running things in Raleigh, and has put its imprint on the UNC system by thoroughly re-making its governing board.

After a slew of new appointments over the last two weeks, Republicans now out-number Democrats 18-13 on the board.

Does it matter?

Well, maybe. We'll see how ideological the board becomes when its new members are seated in July. It hasn't been too political in recent history.

Though the board itself is rarely openly partisan in its decision-making, the process to get there sure is.

Take, for example, the case of Clarice Cato Goodyear.

Goodyear, of Charlotte, is a current board member, named to the board in 2007 on the nomination of a Democratic State Sen. Daniel Clodfelter.

She has been active on board committees and has represented the board in an official capacity at commencement ceremonies for 16 of 17 campuses in the system.

 She concludes her first four-year term later this year, and in recent months has clearly fought hard for reappointment.

The nomination packet she submitted to legislators was far more robust than many; it extols her accomplishments at length and makes the point several times, often in bold print,  that while she used to be a registered Democrat, she's now registered as an unaffiliated, and brings the backing of many influential Republicans.

She notes that she's a fiscal conservative who has spent more than 30 years as an executive with the Cato Corporation, a women's fashion retailer.

She enlists 23 influential movers and shakers to offer endorsements. Several happily point out that she's seen the light by abandoning the Democratic party.

Her four pages of endorsements include these snippets:

last week, Jane Shaw from the Pope Center for Higher Education wrote a provocative letter to the editor that ran in the News & Observer commenting on a recent story showing that several of this year's summer reading selections at area universities are, well, depressing.

Shaw, whose Pope Center routinely pokes at what it perceives as a liberal bias infecting American higher education, wrote that summer reading selections are generally a university's first attempt to brainwash young minds.

She wrote in part:

"Freshman reading begins four years of immersion in radical but baseless notions: that capitalism represses women and minorities, that the only important part of American history is its racist past, and that Americans should feel guilty about prosperity. For many college faculty, the goal of education is to lead students to reject traditional institutions."

Zing!

 Enter Jeff Braden, dean of the college of humanities and social sciences at N.C. State. He reacts to Shaw's letter today with one of his own. In it, he notes several reading selections from recent years at NCSU and UNC-Chapel Hill, like the 2004 UNC-CH selection chronicling a year at West Point, that he feels counter's Shaw's claims.

He writes in part: [Shaw] is welcome to read our book selections, attend our public lectures and yes, even take our courses. However, she'll have to do her homework if she wants to pass our classes."

So what do you think?

Erskine Bowles doesn't leave office as UNC's system president until the end of the year, but plenty of people already have opinions on who should succeed him.

The search committee, once it's formed, will face plenty of pressure - or advice, if you will -  from the various university constituencies as it looks for the next leader of the public university system.

But unlike previous searches, the UNC system has a very tight budget - if any at all - with which to conduct a search, according to Hannah Gage, chairwoman of the UNC system's governing board.

University campuses routinely spend $100,000 or more during searches for campus chancellors. Much of that money is spent on a search consultant, but it also pays for travel costs and other logistical expenses.

In 2005, the UNC system spend $89,000 on its search that culminated in the Bowles hiring, including $75,000 for a consultant.

Some say the system should look for a Bowles clone.

For more, read today's story.

Enrollments up, endowments down.

Okay. Maybe summarizing higher education in 2009 is more complicated than that, though it's a good place to start.

Over at the Raleigh-based Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, Jane Shaw and the rest of the staff take a shot at it with their 2009 Year in Review.

Among the highlights: The continuing success of for-profit education, the Mike-and-Mary-Easley/NCSU mess, and, in California, a complete fiscal disaster.

Have a look.

From the Pope Center for Higher Education, a case for differentiating between low tuition and low cost.

The Pope Center's Jane Shaw writes about the UNC system's current tuition deliberations and puts this out there: "Low tuition is not always as fair as people think - or even always beneficial for students."

The UNC system's governing board engaged in some serious handwringing over tuition last week and is expected to make a decision on it next month.

As you may have read on our blog a while back, universities and the organizations they belong to are breathless in anticipation of stimulus money that may be trickling down to higher education.

Maybe.

In any event, Jane Shaw over at Raleigh's Pope Center for Higher Education Policy has an opinion on all of this. Check it out here. 

The staff over at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy have a few Christmas wishes related to colleges and universities this year.

The Raleigh non-profit institute is routinely critical of higher education and the UNC system in particular. In this series of Christmas wishes, the center's four staffers offers up some advice.

A few highlights:

• Students at all universities should, before graduating, be required to take tests in English competence, basic math and American history.

• Universities should eliminate "free speech zones" and restore free speech everywhere on college campuses - especially in the classroom.

• Someone within the UNC system should acknowledge what Pope Center staff member Jay Schalin deems an "ideological imbalance" on campuses and the "leftward drift" of the state's education schools.