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:

Should UNC-Chapel Hill get special treatment?

That's what Jay Schalin argues for today on the opinion pages of the News & Observer.

Schalin, who writes for the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, suggests today that, given the state's dire budget circumstances, Carolina get some extra flexibility from state regulations.

Essentially, Schalin proposes that UNC-CH get less state money but take less of a budget hit. In exchange, it can be freed to raise tuition higher and generate more of its own revenue.

GASP! Raise tuition higher? At the people's university?

Yes, Schalin writes.

Chapel Hill could do this, he argues, because its students are wealthier on average than most public university students, and its fundraising machine is far better than any other across the state system.

The core of Schalin's argument is that Carolina is demonstrably different - and better - than other public universities and should be treated as such.

He writes in part:

"The campus is different from the other UNC schools. It has a Nobel Prize winner on the faculty and its students regularly win Rhodes Scholarships. Its incoming freshmen average between 125 to 450 points higher than its UNC system counterparts on combined math and reading SAT scores. In many ways it resembles Duke or Wake Forest more than other UNC schools."

It's an interesting idea and not one I've heard floated - at least publicly - by anyone associated with the university.

So what do you think?

How religious is too religious?

That's the dicey question at the core of a recent court ruling that now prohibits Davidson College from using police powers. The thinking: Davidson is a Presbyterian institution and as such cannot have a police force because it runs afoul of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

To all this, a writer with the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy says: Enough!

Writing on the group's website, Duke Cheston argues that the ruling opens a door that best remain shut - defining levels of religiosity.

And, Cheston suggests, in farming out security to other local agencies, religious colleges and universities may be getting a lesser product.

In late May, budget writers in the State House had the rather audacious notion to suggest a 1 percent cap on enrollment in 2011-12 at the state's public universities.

It would be, they said, an attempt to get a better handle on what had become an overly difficult task of predicting enrollment growth and funding.

The idea was met in gasps by UNC system supporters who saw it as a direct attack on the state's long held belief in the importance of access to education. Capping enrollment, they argued, would mean turning young North Carolinians away, and that is a restriction of access.

Not so much, argues Jay Schalin with the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

Writing today on the Pope Center's website, Schalin suggests that universities limit access all the time simply by selecting some applicants and turning others away.

Further, Schalin says a cap would make sense in strict financial terms. With the state still struggling, the cap would ease the strain.

 "It represents a common sense approach for dealing with a changing reality, one in which the state government must limit spending or risk bankrupting the state," Schalin writes. "The UNC system has long been on the receiving end of the legislature's generosity in good times, sometimes excessively so. This year, acknowledging that this must change, Ray Rapp, the chairman of the House education appropriations committee, said that there cannot continue to be an "open checkbook " for UNC's growth."

You can read Schalin's entire piece here.

The proposed cap was not approved.

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?

An interesting op-ed in today's News & Observer written by Jay Schalin and Jenna Robinson over at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

Schalin and Robinson tackle the ongoing deliberations over tuition hikes at the state's public universities and what should be done with revenue raised from them.

Under current state law, tuition hike revenue would go into the state's coffers for general use. This use, a departure from the historical practice of leaving revenue on each campus, was mandated last year because the state needed the cash.

But now, UNC system leaders are lobbying to get that money back. They say campuses know how best to use that revenue and need it. Bad.

Here's where Schalin and Robinson take issue: The UNC system says it would use half of revenue raised from tuition hikes for need-based financial aid, the idea being that if tuition has to rise, more money should be set aside to help those students paying more.

But Schalin and Robinson say putting that much revenue aside disproportionately aids low-income students while hurting the many middle-class students who fall into that area where they don't qualify for adequate aid but still need help paying for college.

It is, they argue, "a classic case of wealth redistribution."

What do you think? Here's their essay.

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.

In the UNC School of the Arts, North Carolinians have a rare resource - a public fine arts school that routinely produces talented musicians, actors and the like.

North Carolina is just one of three states with such an institution, New York and Massachusetts being the other two. And while it's hard to argue with the talent created by the school, this question remains: Should such a school, which costs more per student than any other public campus in the state and caters to a small population, be supported by tax dollars?

That's the crux of a question tackled in a new report from the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. In it, author Max Borders questions whether a school that enrolls just 1,161, including 289 high schoolers who go for free, should be a public initiative.

In an accompanying column, the Pope Center's George Leef writes that the school's original purpose when created in 1965 - to help the state "escape the stereotype of being a 'cultural wasteland', " hasn't quite happened.

Put another way: What is the public benefit for North Carolina?

Click here to read the report.

UPDATE - The student group Youth for Western Civilization is back in business, having found three new faculty advisors.

The faculty advisor for a controversial student group at UNC Chapel Hill was relieved of his volunteer duties last week after an ill-advised remark about a gun.

But in insisting that retired professor Elliot Cramer step down as advisor for Youth for Western Civilization, UNC-CH Chancellor Holden Thorp has empowered campus radicals who now pledge to disrupt any event that group presents on campus.

So says Jay Schalin, writing this week for the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

In asking for Cramer to step down, Thorp in essence hamstrung the student group's ability to exist, since the clock is now ticking towards a deadline before which it must have a new faculty advisor.

Schalin writes in part:

Thorp can amend this error by making bold statements that he will not let legitimate opinions on his campus be harassed into silence. One thing he could do is to sponsor the YWC himself, at least for this year. That would send a powerful message to the radicals that his campus is a place for free expression of ideas, not group intimidation and violence.

Additionally, he must make it clear that attempts to intimidate and silence others on campus will be met with expulsion and prosecution. For without a very clear no-tolerance policy of such behavior, the radicals will grow continually more aggressive until they get their way or until somebody gets hurt. And if they get their way, they will use the same methods to silence other voices that disagree with them.

What do you think? Did the chancellor overstep in asking Cramer to step down for a remark that appears to be made in jest?