Forget the football and basketball teams. How about that LAW SCHOOL?
Chapel Hill is known mainly for two things: (1) Great basketball and (2) loony-tunes lefty nuttiness. Basketball is down a little bit this year. (The football team is showing some promise as it emerges from probation.) But the UNC law school is still swinging away in all of its leftist glory.
I have a judge friend here in the state who also happens to be a UNC law alum. He’s a rather conservative jurist, so its safe to say that the indoctrination / mind control didn’t work on him. He once told me a great story about his alma mater:
“Every year, they call me up looking for a donation. I usually interrupt the caller, halfway through his spiel, and ask ‘Is Barry Nakell still on the faculty?’ Every time they say Yes, I tell them ‘Call me back when he’s gone.’ ”
Well, Mr. Nakell is gone. But it looks like a new lefty warrior has stepped in to fill his BIG SHOES. Gene Nichol is THE Boyd Tinsley Distinguished professor and Director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at UNC Law School. Boyd Tinsley? Who’s that, you ask? A signatory to the state or US Constitution? A founding father of our state or country? Some great legal mind? Well, the name sounded familiar. SO, I turned to my old friends at Google. My suspicions appear to be confirmed. The ONLY Boyd Tinsley I could find is the violinist for The Dave Matthews Band. (Who went to UVA, by the way.)
(By the way, that Poverty Center thing is the gig initially established for John Edwards after he left the Senate and lost the 2004 presidential race. )
So, a member of Dave’s band gets a distinguished professorship? What’s next? The Ozzy Ozbourne Distinguished professor of the Culinary Arts? The Snoop Dogg Distinguished professor of Pharmacology?
Well, Professor Nichol published quite the lefty screed in the Raleigh edition of McClatchy’s daily journal of creative writing:
For the first time in modern history, North Carolina is ruled entirely by Republicans. The vast tide of 2010, a seemingly unpopular incumbent governor, weak Democratic candidates, potently gerrymandered legislative districts, boatloads of ideological money, a still-lousy economy, energized evangelicals and, of course, an anti-Obama racial animus combined to decisively deliver both state houses, the governor’s mansion and the state Supreme Court to the Grand Old Party.
The victors are, to understate, striking while the iron is hot. Though we have among the highest poverty rates, the highest unemployment rates, the highest “food insecurity” rates, the highest uninsured rates and the highest levels of income inequality in the nation, our leaders have concluded, all facts to the contrary, that the only thing wrong with North Carolina is that those at the bottom have too much and those at the top don’t have enough.
At the risk of sounding like a judge or law professor or something, I have to ask: “Any evidence to support your claims, counselor?” MORE:
We decided to reject a Medicaid expansion that would benefit us more than virtually any other state – shoving us to the right of even the pernicious Rick Scott of Florida. Over 500,000 needy citizens are now effectively ejected from the health care system, though the feds were ready to foot almost the entire bill.
Um, OBJECTION. First, who got kicked OFF of Medicaid? Second, the feds cannot, with any confidence, promise that they will “foot almost the entire bill.” I hate to break it to the professor, but the feds AND the state get their money from THE SAME SOURCE. More:
We cut unemployment insurance dramatically in a way that will forfeit federal funds appropriated as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations – brushing aside money, once again, already on the table. A bumbling committee chairwoman explained she’d been working on the changes for weeks and didn’t want to go back and re-do things to get the federal dollars. Too much trouble. After all, it’s just food and sustenance and housing for 170,000 immensely distressed human beings. Whoever cares?
Again, your honor, I object. Unemployment insurance got cut because (1) we have some of the most generous benefits in these United States, and (2) we are more than THREE BILLION DOLLARS in debt to the federal government. More:
We’re moving to end the state’s exceedingly modest earned income tax credit.
Actually, one reason that tax credit was ending was that TOO MANY folks who pay NO taxes were GETTING MONEY BACK. One more welfare handout from the state . More:
Yet another proposal speeds forward to dramatically cut, or eliminate, the state income tax and increase the sales tax on food and other essentials. This is necessary, reportedly, so that poor people pay can more taxes and rich people less.
Really? How? Evidence? Just a little, please?
And we’re re-introducing payday lending, long outlawed here, to help wealthy folks steal more readily from impoverished ones. Government by brigands.
Wow. Just a wee bit over the top there. Click here for some actual facts on the pay day lending legislation. Oh, and “brigands”? Really, professor? Which party’s speaker of the House got a taxpayer-funded trip to a federal corrections facility for brigand-like behavior?
According to the legislative leadership, the right to vote, the Racial Justice Act and the destruction of the public schools are on deck.
Wow. This is so ludicrous that I am at a loss for words. More:
[…]
We can suffer such damage in two or four or six years that it will take generations to recover.
Kinda like that “War on Poverty” LBJ got started in 1964? More:
We face exigency, true and unrelenting, cruel and demeaning, serious and deadly. An outraged citizenry is now obliged to rise in order to protect its children, its future and its shared bond.
That can’t wait for the next electoral season. It’ll be too late. See you in the streets.
All right, now. A call for revolution. *There is clearly some important educatin’ going down at Mr. Nichol’s Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity. *
We ought to thank our lucky stars that we get to subsidize this guy’s very existence with our hard-earned tax dollars. This is my first exposure to the work of Gene Nichol. I can now say that I have been exposed to someone and something that is just SCREAMING to be cut from the state budget.
I don’t see the problem. You got to be smug, condescending and arrogant to be a UNC lawyer in the first place. I’m figuring this guy is their version of the American Idol. But as far as my taxpayer money is concerned I would rather they hired Lawyer Jackie Chiles.
And they wonder why the Republicans want to have new members on the BOG. I guess the first step is to figure out whom is in charge? Is the UNC system above the North Carolina General Assembly? I mean, hey, the North Carolina voters elected the General Assembly but the UNC system exists through Divine Right, doesn’t it? If you check your Biblical history I think you will find that Moses came down from the mountain with 11 Commandments. The 11th being, “Do not question the UNC system as they are above even Me.”
Need to cut their athletic department. Obviously it is corrupting the academics and threatening their accreditation status, not that those are any great shakes, either. And they HAVE received inquiries from the regional accreditation body above them about phantom classes, questionable syllabi, etc.
This guy sounds like a reincarnation of Lenin. Sheesh! Where do we find such radical political hacks for our universities?
And the McClatchey gang would have probably thrived running Pravda back in the Breshnev era.
UNC Law School has became a leftwing haven for radical law professors. Even most of the alumni are fed up with it. The legislature ought to shut it down, especially with all the other good law schools we now have in the state. Gene Nichol is just typical of the the professors there.
Actual Tar Heel law student here-who is also an active conservative and fairly regular reader of the Daily Haymaker!
While scrutiny of how our tax dollars are spent at public universities is a very important goal, I’d caution everyone not to overstate the problems at UNC Law. Does the law school have a strongly Democratic faculty? Yes, of course. Other than Liberty, Regent, and maybe George Mason, the vast majority of legal academia is liberal. There are indeed (in my opinion) overly political professors here as well.
The op-ed in question is ridiculous. This ‘government by brigands’ continues to fund this professor’s substantial salary. He is dismissive and offensive towards the people of the state who disagree with his views. His examples-Medicaid, the EITC, payday lending, unemployment insurance are at a minimum complex and difficult issues that even an honest liberal would acknowledge.
However, the vast majority of the students and professors are intelligent, competent, and open-minded, and I have never faced anything resembling disdain or discrimination because of my views. There a good number of conservative law students like myself-enough to sustain active Republican and Federalist Society groups.
Nor does the law school always act as an indoctrination camp. Most of my classmates come in fairly settled in their political opinions, so the clumsy politicking from the few crusading professors doesn’t overly influence us. Some of my professors are even (gasp) Republicans!
Great Republican and conservative alumni of UNC Law include all 4 conservatives on the NC Supreme Court, NC’s first Republican governor in the 20th century, Jim Holhouser, Rep. Howard Coble, 7 of our GOP state legislators (Sens. Goolsby, Daniel, Hartsell, and Barringer as well as Reps. Stam, Blust, and Jordan), as well as many of the Republican DA’s, judges, legislative aides, McCrory administration staff, and attorneys in private practice that keep our state’s legal system functioning.
So keep up the scrutiny, but keep in mind that the most poltically vocal members of the faculty aren’t representative of the average professor, many of the students here are on the right side of the aisle, and a large number of good Republicans have left here and gone on to do great things for the state and community.
What about the UNC law professors who made idiots of themselves attacking the Marriage Amendment by claiming it would put an end to domestic violence prosecutions. This was a total lie which was corrected by the faculty at the Campbell Law School in Raleigh. And since the Amendment passed, guess what? Domestic violence cases are still being prosecuted. Again, UNC Law has become a batcave for liberal lunacy. If there are any sane professors there, why don’t we hear from them? Point proved.