Earlier today, a panel of the University of North Carolina system’s Board of Governors recommended shutting down the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at UNC’s flagship campus in Chapel Hill. However, an article that The New Republic’s Michael Cooper wrote a few days before the vote lays out substantial evidence that the board’s action is the latest salvo in an ideologically driven war on North Carolina’s poor–and those who want to speak for them.
The Poverty Center has been a favorite whipping boy of North Carolina conservatives almost from the time it was founded by then-UNC Law School dean Gene Nichol and former Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards in 2005. Specifically, it’s drawn the ire of North Carolina’s main conservative think tank, the John W. Pope Foundation. Its chairman is retail magnate Art Pope, who is a longtime friend of the Koch brothers and is a former co-director of Americans for Prosperity. He also briefly served as Governor Pat McCrory’s budget chief. When the Poverty Center was founded, George Leef, the head of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, not only denied poverty was a problem, but even suggested that poverty was something that people can overcome “through their own efforts,” without any help from the government.
Since 2005, North Carolina has experienced a greater increase in concentrated poverty than any other state. Despite that, since the Republicans took control of the General Assembly in 2010, they have raised taxes on the poor, slashed unemployment benefits, and backed out of Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid. Nichol, who had taken over as director of the Poverty Center in 2008 after a stint as president of the College of William and Mary, responded by joining the “Moral Monday” protests in Raleigh. He also wrote a number of scathing op-eds in The (Raleigh) News & Observer criticizing both the legislature and McCrory. That didn’t sit well with several Republican lawmakers, who threatened to close the Poverty Center unless Nichol toned it down.
The latest battle began in October, when McCrory signed a tough new voter ID bill into law. Nichol declared that by signing it, McCrory had made himself a “21st century successor to (Lester) Maddox, (George) Wallace and (Orval) Faubus.” The Civitas Institute, a Pope affiliate, responded with an article denouncing Nichol’s “nastiness and increasingly unhinged partisanship.” This is the same Civitas Institute that maintained? a horribly invasive database of people who were arrested in the Moral Monday protests. It included such information as phone numbers, interest group affiliations, and whether the arrestee is employed in the public or private sector. It also filed a public records request for Nichol’s emails and phone calls. Nichol was eventually forced to agree to put a disclaimer in his op-eds saying he only spoke for himself, and not UNC-Chapel Hill.
That wasn’t enough to keep a working group of the Board of Governors from considering whether to close the Poverty Center and 33 other centers. The working group’s chairman, Jim Holmes, openly admitted that the process for picking centers for scrutiny was completely subjective. Any one of the group’s seven members could pick a center they wanted called on the carpet for any reason. That raises grave questions about the legitimacy of this review. And that would be the case even if the board had been dominated by Democrats; it is currently dominated by Republicans after four years’ worth of appointments. Nichol agrees. In a typically blistering op-ed written hours after the vote, he wrote that “a tedious, expensive and supremely dishonest review process” now threatens the work for which he won a Thomas Jefferson Award from the full board last year.
Even if the Poverty Center isn’t shuttered after a final vote on February 27, Cooper thinks that Nichol and other center directors will have to be much more careful about what they say. Either result would likely have longtime UNC system president Bill Friday turning in his grave. Friday, who served on the Poverty Center board until his death in 2012, told Nichol’s students not to forget that their education was supported in part by taxes from the poor. “You’ll want to think about what you’re going to do to pay ’em back,” he said. It saddens this 2000 UNC-Chapel Hill graduate that Pope is leading the UNC system on a double-time march away from being “the university of the people,” as Charles Kuralt put it in his 1993 commencement address. However, that spirit long applied to the entire UNC system, and not just to Chapel Hill–something that Pope and his cronies don’t want future students to know.
