Carolina North

Some folks who live near the University have started an online petition. I don't know how effective these things are, but I guess it can't hurt, right? Here's what it says:

To: UNC-CH trustees, Chancellor Moeser, the UNC Board of Governors, the developers of Carolina North

We, the residents of the Towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, in recognition that the Towns benefit from the University and the University benefits from the Towns, ask for careful consideration of this petition.

The best faculty recruitment tool the University has are neither salary compensation, nor health benefits, but the Towns of Chapel Hill/Carrboro themselves, their natural resources and public facilities including the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools.

In this spirit, to maintain the desirability of Chapel Hill/Carrboro as a place to live and enable the University to recruit the best faculty far into the future, we demand that any Carolina North plan for the Horace Williams Tract have a designated public school site before Trustee approval.

It's no secret that UNC plans for Carolina North (CN) to be a research park, along the lines of NCSU's Centennial Campus (CC). In fact, the guys in charge of creating Carolina North specialize in it, which I think is sort of unfairly stacking the deck for research, when earlier plans for CN indicated there would a be significant academic (ie: teaching) activity there.

Associate Vice Chancellor Mark Crowell was recruited by UNC directly after working with CC at State. (He's quoted as saying "We don't give away football tickets, why should we give away technology?" Doesn't that just warm your cockles?) And the leader of development of Carolina North is Vice Chancellor (and UNC alumn) Tony Waldrop, who came to UNC after building a similar institution at the University of Illinois.