UNC
In her guest column in yesterday's Chapel Hill News, Nancy Suttenfield announced the creation of Our Community, "a web resource for members of the Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Orange County communities."
As someone who has often found it difficult to locate UNC-generated materials, this is a most welcome resource.
Initial offerings include materials on UNC's position on OI-4 zoning changes to be discussed Wed. night and material on the waste disposal site.
Last night, UNC's department of environment, health and safety held a public meeting on the latest plans for the hazardous waste clean-up at the Horace Williams property. I was unable to attend and am hopeful that a report will be made publicly available.
Some of Director Peter Reinhardt's comments, as reported in the Herald, were disturbing.
Reinhardt said he doesn't expect the work to create much disruption to the surrounding neighborhoods.
"It's so far away from any house that I can't imagine anyone will be able to hear it," Reinhardt said.
The buried waste will be excavated and removed from the site by hazardous material trucks.
Fencing will be erected around the site for safety reasons and to mark the area's perimeter, Reinhardt said.
My concern, having listened to the din when Horace Wms was the staging site for the power plant upgrade, is not the noise. Rather, it is what might enter the air and affect lungs, skin, or eyes.
Chapel Hill Herald, Saturday April 23, 2005
It's not often that the mayor of Chapel Hill, the chancellor of UNC, a key UNC trustee, an outspoken councilman and several prominent residents address town-gown relations at a public event. That's just what happened last Thursday during the first panel of WCHL's "Building Bridges" community forum.
You might have expected the following to have been discussed: the pending rezoning of part of the Horace Williams property, the also pending modifications to the OI-4 zone of the main campus, the town's stellar job hosting the celebration of UNC's men's basketball championship and the mysterious delay in the agreed-upon improvements to South Columbia Street, a delay that panelist Bill Strom recently laid squarely at the feet of the university.
But if you expected the forum to have much to do with what's actually going on, you were surely disappointed.
The Daily Tarheel ran a pretty good article on Wednesday about student involvement (or lack thereof) in town issues. In 1991, I got appointed to the Chapel Hill Transportation Board and I helped get a fellow undergrad, Mark Chilton, get elected to the Town Council. Ever since, I have been advocating for a greater student voice in local politics. There can be no doubt that students are impacted by town policies (transit, sidewalks, housing, downtown businesses, University development, just to start.).
But many people forget how very much students have to offer the rest of the town. Students created what would later become the municipal bus system in in the 1970's. Students have brought many important social causes to the community's attention, from apartheid and sweatshops far way, to housekeepers and cafeteria workers and the civil rights movement here at home.
You may have seen the news reports on the so-called "academic bill of rights" proposed in the legislature a couple of weeks ago. This legislation, similar to bills now in vogue in conservative circles across the country, aims to end so-called liberal bias in academia.
The bill's sponsor, Republican Senator Andrew Brock said that as written, the bill would protect the "conservative train of thought."
The chairman of UNC Chapel Hill's College Republicans acknowledged that "Not everyone's out to get conservatives. That's just part of the partisan rhetoric But there are some out there, and that's what the Academic Bill of Rights is for -- to create guidelines."
In particular, the right is concerned about studies that show professors are more likely to be registered as Democrats than as Republicans. They suggest that this reflects a bias in academia.
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