UNC
While I'm fiddling with the where-are-they-now machine on this, the last day of 2003, a day when the grownups seem to have disappeared leaving us nothing substantive to chew on, I thought I should call your attention to the situation of former UNC-Chapel Hill Executive Vice Chancellor Elson Floyd, now the president of the University of Missouri system.
http://www.collegesports.com/sports/m-baskbl/stories/121103aah.html
It's too complicated to summarize, but it involves a basketball player/girlfriend beater named Ricky Clemons, NCAA violations, secretly taped conversations, a crashed ATV, and that scion of the Evil Empire, Quin Snyder. In my experience, Floyd was an honorable, honest, and candid vice chancellor when he was at UNC, and I'm surprised he's landed in this mess.
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.
The Town of Chapel Hill's Horace Williams Citizens' Commitee will meet tomorrow (12/18/03, 5:30 pm, C.H. library) to respond to UNC's latest draft plans for Carolina North. This group was created to advise the Town Council on issues related to UNC's development of a satellite campus on Airport Road. I invite anyone who has been paying attention (as many of you have) to share your opinions with the committee and the Town Council.
(By the way, the Town Planning department has put up a great website with tons of resources on Horace Williams/Carolina North, check it out.)
I'll be out of town and have to miss this meeting, here's what I wrote to them:
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.
Having lived in other parts of the country and visited other parts of the world that have livable, walkable, dense communities, it's sometimes hard to come home and be too positive about the state of affairs in this area. Just as grand old Durham always seems to be on the cusp of something big and grand and wonderful before plunging off the precipice into bad planning and disastrously bad governing decisions, the region as a whole seems to have good ideas and good people and decent governance but just can't seem to quite get it on track (pardon the pun) with planning and public transport.
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