The work on UNC Charlotte’s new front entrance is moving fast. Current plans include an aggressive time line that will hopefully allow two-way traffic before graduation on May 10th. As you can see from the photo below, the roundabout is already complete and the traffic pattern for the new entrance is ready to go.

Charlotte 49er Students,

I am writing today to update you on football at UNC Charlotte as of April 13th, 2008. The Chancellor appointed a Football Feasibility Committee last February after you turned out in force, voting in the Spring 2007 SGA football poll to say that you wanted football and that you wanted to pay for it. The Football Feasibility committee reported back in February 2008 with a unanimous recommendation to kickoff in 2012.

Now the Chancellor is exploring the topic even deeper and will discuss some of his findings to the UNC Charlotte Board of Trustees in June and will likely present his yes or no decision at the September 18th Board of Trustees meeting. After seeing some of his initial work, he is delving into the topic and exploring how football has been implemented at other schools to ensure that a permanent decision on adding football will be a success. Any Charlotte football program may lose money on the balance sheet for a long time but I think Chancellor Dubois understands that we would lose that money to gain the community which a shared experience on a Saturday afternoon between 20,000 49er fans can be.

The Athletic Department has engaged leaders in the community and its own staff in generating plans on how to deal with a yes-to-football/no-to-football decision by the Chancellor and I have been impressed by their diligence on the issue.

A national football stadium consulting firm recently took a look at Memorial Stadium and determined that the upgrades would be expensive and ineffective for the future. Likely our best option is to upgrade the Belk Track facility as any long-term commitment to that facility would benefit the soccer programs and the track team. Even successful Division 1AA programs like App St. play football on a field with a track running around it.

Clearly these are exciting times for Niner Nation so stay posted for the latest developments.

According to the Chancellor’s timeline, we’ll know the final decision on Charlotte 49er football by the 3rd week of September, 2008.

Go Niners!

Cordially,

Justin Ritchie

Student Body President

What a miserable event. Clinton gave a good speech but the speakers
before he came out were just plain horrible. The event was planned
great on the universities end, however the campaign had no clue when
Clinton was coming and the guy with the t-shirts who started everything
off was so obnoxious I almost left.

Everyone thought they were at UNCCH. Susan Burgess, from our own city council, even thought so! How disappointing.

The representative from the Virgin Islands did alright bringing up the
49ers but then she said “let’s give a big warm UNC welcome” and “go
UNC”.

But then again, I can’t blame them… to anyone not associated with the
university we will always be UNC at Charlotte (which technically is our
name). Even worse is what Anderson Cooper said a few weeks ago: UNC in
Charlotte.

I’m just glad no one “wished us luck in the Final Four”.

Brian Carlton from the UTimes just put up some great commentary which echoes my sentiments.

The University of California system recently appointed its 16th chief administrator in Mark G. Yudof who was the former president of the University of Minnesota system and University of Texas systems.

One major thing that really struck me about some of the initial comments made by Dr. Yudof centered around the policies that his administration would pursue in the interest of California students. From an article about him on InsideHigherEd:

…he noted that one of the reasons why the UC job attracted him was because there is widespread agreement — characterized in proposals like one last month from the university’s current provost, which would cut the size and budget of the president’s office by 20 percent next year — that such changes are necessary. “Intellectually everyone’s bought into it,” he said, and “they want someone who will implement those changes and also look for other savings and economies.”

UC’s campus chancellors, who have bristled at times under what they characterize as a president’s office that impedes ingenuity and agility, are likely to have found Yudof’s message to them appealing. “I want you to think about three questions,” the incoming president said he told the chancellors he met during the search process. “What business is the office of the president in that it should not be in at all, that adds to your workload and adds no value? Think about the things that inevitably have to be dealt with at the system level or are more efficiently dealt with at the system level. How can we make those processes work better? And third, what businesses should the president’s office be in that it isn’t in now that would help the campuses reach the higher levels” they strive for?

This seems like an entirely different philosophy from the one that the University of North Carolina system holds.  The recent initiatives rolled out by UNC offices seem to be bogging down the administrations of each campus to the point where local goals seem out of reach.

The UNC PACE initiative led to subpar results such as, Blackboard sharing across campuses in order to conserve resources… which sounds like a great idea until you compensate for the cost of collaborating and coordinating multiple very different institutions. What ended up happening is Blackoard worked very poorly and now campuses are scrambling to find a way to invest in an alternative without losing out on a ton of money.

This all relates back to the inability of the UNC system to understand that while the 17 NC public institutions all receive money from the same source, they are very different. We can’t expect blanket policies to apply while at the same time enabling chancellors across the state.

Currently, UNC system schools are forced to adhere to a very complex and rapidly approaching response time frame for the UNC Tomorrow (UNC-T) initiative… which once again sounds like a great idea. But after a long and drawn out exploratory phase, the UNC-T commission found out some really vague recommendations for universities such as, “increase access to education” and “prepare students for a global economy”.

I value the time that many important people have invested in this effort but forcing campuses to develop huge and unwieldy programs that will ultimately lack funding (except in Chapel Hill and Raleigh) is little more than an exercise in appealing to public opinion. However I truly hope that I am proven wrong on this point.

At the end of each day, we have to evaluate whether the UNC system administration is helping  our our public universities or if by trying to build a strong “system” we’ll end up hurting the institutions that make up our state. Running a university system like a business might be appealing to potential investors, but as a participant in the process I haven’t seen any benefits that outweigh the costs in Charlotte. Moving to a “soviet” university model instead of a confederate model will have its initial appeal but little success. Institutions have a hard time meeting their own needs and are sadly often know for bureaucracy and an inability to communicate within themselves, I am unfortunately pessimistic about the ability for these schools to work amongst each other. (Kind of like the UNCCH Medical School moving into Charlotte without even communicating with UNC Charlotte until we contacted them.)

What NC really needs is a bond package for higher education and I’m hoping we’ll see one soon.