http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/won ... -carolina/
Republicans want to shut down poverty research in North Carolina
By Emily Badger February 21
The North Carolina State Capitol in Raleigh. (Courtesy of Flickr user Jim Bowen, under a Creative Commons license)
The Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill studies, among other things, the depths of poverty in a state with severe pockets of urban distress, the impact of foreclosure clusters on minority neighborhoods there, and the economic impact of legal aid for North Carolina's low-income residents.
Now the center may be shutting down, the target of a Republican-appointed committee recently charged with reviewing the state university system's research centers. The panel's recommendations, announced this week, have caused an uproar in the state over political retaliation against academia — and, more specifically, over the areas of research curiously singled out by the panel. As Inside Higher Ed points out, the three centers the committee wants to ax "reflect scholarly interests in poverty, the environment and social justice."
Conservative officials in the state have long groused that academics from North Carolina's public universities have attacked conservative politicians over policies such as the state's stringent voter ID law. Since 2010, Republicans have controlled both houses of North Carolina's state legislature, and the vast majority of the university board's members have been appointed by the legislature since then. Last year, the New York Times reports, legislators asked the board to reexamine funding for the more than 200 research centers affiliated with state schools.
Part of the result, from the Times' Richard Fausset:
The head of the poverty center, Gene R. Nichol, a law professor, said that Republican lawmakers had made it known to him, through university officials, that they would shut the center if he did not stop criticizing them and Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, in his columns for The News & Observer of Raleigh.
Mr. Nichol said the center’s only agenda was to raise the profile of poverty in the state through research, teaching and advocacy. He added that the center did not receive any money directly from the Legislature, relying solely on private donations for its $120,000 annual operating budget.
The problem was not the center’s work, Mr. Nichol said, but the focus of its work. “The poverty center is an immensely productive operation,” he said. “They just don’t like what we produce.”
Conservatives, according to the Times, have meanwhile been elated.
Ideological meddling in academia is a big problem in and of itself. But the other scary implication here is the politicization of poverty research in particular, the suggestion that an interest in the poor can only signal partisanship. North Carolina's poor may be even worse off than the center's work portrays if any inquiry into their lives — or advocacy on their behalf — is considered an act of politics.
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