Dear Governor
McCrory,
I am writing
with regard to the “NC” lapel pin you gave me and, I’m assuming, all UNC system
employees, with the enclosed card asking that I “please accept this token as
our appreciation for all that you do to make North Carolina a place where we
are all inspired to do, see, create, experience and achieve more.” I know that
you’re a generous if utterly tone deaf kinda guy; I remember when you offered the Moral Monday protesters cookies
as they stood on your lawn protesting your tightening of restrictions on access
to abortion (if I remember correctly, your cookies were returned with a note
that read “we want women’s health care, not cookies”).
Oh, look! A pin!
In the case of
the lapel pin, I don’t own a single item of clothing with lapels, and even if I
did, I wouldn’t wear this pin (is that a pine tree between the N and the
C? My god, that’s ironic. Wouldn’t coal ash make more sense? A
nice, wide swath of the stuff bifurcating the “North” from the
“Carolina”?) because I’m not proud of my state at present, not willing to
don an “NC” pin when I think that those letters rather stand for “Nefarious
Conservatism” or “No Compensation” – particularly with regard to our state’s
educators. Did you send these pins to public school teachers? Because
while you’ve been governor, you’ve gutted public education, induced a mass
exodus of our best teachers, failed to adequately compensate their labor, and
sat idly by as our national rankings have plummeted.
(For the love
of all that is holy, please tell me you didn’t send those little pins – which I
found for $.49/each if you buy in bulk – to North Carolina’s public school
teachers. It’s bad enough that you sent them to us.)
University
faculty and staff in the UNC system haven’t seen raises since 2008.
That’s seven years, Pat. I know you’re giving us all a $750 bonus on December
23, and like the good Bob Cratchits that we are, perhaps we’ll raise a glass to
you, our benefactor, two days later (please, sir, may I have another lump of
coal … ash?). But the lapel pin. Your timing couldn’t be worse.
We’ve all just learned that the Board of Governors, who, like you, is owned by the Koch Brothers,, behind closed
doors has approved insane raises for 12 of the 17 system
Chancellors, some as high as 20% of already exorbitant
salaries.
Do you have any
idea what this has done to morale on those campuses? Do you care?
This looks very much like the bribe that it is to those of us not getting
raises. Which is the rest of us. All of us.
And (again
behind closed doors, angering even staunch conservatives in the legislature) the
Board of Governors has hired Margaret Spellings, the homophobic
former George W. Bush education secretary who has never done an ounce of work
in higher education, to take over as the system president after the
still-unexplained ouster of Tom Ross.
Who, me? Homophobic?
Please know
that what you’re reading is actually a love letter to my state regardless of
its criticisms; my family has been in western North Carolina since the
1700s. We’re dug in, as they say, like ticks, and I’m not going
anywhere. My father graduated with a business degree from Western
Carolina University where I now work. I am the product of an
undergraduate education at Appalachian State University and an MA degree from
East Carolina University. I taught there, then at North Carolina State
University for four years, and I've been at WCU for the past 10. I have been here a damn long time, long
enough to be utterly fed up with your treatment of your citizens, your treatment of my state’s environment, and
your destruction of my state’s formerly exceptional educational system.
Coal ash!
Just like the lapel pin, a gift that just keeps on giving.
So back to the
lapel pin: what an insult. How stupid. How unconscionable.
How very “let them eat cake” and all. The pin as final nail in the
coffin, as emblematic of your administration’s belief that we’re too dumb to
see what you’re doing to us. That a trinket is enough to placate all the frustration and anger that so many of us are feeling.
At my own
institution, I’m watching a game being played out to its logical conclusion, and
I’ll tell you how it looks. Every year,
the faculty in my department –and other departments across campus – take up
collections for our administrative assistants and housekeepers who are so
woefully underpaid that it’s embarrassing.
Most are women, often supporting families, who have to hold down another
job in addition to the full-time work they do at our university. My colleagues contribute their own money –
and remember that they haven’t seen raises in years – because it’s the right
thing to do. But here’s the thing: it’s
actually the right thing for you to do.
But you’re not doing it.
Meanwhile, the Board of Governors just gave our chancellor a 19.43%
raise, taking his salary to $335K. I
realize that this raise isn’t his fault; it’s just further evidence of an
utterly broken system. A system that you
broke.
And there’s
more: the Koch brothers have purchased ungodly amounts of
influence in our state’s governmental processes and
have worked (through the Pope Center and the John Locke Foundation) to
demonize, gut, and defund specific aspects of our university system (see, for
instance, this piece on my discipline and this piece on the Koch’s role in the
elimination of specific UNC system centers). The Koch Foundation has then
offered starved and vulnerable institutions a life line in “free” gifts to
support “research and education programs that analyze the impact of free
societies” and focuses on “a select number of programs where it believes it is best
positioned to support positive social change.”
And now the Kochs have
offered WCU a two million dollar “gift” to establish a Center for the Study of
Free Enterprise. I’m not an economist, but I’m worried that my economist
colleagues are missing the economic implications of this maneuver in the face of needed funding;
I’m worried that they aren’t seeing that they are being given money by the very
entity that is denying the institution for which they work money. The Kochs are buying bits of the institutions that they have worked to starve. And the ideological costs of such transactions are huge.
The Faculty
Senate at WCU voted overwhelmingly against support for the center, citing the lack of peer
review, the lack of institutional need for such a center, particularly given
that WCU already has the Center for Public Policy, the cost to our
institution’s reputation, and the monetary cost to the institution (in terms of
faculty lines that will support the center). But the Kochs effectively
own us; they have shaped our state legislature and our Board of Governors, and they have, therefore, been instrumental in the processes that have given our
chancellor and others gigantic raises. This "gift" then seems like a deal that he can’t refuse, doesn’t it? Nonetheless, I hope
that he does because doing so, again, is the right thing to do.
I’m not an
economist, and I’m not a political scientist. I’m a humanist, and if the
Pope Center is correct, my ilk is the biggest threat out there. The job of the humanist is to call out hypocrisy and injustice, to assess the cost of certain transactions to our very humanity. And, I hope, call
out those who would deem to do us harm. So that’s what I’m doing.
As for the lapel
pin, I’ve found a good home for it.
