Right-Wing UNC Names Online Gambling Exec to Board of Trustees

When domestic policy advisor for George W. Bush was named Secretary of Education, the demolition of American public schools was proceeding on a schedule set by the cynically-impossible demands built into No Child Left Behind, which Margaret LaMontagne Spellings had helped to design. After both Bush and Spellings left their miseducative mess for Team Obama to make ever worse in 2009, Spellings kicked around among the elites of the corporate education reform movement for a few years before she received her next assignment from the right-wing billionaires in charge of the GOP.  

When Tom Ross was fired as President of the UNC system in 2015 for his links to progressive causes, Spellings was picked as his successor by the the state's powerful John Birchers.  Everyone knew by then that the UNC system would never be the same highly-respected academic institution that it had worked so hard to become.  

Even though Spellings has been put out to pasture from her position as political waitress to the UNC Board of Governors, the Board of Trustees, now controlled by the North Carolina Trump Party legislature, has been seeded with know-nothing conservative businessmen--you know, the kind that would deny tenure to an eminently qualified black scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (read Nicole Hannah-Jones's statement here).

Among the new team members named to the UNC Board of Trustees this year is Malcolm Turner, an executive for the online sports gambling site, DraftKings, Inc.  He should be lots of help this fall during Board meetings that focus on finalizing members' parlay cards.  Wonder if he knew what the betting line was on whether or not Hannah-Jones would accept the Board's efforts to humiliate her?  

Whatever the line was, I would have bet against it.

The Spellings Privatization Machine Shifts Gears

With some uncertainty as to how long it will take for North Carolina citizens to ride her out of the state on a rail, Margaret Spellings is wasting no time implanting Koch Brothers' stooges into what has been one of the best public university systems in the nation.  If Spellings is left to do what she was put in charge to do, we will witness the replacement of public servants with crony profiteers, privatizers, and fascist hacks who circulate among the power centers of the Old Confederacy.

As in Cecil Staton, who Spellings recently named as Chancellor of East Carolina University:

As a five-term Republican member of the Georgia Senate, Staton moved millions in taxpayer dollars to Mercer, the private university that employed him. He authored a voter ID bill that a federal judge likened to a "poll tax." He was also notorious for pushing police crackdowns on immigrants.

Most bizarrely, he was involved in an email scandal, in which the then-senator allegedly used a fake account and name to spread attacks about a political rival.

"We know Ms. Spellings was a political appointee who has had nothing really to do with advancing academia," N.C. NAACP president William Barber told Ball. "Now it seems birds of a feather flock together."

And if there are no positions to fill, then she is intent to let her handlers create new positions, as with this newly created position:

So it begins: Yesterday, new UNC president Margaret Spellings announced the appointment of Andrew Kelly to a newly created position called "senior vice president for strategy and policy." The school will pay him $245,000 a year.

A UNC release notes that Kelly was a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute from 2002-2005, and returned to AEI in 2009 as a research fellow in education policy studies. He is also the founder and director of AEI's Center on Higher Education Reform.  

Reactions have been swift.  This op-ed appeared today in the News and Observer by Michael Schwalbe:

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article81662092.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article81662092.html#storylink=cpy

The recent hiring of Andrew P. Kelly as the UNC system’s senior vice president for strategy and policy is a sign of what UNC system president Margaret Spellings and her Republican backers have in mind for the future of public higher education in North Carolina.

Kelly, who received his Ph.D. in political science from UC-Berkeley in 2013, comes to his $245,000 per year UNC system job from the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank in Washington, D.C.

Like Spellings, Kelly has no experience as an educator, other than a stint as a graduate teaching assistant. Also like Spellings, he has ties to the Bush family, recently serving as a policy adviser to Jeb Bush’s failed presidential campaign.

The AEI, for which Kelly wrote about higher education policy, is the tool of its ultraconservative funders, which include the Olin, Scaife, Lynde and Harry Bradley, Adolph Coors and Smith Richardson Foundations. Other super wealthy supporters, including Charles and David Koch, give the AEI millions of dollars through dark money channels, such as DonorsTrust.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article81662092.html#storylink=cpy

What donors get for their money is ideological support for a free-market, anti-regulation, anti-labor agenda. AEI “scholars” produce op-eds, reports and policy discussion papers that oppose raising the minimum wage, support voter ID laws, oppose single-payer health care, oppose tougher regulations on Wall Street banksters and deny climate change.

What comes out of the AEI is not scholarship but pseudo-scholarship tailored to advance the economic interests of its funders. This is the world from which Kelly comes to UNC, to undertake the task of making policies that stand to affect the quality of public higher education in North Carolina for generations to come.

In fairness, one might say that what matters more than where Kelly comes from are the ideas he brings with him. These ideas are easy to find. Kelly has published articles and edited books on how to reform higher education.

One big idea that Kelly pushes is that tuition has soared in recent decades because government loans to college students have provided an open spigot of money, leading to profligate spending by university administrators and giving them an irresistible incentive to keep raising tuition to further fuel that spending.

As a result of this vicious cycle, Kelly argues, affordability has suffered, universities have avoided accountability and low-quality institutions, as well as programs of dubious career value, have been kept artificially alive. The solution is to let the market operate as it should.

“Consumers,” which is Kelly’s term for parents and students, should be told of the likely monetary payoff of degrees in different fields from different institutions, so they can better decide how to spend their tuition dollars. There should also be cheaper alternatives to traditional classes and degree programs; for example, short-term, skills-focused online instruction.

What impedes these reforms? A major obstacle, Kelly says, is the current system of accreditation, which leaves power in the hands of faculty, who want only to keep competitors out of the market and preserve the status quo. As an alternative, Kelly suggests giving the accreditation role to state governments.

Curiously missing from Kelly’s analysis of rising tuition costs and college affordability is attention to the role played by a decline in direct state funding. In the 1970s, states on average provided about 75 percent of funding for public higher education. Today, the figure is about 25 percent. Tuition rates have risen to make up the difference.

In other words, affordability is now a problem because the burden of paying for college has been shifted onto the backs of middle-class families. Kelly ignores this, likely because of why the shift has occurred: the anti-tax and shrink-the-government policies championed by outfits like the American Enterprise Institute.

When self-proclaimed reformers are in league with those whose aims and policies have caused economic hardship for working-class and middle-class families, it’s hard to take seriously those reformers’ claims to be driven by concerns for affordability, though this rhetoric makes for good public relations.

The real goals of the AEI’s “billionaire class” sponsors in regard to public universities have long been clear: turn them into engines of profit making; use them to train scientists, managers, pro-business analysts, and professionals; and, to the extent possible, do not allow them to promote critical thought about the concentrations of wealth and power in America.

To his credit, Kelly seems to have recognized, at least at one time, that administrative bloat – the proliferation of highly paid presidents, vice presidents, vice chancellors and the like, along with armies of staff assistants – is part of what ails higher education and drives up costs. With his new job, he becomes part of that problem, too.

Michael Schwalbe is professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article81662092.html#storylink=cpy

Protesters Disrupt UNC Board of Governors Meeting

Other videos shot by participants here.  From Chapel Hill, NC:


   

End Spellings' UNC Presidency Before It Begins

Protests are guaranteed tomorrow at the UNC Board of Governors meeting:

The UNC Board of Governors picked Spellings in October, after holding an “emergency meeting” shortly before a new law kicked in that would have required the board to nominate three finalists before picking a new system president. 

The protest will take place during the board's meeting on Friday morning and is being organized by a handful of liberal groups, including the Faculty Forward Network, Greenpeace USA, Ignite NC, Progress NC and UnKoch My Campus. Students say that in addition to rescinding Spellings' appointment, they also want the board to stop holding meetings during exam and break periods, a practice they say fails to honor open-meetings laws.  

Spellings' appointment falls in line with other recent board decisions that have ruffled feathers, students and faculty say. "The Spellings issue has just brought a lot of other things to a head and is just the latest embodiment of the corporatization of higher education in the state," said Altha J. Cravey, a geography professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Spellings' Preparation for UNC Job

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Spellings as President of UNC resulted from the North Carolina Tea Party Taliban's (TPT) political purging within the UNC system.  Art Pope, who functions as the chief stooge of those billionaire John Birchers, the Brothers Koch, led the effort to unseat the former UNC president, who was Democratic, experienced, and competent--three strikes against anyone running a public institution in line for corporate takeover. 

Below is a clip from a piece in The Nation, which points out two of Spellings' most recent exploits after leaving the White House that made her resume even more attractive to the TPT:

Spellings went on to work in the troubled for-profit industry after leaving the White House—an experience, she told UNC’s board of governors, that taught her “a lot about how we can serve our students and think of them as customers in providing a product in convenient ways for them.” Beginning in 2012 she served on the board of the Apollo Group, the parent company of for-profit chain University of Phoenix. That “diploma factory” is now under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, in part for its aggressive recruiting of military veterans. Its online program has a graduation rate of just 7.3 percent, and the student loan default rate is up 5 percent from the national average.

Spellings also chaired the board of the Ceannate Corporation, a student loan–collection agency. It’s not surprising that she had connections there: During Spellings’s tenure the education department was accused of acting “as a wholly owned subsidiary” of the student-loan industry. Preying on student borrowers is lucrative business: profit margins for loan collectors average 30 percent. “Despite widespread calls to reform the student loan industry, Spellings and the Ceannate Corporation have simply profited off of it,” two UNC professors wrote in a recent op-ed. “Spellings’ defense of for-profit colleges [following her appointment] is perhaps just as disturbing as the predatory practices these institutions use to fleece students.”

Backroom Deals Before and After Spellings Appointment

Corruption seems to accompany Margaret Spellings wherever she shows up.   Within days of her appointment as President of the UNC System, a secret meeting was held to hand out 20 percent raises to 12 of the system's chancellors.  Were these the chancellors who supported her absurd appointment for a whopping $750,000 per year ($150,000 higher than her qualified predecessor)?

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Governors of North Carolina's public university system gave in Friday to legislative demands for details of a closed-door meeting that resulted in big pay raises for a dozen top campus executives, but not before debating whether their job was to insulate the institution from politicians. 

The University of North Carolina's Board of Governors voted to release details of the private meeting two weeks ago that approved pay raises of up to 20 percent for chancellors at 12 of the state's 17 campuses. The board acted after consultants told them the chancellors were underpaid. The raises were retroactive to July 1. 

The decision to turn over details of the private meeting, which some board members called contentious, was opposed by Raleigh lawyer Joe Knott. He said he and fellow board members should insulate the universities from politicians who might want to install supporters and donors in decision-making roles. Putting people in those positions that are not qualified could hurt the universities' excellent reputations. 

"I view this request as a continuation of unusual interruption in our business by the political arm of our state government," Knott said. 

Knott said a powerful politician demanded that their candidate become the next president of the 17-campus system. "A person with power" in the Legislature directed former university board chairman John Fennebresque to select that lawmaker's choice as the next university system president, Knott said. He refused to offer details to back up his allegation 

Former U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings got the job last month. Fennebresque resigned days later. 

A spokeswoman for Senate leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, declined comment. A spokeswoman for House Speaker Tim Moore, R-Cleveland, didn't respond to a request for comment. 

"We shouldn't deal in rumor-mongering," board member Marty Kotis said, urging Knott to produce some evidence of the arm-twisting. "The issue is that we are appointed by the Legislature. We are a body that exists because they have appointed us. They are elected by the people of the state. The people of this state own this university" and deserve to know more about what's going on. 

The big pay raises approved in secret comes during a rocky year for university governors that started with their sudden decision to force out current president Tom Ross, followed by a presidential search largely done in private to keep the candidates confidential, and legislative criticism of that closed-door process. 

The board waited until three days after the Oct. 30 meeting, after the big pay raises took effect, to disclose their decisions. On Friday, the board refused to release to the public the same records shared with lawmakers. Governing board vice chairman Louis Bissette said that's because the records contain confidential personnel details. Salaries of public employees must be disclosed under state law. A summary will be released next week, Bissette said. 

The legislative demand comes ahead of a meeting Wednesday where lawmakers will review the board's recent actions.

President Spellings

Anyone with the intellect to appear brilliant to George W. Bush is probably not smart enough to stay out of the public eye.  The re-emergence of Margaret Spellings as president of a prestigious state university system proves as much.

Having ballooned her bank accounts since 2008 as she criss-crossed the nation serving on executive boards and offering corporate education consultation as chief proprietor of her modestly named company, Margaret Spellings, Inc., it appears that Spellings has once again been called upon by the billionaires to use her hammy fists and her drunk cowgirl persona to beat down one of the last remaining civilized institutions of our dying planet.

When Spellings left the White House, she carried with her the knowledge of how to become the most despised education official in the land to everyone, at least, who does not fly on a corporate jet.

Along with Bush's bagman, Sandy Kress, Spellings used her extensive knowledge (a B.S. in poly-sci) to craft an education policy for the nation that would deconstruct public education and hand out the remaining chunks to billionaires and their underemployed Ivy League drones.  By the time she left her office at ED, billions in ed funds were going into the pockets of Bush cronies, almost half of U. S. schools were on the NCLB failure list, and the charter school industry was draining public school budgets in 40 states.

A few of the other Bush accomplishment that Spellings oversaw:

Since NCLB became law in 2002, Bush budgets have underfunded NCLB by nearly $90 billion dollars (pdf). Head Start has been cut back by 11 percent. Career education programs, educational technology, and other programs like Reading is Fundamental have been zeroed out in Bush budgets. While cynically demanding that special ed students perform at the same levels as other students, $30 billion has been cut from the authorized amount in the 2004 IDEA Improvement Act. In short, the poor, the disabled, and the immigrant children have been sacrificed to make an ideological case against public schools and for vouchers and charters (even as research shows they are no better at producing test scores than the schools they would replace.

Let's not forget, too, that it was Spellings oversaw illegal interest payments to the student loan kingpins at Nelnet, and then in 2007 she went against her own Inspector General's recommendation in order to make sure the profiteers at Nelnet could keep $278,000,000 in illicit student loan interest payments.

But it was the work of the Spellings Commission that no doubt put Spellings at the top of the Koch heads' list of candidates for UNC president.  The Commission, which was headed by the surly Charles Miller (the John Bolton of higher education), offered a plan to turn higher education into research centers for corporate R&D, human capital training centers, and revenue streams for corporate contractors and student loan companies.  Let's remember, too, that the Spellings report was keen to create the same intrusive accountability procedures in higher ed that devastated K-12.

Perhaps it is time for the tenured faculty to finally get off their asses and to mobilize against the impending Spellings disaster.  It is now or never.