UNCG's Big Bang

If what Edna Chun says is true, that she was pressured into revealing names that should have been kept confidential and that she was working in a hostile work environment, doesn’t that demonstrate that A. there are significant problems in HR with confidentiality and B. She doesn’t know how to address the very situations for which she was hired? So, she has admitted failure (revealing names) and incompetence (inability to address a hostile work environment). I wouldn’t think she’d need a lot more than that to explain why she was fired.

And what about Benita Peace in all of this? It would seem to me that since Chun has been sent packing, Peace should be pushing things into a suitcase too. If Chun has been fired for the reasons that the university would like to provide as legal reasons for non-renewal (as opposed to because she was Asian and 68). After all, the main difference between Chun and Peace then seems to be age (Peace is 59, Chun 68) and race (Peace is African-American, Chun is Asian-American).

In which case, Chun is correct, she was treated differently and is being dismissed as a result of race and age.

I’m sorry, I think I just opened up a wormhole in the universe.

Let me see if this still makes sense:

Either, Chun was fired because of failure and incompetence which means that Peace should be fired too.

Or, she was fired because of her race and age, which would be demonstrated by Peace having not been fired.

So…UNCG should either fire Peace or admit to racism and ageism…which sounds like a HR problem…and should definitely lead to some lost jobs for their supervisors as the very things for which they were ostensibly fired (failure and incompetence.) Which might mean that Charlie Maimone should be fired (and he’s white, so that would truly demonstrate that the firings weren’t about race…I haven’t the foggiest idea how old he is). If he isn’t fired, it must be because Chun is lying…a perfectly good reason to fire her.

Ouch, my head hurts.

Add to that, though, the fact that when Chun was fired from her position in HR at Broward, she filed a grievance claiming discrimination AND she was fired because of claims of discrimination.

This is a twisted mess.

I wouldn’t be surprised if even Stephen Hawking wouldn’t be able to explain UNCG’s Big Bang.

Opportunistic Greensboro Gives Community Service Award to Brady

I had to reread this story several times before I was able to overcome my firm belief that I must be misunderstanding it. However, and hold on to your barf bags, here is what was released in the Campus Weekly this morning:

“Chancellor Linda P. Brady and NC A&T Chancellor Harold Martin received the Thomas Z. Osborne Distinguished Citizen Award from the Greensboro Partnership at their annual dinner. The award is presented to a citizen who has demonstrated extraordinary service and achievement within the community; it is the highest honor given by the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce and is presented jointly with Duke Energy. Brady and Martin were recognized for not only the significant work done at their respective universities, but also for the unprecedented level of teamwork and collaboration that they have exhibited in working to make projects such as the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering, Opportunity Greensboro, and the Union Square Campus a reality.”

Apparently, Opportunity Greensboro members hold the mistaken belief that Brady has “demonstrated extraordinary service and achievement within the community.”

I am having a very hard time imagining where that idea came from.

First though, let me clarify, while the award could be, in theory, given to any citizen, it just so happens that this time the citizens who ‘deserved’ it were both members of the Opportunity Greensboro cabal.

I have no beef with Harold Martin, I don't know him or his work, but the mere idea that the words community service and Linda Brady could be put together in a sentence without a negative separating them makes my skin crawl.

Apparently, you can severely damage several communities and yet still receive an award for outstanding work if, and here’s the catch, you benefit in some way the people who are giving out the award. So that raises the question: which benefits are being given to whom in such a way that Brady’s work would seem meritorious?

Let’s take a look at this “significant work done at their respective universities.” During Brady’s administration:

• The Glenwood fiasco
• The Wreck Center and its fee hike
• The UNCG3 / Paul Mason
• The unnecessary $12 million give back
• Raises for the highly paid
• Shrinking student numbers
• Academic Program Review Circus
• Alienation of HES donors and alumni
• Forced reorganization (twice!)
• Multiple new upper administration positions
• Massive loss of employment
• Underperforming nano program
• Ever shrinking Union Campus Initiative
• Demonstrated racism in UNCG police
• Wood frame housing subject to fire at Spartan Village
• 85% of faculty experience morale as a significant problem on campus
• Culture of bullying rampant in administration
• Rise & Fall of Learning Communities
• Faculty flight
• Staff disappearance
• Enormous increases in health care premiums & co-pays
• Increased teaching loads
• Lost course sections
• Wrestling program dissolved
• UNCG Magazine abandoned
• #36 on list of Fastest Growing Sugar Baby Schools
• Fallen off list of best places to work
• Jan Zink's fundraising impotence
• Tragic branding campaign #dsba
• Greatly increased police presence at BOT meetings

I could go on. And on. And on.

Now put that up against the benefits of the nano school and union square campus:

• Union square already twice reduced in size
• Currently at 85,000 square feet that will cost $90 million to build (a popular number as the rec center cost $91 million)
• Meanwhile, 500,000 square feet of unused space at Gateway East and Gateway North
• Nanoschool has currently produced four PhD graduates in 4.5 years at an outlay of $700,000
• Unfortunately, the outlay for those who dropped out was about $2 million
• In other words, this is a program that produced 4.5 students at $971,000 per degree)
• The nanoscience program was supposed to enroll 110 students (and the nanoengineering a further 110)…in nanoscience they seem approximately 100 short - makes you wonder about the University's prediction of 320 for the Dr. of Nursing to be offered at the Union Campus
• The JSSN cost $65 million to build and equip (odd that the rec center should be so much more expensive…)

I’m still waiting for the benefits from either of those projects to become clear to me.

What is clear to me is that Randall Kaplan, who is a member of Opportunity Greensboro is also part of the founding group for Capital Facilities Foundation, the group that purchased the rec center land in Glenwood and made it available to the university.

Here is what Brady has really done that has earned her this award:

Turned the university into a mechanism for real estate development.

It is clear that a lot of university money is being pumped into real estate in and around Greensboro and that some people benefit directly from the sale of that real estate, some benefit from the property value increases, some benefit by skimming, some benefit through kick backs for construction contracts…and some benefit from lying through their teeth while rubbing elbows with the Greensboro elite.

What are we positioning for here? Who is benefiting from all of these projects? I guess it could be a coincidence that despite the lived experience of thousands of people which indicate that Brady has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster, when that is placed by the side of hundreds of millions of dollars of student and taxpayer money being funneled into private hands that Opportunity Greensboro sees Brady as a hero, but I think not.

The poor bastards writing for Campus Weekly should be given hazard pay for having been made to handle this toxic material.

Driving While Black: UNCG Police Department Search Statistics Paint a Picture

An important part of UNCG putting its house in order is a full and thorough investigation of the people and practices in the UNCG police department.

Here’s a good place to start – an anecdote that led to looking at some data.

When UNCG opened the tunnel leading under the train tracks, there were a small number of protesters. It was anticipated that there would be a great number more or at least, that’s what the police presence indicated. On the side of the tunnel where the Chancellor was to give her opening remarks, there were at least six uniformed police officers. Their radios could be heard with the crackling commentary of police, some undercover, stationed at a variety of other locations and tracking the movement of a certain number of individuals.

On the other side of the tunnel, one of those individuals wanted to hang a home made banner reading “UNCGentrification” but his efforts were met with the full force of the UNCG police department. Officers, some with guns drawn, forced the student to the ground and pushed his face into the concrete before handcuffing him.

This student is black.

Given the use of statistics to examine police department’s attitudes towards race as reflected in their actions, I turned to the website for the North Carolina Department of Justice to see how UNCG’s finest are showing their colors.

Let me preface the numbers with this:

Greensboro’s population in 2010 according to census data was 32.95% Black or African-American. UNCG’s student body has an ethnic minority enrollment of 43% with the total percentage of the student body made up of Black or African-American students being 25.2%.

Let’s acknowledge that this information can never be completely accurate, that there are people who don’t fill out the racial information, or who self-identify differently than they might be identified by others, etc.

Now, then, the question is this:

Why did the UNCG police search 652 black drivers from 2009 – 2014 while only finding 490 white drivers that required their attention?

Or, we could ask why it is that, given the racial composition of UNCG and Greensboro, fully 57% of traffic stops that resulted in searchers are of vehicles driven by Black or African-American drivers?

This data is compiled data from 2010 – 2014. What happens if we look at the individual years, is there some possible explanation there?

Unfortunately, no, there isn’t.

In 2013 UNCG police searched 110 Black drivers and 69 White drivers.

In 2011 UNCG police searched 170 Black drivers and 147 White drivers.

Even in 2012 when the data shows that only 54 black drivers were searched it still shows the same relationship as only 40 of the white drivers were searched.

No matter the year, the story is the same. Black drivers are searched more often than their white counterparts.  

And here’s another interesting bit of information: more White drivers than Black were stopped for Driving While Impaired (in fact, nearly one third more), more White drivers than Black drivers were stopped for safe movement violations and the same thing for stop light/stop sign violations and vehicle regulatory violations. Black drivers are stopped more often than white drivers for vehicle equipment violations and more often for a category called “investigation.” Black drivers are stopped more often for seat belt violations by almost one third.

In short, the violations that could be considered  most dangerous to others and therefore, least likely to be left to the discretion of any particular officer have a racial composition roughly proportional to the population of Greensboro. Otherwise…well, I don’t think you probably require any help figuring out the rest.

So, this is the police department that we have at UNCG. It’s just one aspect of their job and we can’t paint any individual officer with the brush that was used for this picture of the department overall.

But maybe we should check that brush and see if there isn’t some whitewash still left in the bristles.