with the folks who disagree in a much
more intimate way so we can try to address
some of the things that they’re concerned
about.
“The protesters — the really active ones
who were there at the Tancredo thing — I
know all those students’ first names. They
are part of my family. I see them on campus and they’re not doing their protester
act, and we sit down and talk for a few
minutes. So it’s a both/and strategy. It’s
both we need civil dialogue and we’re
going to use the tools we have to promote
that; and if you have a disagreement and
you talk to me about it ahead of time and
you come in here and just tell me what it
is that you’re upset about, I’ll see if I can
help you.”
The Tancredo incident was followed a
week later by the interruption of another
speaker; six people were arrested but the
speaker was allowed to go on.
“We weren’t prepared for the intensity
of the [Tancredo] protest. In some ways it’s
fortunate there was another controversial
speaker a week later, because we were able
to get ready for it — we warned the students ahead of time, we arrested people —
the week after, we did a really good job. I
think the Tancredo, the police did the best
they could under difficult circumstances.
We missed — and I take part of the
responsibility for this — we missed it coming, and we should have done better.”
ARIANA VAN DEN AKKER/THE DAILY TAR HEEL
A public firestorm started at the protest of Tom Tancredo’s attempt to speak on illegal immigration. UNC wasn’t fully prepared for the students and others who forced Tancredo to leave before
he got started, and Thorp apologized for a University that appeared to many North Carolinians to
be insensitive to freedom of speech.
Efficiency that sticks
In the August interview, Thorp said academic programs had been largely protected
in the state budget cuts. But Carolina’s culture of research centers and institutes took
a hit that likely will last, he said.
“It’s not a good time to be a center or
institute director, there’s just no way around
it. The House pulled out the list of centers
and started hacking. We’ve never seen that
before, we hope we’ll never see it again. But
you know, it happened, and whether it will
happen in the next session, I don’t know.”
Some examples of research centers are
the Carolina Population Center, the Highway Safety Research Center and the Renaissance Computing Institute — they also
include Carolina mainstays such as the
Ackland Art Museum, the N.C. Botanical
Garden and the Morehead.
“I think the strong centers will figure
out how to generate more of their own
revenue and adapt, and I don’t worry about
those. The ones that are relatively new, I
think this is going to pose significant challenges for them. But one of the good
things that I hope will come out of it is to
get away from this idea that to do some of
these things you have to have a center. A
faculty member can get grants and get gifts
and do stuff without having a special letterhead and five employees.
“So I think if we make the centers and
institutes less of a status symbol and less
glamorous, then I think we can have more
faculty doing more kinds of focused things
because they don’t have to go through some
arduous process to determine whether
they’re a center director or not. They can
just do what curiosity and their call to pub-
‘We weren’t prepared for the
intensity of the [Tancredo] protest. ...
We missed — and I take part
of the responsibility for this —
we missed it coming, and we should
have done better.’
lic service makes them want to do.”
What about RENCI , the Renaissance
Computing Institute, which applies computing and other technologies to real-world problems and has locations at six
North Carolina campuses? It took a 35
percent state cut and lost 18 staff members
and four contractors.
“High-performance computing is integral to the way we do everything, but we
felt that that cut to RENCI was the better
of a number of bad options because they
have a lot of state support, and ultimately
we don’t want our centers to rely as much
as RENCI is on state support for their existence. So that process of graduating them
from being state-supported to having their
own revenue had to start at some point.”
There was bad news and good news on
the faculty vitality front, considered among
the highest priorities.
“The college canceled a bunch of
searches last year when we had the midyear
reversions, and that was probably the worst
possible way to cut the budget. But we
went into the school year [in 2008] unprepared for the fact that the governor was
going to be asking us for some money back,
