We’re so excited that Korie Dean has joined The Assembly as a higher education reporter and co-author of The Quad.
You probably already know her work from The News & Observer, but now that she’s on the team, we wanted to give Korie a chance to tell you a little more about herself.
What’s your favorite story from your time on the higher ed beat?
It’s hard to pick one, but last summer I wrote about the impacts of UNC Asheville cutting academic programs that were central to the university’s longstanding liberal-arts mission. I interviewed professors from the cut programs, including one who had dedicated nearly 20 years of his career to starting and shepherding the religious studies department. Their stories, as well as those of students in the eliminated programs, showed the personal fallout.
The story also zoomed out to show how the cuts were indicative of trends at the state level, where falling enrollment at public universities can lead to budget constraints, and at the national level, where fewer students are completing degrees in the liberal arts and humanities. And it looked ahead, too, pondering where UNC Asheville would go from there.
Now, there are more questions about the university’s future and its millennial campus, which I’m curious to see unfold.
We tried (and sort of failed) to have a recurring feature called “The Quad on quads.” What’s your best memory from a North Carolina campus quad?
This is an easy one; I literally wrote about it right before I graduated. Early in my senior year at UNC-Chapel Hill, during the pandemic, my friends and I got together for a picnic on Polk Place. We chatted, ate some takeout, and watched the sunset. And as I looked around at the quad around me—surrounded by all of the buildings where I attended classes and the brick paths I tripped on—I became silently sentimental, realizing my time at UNC-CH would come to an end in a matter of months. I’m probably romanticizing it too much, but it was a perfect moment.
What was the coolest class you took in college?
I minored in Southern studies, so I took a lot of great classes about culture, literature, folklore, politics, and other disciplines in the American South. One of the coolest courses was a food studies class taught by professor Kelly Alexander, which urged us to think critically about food’s intersections with race, gender, class, and other factors. We learned about “rage baking,” debates over tipping, the environmental impacts of North Carolina’s pork industry, Indigenous foodways, and more. It was very hands-on, even though the course met virtually (another sign of my COVID-era college life). We ran a class Instagram account where we posted many of our homework assignments, including our attempts at making meals following federal school lunch guidelines. We also learned how to make biscuits over Zoom! (Don’t ask me how mine turned out.)
