We try not to lean too heavily into the Duke–UNC-CH rivalry in this newsletter, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. Mostly that happens in basketball season, but this time it’s TV.

Season three of Amazon’s The Summer I Turned Pretty debuted last week, and the Tar Heels are pumped. Not only is the show based on a series of young adult novels by UNC-CH alum Jenny Han, but the new season was filmed on the Chapel Hill campus. It’s all providing lots of fodder for the admissions team.

Compare that to Duke’s recent starring turn in HBO’s The White Lotus, which led the university to publicly complain about a character wearing a Duke shirt while contemplating suicide. While UNC-CH was also lampooned in the show—thanks to a fictional drawling, pill-popping alumna—it didn’t leave quite the same impression.

There’s a widely memed still from the show we could embed here to dramatize Duke’s likely feeling, but that might make things worse.

Erin (who is Team Conrad, btw) will have more on the impact of The Summer I Turned Pretty soon. But here’s what we’ve got this week.

— Matt Hartman

📚 Today’s Syllabus

1. How UNC-CH could pay for revenue sharing with athletes
2. The UNC System demands new DEI compliance committees
3. Sandhills Community College’s innovative high school
4. Lessons from Harvard and other reading

Pay to Play

The new era of college sports has begun, and major athletics programs like UNC-CH’s have a $20.5 million revenue-sharing line item they didn’t have last year, thanks to the House vs. NCAA settlement finalized last month. Now schools are turning over every proverbial couch cushion they can find to shake out the pennies hiding there.

The Quad obtained two internal UNC-CH documents that give an inside look at that process. Not only do they show that UNC Athletics has explored everything from putting advertisements on players’ jerseys to reducing the number of complimentary tickets and parking passes provided to athletes, but they show how much the university projected it could earn or save from each.

Those comp tickets? Cutting them by a third could save more than $200,000. Putting ads on men’s basketball jerseys could net $3 million, while doing the same for football would bring in $1 million. But a new basketball arena is the real moneymaker, with early estimates putting the value at another $15 million annually—thanks in large part to the revenue potential of new luxury boxes.

“We have not made any final decisions regarding which initiatives we may implement,” UNC-CH athletics spokesman Robbi Pickeral Evans said.

— Matt Hartman

How UNC-Chapel Hill Could Free Up $20.5 Million to Pay Athletes

Thanks for reading The Quad, a higher education newsletter written by Matt Hartman and Erin Gretzinger and edited by Emily Stephenson. Reach us with tips or ideas at highered@theassemblync.com.

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DEI Another Day

When we reported last month on the rapidly changing landscape surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion, we wrote that “top officials in the state aren’t done battling DEI.”

Sure enough, on Monday, we reported that the UNC Board of Governors sent a memo instructing the boards of trustees at each campus to form a new subcommittee to scrutinize compliance with the equality policy that replaced the older DEI guidelines.

The committees will receive various briefings from their chancellors or other senior administrators. That includes closed-session meetings about the performance of “relevant” personnel, which the memo defined as anyone whose position was changed last year to comply with the equality policy and any professionals with “with vague or unclear titles within student affairs operations.” The goal of the confidential meetings is to ensure “an employee’s previous responsibilities do not continue in the present role.” The memo said any disciplinary action of employees “should occur at this time as well.”

The change came after the release of several secretly recorded videos of university administrators. Most of the administrators in the videos are no longer employed at their institutions, though it is unclear if they were fired or resigned. The memo doesn’t mention the videos. But Republican state lawmakers said they were skeptical UNC System schools had stopped DEI efforts. 

“Folks are admittedly still doing some of these things behind the scenes, and they’re admitting to sneakily finding ways to push an agenda,” Rep. David Willis, a Union County Republican, told me last month.

Rebecca Howell, the chair of the Employee Forum at UNC-CH, told me after Monday’s story that she had a lot of questions about the procedure for evaluating staff members behind closed doors, especially considering it is unclear how many student affairs employees could be impacted. She said it is also unclear whether those under review would be included in the process—or even aware they are under review.

“Who is deciding whether a title is ‘vague or unclear?’ Is that going to be something that the committee decides? … It’s just vague and over-broad,” she said. “I just worry that this is something that would blindside an employee—potentially high performing employees—and potentially have a chilling effect.”

Read more about the memo.

— Erin Gretzinger

Innovation High School

Moore Innovative High School is not your traditional high school. For one, the school is housed on the campus of Sandhills Community College (SCC). With an emphasis on the “skilled trades,” the school—which opens to the first cohort of “red wolves” in August—envisions becoming a model of workforce development at the high school level. 

The Moore County school is the latest addition to North Carolina’s 134 Cooperative Innovative High Schools, which are partnerships between public schools and community colleges that aim to support first-generation college students, students at risk of dropping out of high school, and those who would benefit from an accelerated learning environment. 

Early college high schools, where students finish with a high school diploma and an associate degree, generally aim to help students transfer to a four-year college. According to Ashlee Ciccone, principal of Moore Innovative High School, her program is more focused on ensuring students graduate with the credentials to enter the workforce, though they can also earn an associate degree. 

“The line between high school and community college has become so blurred that it’s almost hard to distinguish one,” SCC President Alexander “Sandy” Stewart said, explaining that many high school students are dual-enrolled and earning college credits.

Sixty-seven ninth graders will join the first class at the new high school, which begins with two years of honors-level coursework intended to fulfill high school core requirements. Students will then tackle college courses at SCC their junior and senior year and gain early exposure to the workforce through shadowing and internship opportunities. 

There are five career pathways available: Architecture and Construction; Education and Training; Health Science; Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics; and Information Technology. These career options are identified by SCC as “high need – high wage” areas in the community. 

The new vocation-track high school, which is part of Moore County Schools, was funded by a $25 million appropriation from the 2023 state budget that would also pay for capital improvement projects at SCC. 

Stewart cited rapid population growth in Moore County, high demand for healthcare workers, and North Carolina’s rank as the top state for business as impetuses for establishing the high school. 

He said the high school is also “perfectly aligned” with Propel NC, a proposed new funding model that would allocate state dollars to community college programs that result in high paying jobs in the area. 

The school’s mascot of red wolves embodies the identity of the students, Ciccone said. One of the most endangered canids native to North Carolina, red wolves are intelligent yet elusive.

“They’re shy, but they really do like to live in packs, and so we felt like that really matched the students that we’re seeking to serve,” Ciccone said. 

— Lucas Lin

Assigned Reading

The Institutionalists: The Atlantic’s recent profile of Harvard President Alan Garber presents an argument we’ve been hearing from more and more university officials across the state. This group, as Franklin Foer writes, believes “bad-faith attacks sometimes land on uncomfortable truths,” and they’re taking higher ed’s ongoing “crisis as an opportunity, leveraging the looming threat of Trump to make changes that would have been politically impossible in less ominous times.”

Following the Finances: This week, our Slack channel lit up with two helpful resources for taking stock of ongoing funding cuts. One is from our friend/competitor Brian Gordon at The News & Observer, who has a terrific story about the past and present of the Research Triangle. The other is a Center for American Progress report mapping data from the U.S. Treasury Department and DOGE.

Make News With Us: Last week’s Quad included a brief recap of our Newsmakers Series event with UNC System President Peter Hans, N.C. Central University Chancellor Karrie Dixon, and RTI International CEO Tim Gabel. After we sent the newsletter, we wrote more about the event for The Assembly. Catch up here—and be sure to join us next time!

Let us know what’s on your radar at highered@theassemblync.com.

Matt Hartman is a higher education reporter for The Assembly and co-anchor of our weekly higher education newsletter, The Quad. He was previously a longtime freelance journalist and spent nearly a decade working in higher ed communications before joining The Assembly in 2024.