The Quad: Meet UNC’s New Accreditor

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A ‘Non-Ideological Approach’

Ever since Hans announced in May that the UNC System was working to create a new accreditor with other public university systems, one question that loomed large for me was which states those would be—and what the partnership would mean for public universities in North Carolina.

On Thursday morning, we finally got an answer. (If you’re wondering why The Quad was a little late, this is why…)

The UNC System announced today that it will partner with five states—Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Texas—to create a new accreditor called the Commission for Public Higher Education.

Despite the politicized dialogue around accreditation in some of those states, Hans told The Assembly his vision is centered on student outcomes.

“The vision for this effort really is to offer a streamlined, non-ideological approach to accreditation,” Hans said.

—Erin Gretzinger

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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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Do or DEI

Across the country, colleges have faced increasing pressure in recent years to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on their campuses. Since President Donald Trump returned to office, colleges in North Carolina and elsewhere have scrubbed the three politically charged words—and a growing list of others deemed related—from websites, job titles, and research proposals.

To document the rapidly changing landscape and explore how public and private colleges have responded, The Assembly partnered with five student newspapers—The Daily Tar Heel of UNC-Chapel Hill, The Chronicle of Duke University, the Niner Times of UNC Charlotte, the Old Gold & Black of Wake Forest University, and The Seahawk of UNC Wilmington—for a deep-dive reporting project.

We spent the spring semester chasing down the answers to complicated questions facing colleges. Our reporting reveals that schools across the state are grappling with frequent rule changes and confusing federal directives and state demands, as they also try to support diverse student bodies and workforces.

“Some of the things we’ve seen out of Washington have been vaguely worded,” said UNC Wilmington Provost James Winebrake. “Just as a general statement, sometimes when you have vaguely worded orders that come out of Washington, there could be a tendency to overcomply or undercomply because you don’t really know what’s being asked of you.”

Read our big-picture story with reporting from all the student newspapers. And check out stories from our student newspaper partners to go deeper on how changes to DEI-related programs have impacted students and their college experiences.

—Erin Gretzinger and Matt Hartman

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The DEI Bill That Didn’t Die

In a sign that the DEI story isn’t over in North Carolina, the GOP-led state House passed the Senate’s “Eliminating ‘DEI’ in Public Higher Ed” bill on Wednesday. As we previously reported, the bill essentially codifies the steps the UNC System has already taken to curtail DEI efforts and applies it to the North Carolina Community College System, too—with added legislative oversight.

While the bill is now sitting on Gov. Josh Stein’s desk (awaiting a likely veto), the tone in the House rules committee on Tuesday signaled that the issue was not going away.

“We’ve gone ’round and ’round with DEI for the last couple of years here. I think we’ve debated this topic up and down,” Rep. David Willis, a Union County Republican, told the committee when he presented the bill.

One Democrat, Rep. Amos Quick of Guilford County, spoke in opposition. “Diversity is in the DNA of the United States of America. Inclusion is in the DNA of the United States of America,” Quick said, rattling off laws and policies ranging from the Reconstruction Amendments passed after the end of the Civil War to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “All of those would be categorized currently as DEI programs. None of those should be done away with, and this bill should not be enacted in our state.”

More Democrats spoke in opposition to the bill when it went to the House floor. “You’re working to have less diverse faculty. You’re working to have less diverse students, less diverse staff,” said Rep. Zach Hawkins, a Durham Democrat. “People are scared, and you’re going to see a lot of folks leave universities across North Carolina.”

Willis told The Assembly the legislature needed to take action to align with the federal government and the Trump administration on DEI. He also pointed to secretly recorded videos of administrators released by Accuracy in Media, a conservative advocacy group, as evidence more needed to be done.

“Folks are admittedly still doing some of these things behind the scenes, right, and they’re admitting to sneakily finding ways to push an agenda,” Willis said. “And whenever you’ve got an agenda that supports one side or the other from a political perspective, a social perspective, I mean, are we giving the kids the true education and educational freedom that they talk about?”

The administrators from UNC Charlotte, UNC Asheville, and Western Carolina University in those videos are no longer employed at their institutions. (UNCW said it is investigating a recording involving two of its employees.)

While universities have declined to clarify whether the employees were fired or if they resigned, Belle Boggs, an English professor at N.C. State and the president of the state AAUP chapter, said their exits send a message.

“It says that we’re expendable,” she said. “Where does it end?”

—Erin Gretzinger

(P.S. Shoutout to Bryan Anderson, who anchors our politics newsletter The Caucus, for helping me track this bill as it moved through the legislature. He’ll have more coverage of the General Assembly in the coming weeks—subscribe to The Caucus if you haven’t already!)

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Assigned Reading

Pulitzer Pride: Our partners at Border Belt Independent sat down with Kathleen DuVal, a UNC-CH history professor, to ask how she felt after winning the Pulitzer Prize in history for her book, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America. (A delightful spoiler: She got so much champagne gifted to her that she felt buzzed for about a whole week.)

Just the Beginning: The impacts of federal research cuts are becoming clearer every day—and it seems like things are bound to get worse for North Carolina universities, Triangle Business Journal found.

ChatGPT Got Game?: Center Square reports that the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at North Carolina Central University will help evaluate the effectiveness of a pilot program to see if ChatGPT can help the state government run more efficiently.

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

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