Pope Center

The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy is a conservative, nonprofit institute located in Raleigh, North Carolina "dedicated to improving higher education in North Carolina and the nation." It was founded and is funded largely by Art Pope, a conservative businessman. The Pope Center is one of several conservative public policy centers underwritten by the Pope family, which has also contributed significantly to UNC-Chapel Hill and, in lesser amounts, to arts and humanitarian causes in North Carolina. It is named for John William Pope, who served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Pope Center has attained the GuideStar Exchange Gold participation level, a symbol of transparency and accountability.

History and organization

The Pope Center originated in 1996 as a project of the John Locke Foundation (also founded by Art Pope), a nonprofit think tank concerned especially with free markets, limited constitutional government, and personal responsibility. In 2003, the Pope Center was incorporated as a separate entity.

The current president of the Pope Center is Jenna A. Robinson, a long-time employee of the John Locke Foundation and a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and the Koch Associates Program sponsored by the Charles G. Koch Association. The previous president was Jane S. Shaw, who retired in February 2015. The director of research at the Pope Center is George Leef, and its director of policy analysis is Jay Schalin. Schalin studied Computer Science at New Jersey's Richard Stockton College and Leef is the former Vice-President of the John Locke Foundation. The Pope Center is governed by a board of directors and is also supported by an academic advisory committee. The Pope Center is funded primarily by the John William Pope Foundation.

Activities and criticism

The Pope Center describes its role as a "watchdog" with respect to higher education in the United States in general and the public system in North Carolina in particular. The UNC Chapel-Hill included among its trustees, John W. Pope, father of Art Pope, who saw the university campus as becoming close-minded and politically correct. The Pope Center makes available on its website many of the research and policy papers authored by its staff, including reports on campus speech codes, faculty teaching loads, general education programs, and privately funded university academic centers.

The work of the Pope Center and its staff has received praise and support from other conservative or libertarian organizations and publications with an interest in educational issues. The Center has also provoked a welter of strong criticism from faculty in the North Carolina university system and from journalists and commentators outside the sector. Dr. Toby Parcel, at the time Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University, called the Pope Center's work "deplorable and counterproductive." Her colleague, Professor Cat Warren, at the time Head of Women's Studies at NCSU, described the PC's report on her program as "inane crap" that was rife with inaccuracies, while other faculty at NCSU deemed the organization's work to be anti-academic, anti-intellectual, and "aimed at denigrating women, minorities and academic freedom." Hassan Melehy, Professor of French at UNC-Chapel Hill, writing under the auspices of the American Association of University Professors, has accused Art Pope of using the Pope Center and the John Locke Center to combine "a public image of concerned generosity about the university system with open attacks on the faculty and curriculum at UNC–Chapel Hill." Journalists writing on culture, education, and politics have echoed this assessment, with Jed Purdy of the New Yorker magazine describing the Pope Center as staging, through its policy advocacy, "a two-pronged attack on public higher education as currently practised." The first of these proposed policy changes consists of raising tuition in the UNC system and shifting public funding to support students attending private colleges, thus "eroding the distinction between public and private institutions" and driving more students towards pre-professional degrees. The second would be a return to a "Great Books" curriculum with an emphasis on Western philosophy and literature as a source of eternal truths.

The Pope Center's commentaries and research papers have called for budget cuts to the UNC system and for increasing faculty teaching loads and eliminating teaching reductions for administrators. The Center's Director, George Leef, has argued to eliminate the public subsidies for the state's scholarly press (the University of North Carolina Press) and for cuts in funding for the university system generally, terming it a "boondoggle". In its broadest aim, the Center has argued for "renewal of the university", advocating the creation of privately funded academic centers, which, in their view, would offer balance to academic courses. Their strongest opposition campaign to date, conducted in conjunction with another Pope-funded think tank, the Civitas Institute, was directed against Gene Nichol, former President of the College of William and Mary and former Dean of the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law, in his role as the director of UNC Chapel-Hill's Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity. The Pope Center accused Nichol of partisanship and financial opacity. In 2015, under political pressure from the Republican-controlled state legislature and Governor Pat McRory (R), both of which had been sharply criticized by Nichol for what he deemed to be their failure to address poverty and other attendant social ills in NC, the UNC Board of Governors voted to close the Poverty Center.

External links

• The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy (Official Website)
• Organizational Profile – National Center for Charitable Statistics (Urban Institute)
• The John Locke Foundation
• The John William Pope Foundation
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