NC Governor McCrory Impugns The Liberal Arts

I’m currently teaching a section of the Basic Principles of News and Article Writing course (ENG 316) at North Carolina State University. In a recent radio interview with conservative talk show host Bill Bennett our new governor, Pat McCrory, questioned the relevance of funding liberal arts education across the state’s 17-institution University of North Carolina system in the face of our 9.2% unemployment rate.

A report on the governor’s comments can be found here at the Raleigh News & Observer where over 300 online comments were received.

After posting their assignments to the course management system, the students read all 21 op-ed and voted for the top three that best exhibited the key points of an opinion column. The two students with the greatest number of votes from their peers would have their pieces published here at my Forbes.com site. I had one vote as course director. I couldn’t imagine a better gift to move up an exercise from my course syllabus to have the students write their own 500-word op-ed responding to this story. NC State is a member of the university system and the students in my class section are predominantly from liberal arts degree programs.

Their work was so uniformly excellent that four students tied for the top spot and two others were close behind in second place.

In yesterday’s class each of the finalists read their pieces to the class and we discussed the strengths and weaknesses of each. The students then voted for the top two pieces they wished to appear here (I had no vote in this polling).

One student, Luke Tompkins, was the first-place winner while two others, Susan Anthony and B-A Garrison, tied for second with seven votes.

So, I’ll be posting these three peer-awarded op-ed pieces on this website today. I encourage you to read them and kindly comment on one or all of the pieces. The students always get feedback from me but our readers here are so diverse and accomplished that I’m sure you can provide additional insights.

The links for the top three op-ed pieces will appear here as the day proceeds:

North Carolina Governor’s Intent is Good by Luke Tompkins

I also wanted to acknowledge the work of the remaining finalist, Stephanie Proaño, and the two honorable mentions, Jason Katz and Mary Jane Weeks. I have linked to PDF versions of their pieces as will be indicated below.