Hello reader! Welcome back to Higher Stakes, your source for North Carolina’s higher education news. I’m Jane Winik Sartwell.
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This week, the UNC System’s Board of Governors, the governing body for all 17 of the system’s institutions, will meet virtually. The group will discuss, among other things:
Stay tuned for more in-depth coverage of the Thursday meeting later this week. For now, let’s look at what else people are talking about in the world of higher ed.
This week, Fayetteville State University is celebrating the largest private donation in its history: $6.5 million from an organization called Anonymous Trust, a low-profile trust in Raleigh that supports communities and education in Eastern North Carolina.
Fayetteville State University, under the leadership of Chancellor Darrell Allison, has been laser-focused on improving the school’s four-year graduation rate. When Allison took the job at the HBCU in 2021, the school had the lowest four-year graduation rate in the system, trending at just 19%.
“To be a part of a UNC System where your funding is performance-based, and the big measures are for your graduation rate and credit completion — and we were last in both of those categories in the system — we had to really think of something innovative,” Allison told me.
Here’s what the school came up with: a free summer school program to keep students in the classroom when campus is typically quiet — or “just crickets and frogs,” as Allison puts it. It’s part of a push to get students to graduate on time, an initiative dubbed 30-60-90. In recent years, that four-year graduation rate has increased to 25%. The school has an extended goal of reaching 50% by 2031.
In addition to Anonymous Trust’s donation, the new state budget includes $2 million in recurring funding for the 30-60-90 program. For a program initially funded with finite COVID aid, that’s a big deal. It will allow Fayetteville State “to permanently become a three-semester university (fall, spring, and summer) where summer semesters will be fully covered by the university,” the school said.
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“We are really, really, really, excited about it,” Allison said.
The dean of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, Raul Reis, stepped down last week. He led the school for four years.
This fall, Reis will take a leave to focus on research before returning to teaching in the spring. An interim dean for Hussman will be announced in the coming weeks, according to provost Magnus Egerstedt.
Actor and filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg is coming to NC State University on Sept. 18. He will headline NC State’s Human Factor speaker series in its second year. Hosted by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the series will focus on the practice of storytelling, of preserving those stories, and how stories can help solve societal problems.
“We’ll be talking about storytelling and why stories matter,” Eisenberg said in a video posted by NC State. “Unless of course you disagree. Then we can talk about why stories don’t matter. But either way, it’ll be a great time.”
Eisenberg’s event will take place in Stewart Theater. It will be followed by a collection of panels, workshops, and other events about storytelling throughout the school year.
Thank you for reading. See you back here next week.
— Jane Winik Sartwell
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