Named after | Gov. James G. Martin |
---|---|
Formation | 2003 |
Purpose | Higher education policy |
Location | |
Methods | Public policy |
President | Jenna Ashley Robinson |
Revenue (2015) | $629,859 [1] |
Expenses (2015) | $651,393 [1] |
Website | http://www.jamesgmartin.center/ |
Formerly called | Pope Center for Higher Education Policy |
The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, formerly known as the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy and simply the Pope Center, is an American conservative nonprofit institute located in Raleigh, North Carolina. [2]
The Martin Center is one of several public policy centers underwritten by the John William Pope Foundation. [3]
The Martin Center changed its name in January 2017 and is named after former North Carolina Governor James G. Martin. [4] The Martin Center has attained the GuideStar Exchange Gold participation level, a symbol of transparency and accountability. [1]
The Martin Center originated in 1996 [5] 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. [6] In 2003, the then-Pope Center was incorporated as a separate entity.
The president of the Martin Center is Jenna Ashley Robinson. [7] The previous president was Jane S. Shaw, who retired in February 2015. [7]
The Martin 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. [5] The Martin 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. [8]
The Martin 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 of research, George Leef, has argued for cuts in funding for the university system generally, [3] and to eliminate the public subsidies for the state's scholarly press (the University of North Carolina Press), terming it a "boondoggle". [9] 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. [10] 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. [11] The Pope Center accused Nichol of partisanship and financial opacity. [12] In 2015, the UNC Board of Governors concluded that the center was unable to demonstrate any appreciable impact on poverty and did not enhance the educational mission of the university and voted to close the Poverty Center. [13]
The work of the Martin Center and its staff has received praise and support from other conservative or libertarian organizations and publications with an interest in educational issues. [14] The center has also been criticized by faculty in the North Carolina university system and from journalists and commentators outside the sector. [15]
As of 2021, the organization's board of directors includes Arch T. Allen, Nan Miller, J. Edgar Broyhill, Virginia Foxx, John M. Hood, Burley Mitchell, James G. Martin, David Riggs, Jane S. Shaw, Robert L. Shibley, and Garland S. Tucker III. [16]
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It is the flagship of the University of North Carolina system. After being chartered in 1789, the university first began enrolling students in 1795, making it one of the oldest public universities in the United States.
The University of North Carolina at Asheville is a public liberal arts university in Asheville, North Carolina, United States. UNC Asheville is the designated liberal arts institution in the University of North Carolina system. It is a member and the headquarters of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges.
The University of North Carolina Wilmington, or University of North Carolina at Wilmington, is a public research university in Wilmington, North Carolina. It is part of the University of North Carolina system and enrolls 17,499 undergraduate and graduate students each year. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity".
James Grubbs Martin is an American chemist and politician who served as the 70th governor of North Carolina from 1985 to 1993. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as the U.S. Representative for North Carolina's 9th congressional district from 1973 to 1985.
Stephen Wray Wood is an American politician who served as a Republican member of the North Carolina General Assembly representing the state's sixty-first House district, including constituents in Guilford county. Wood served eight terms in the State House from 1984–2005.
Margaret M. LaMontagne Spellings is an American government and non-profit executive who has been serving as President and CEO of Texas 2036 since 2019. She previously served as the eighth United States secretary of education from 2005 to 2009. After leaving the government, Spellings served as president of the University of North Carolina System, overseeing the seventeen campus system from 2016 to 2019. In June 2023, Spellings was named the new CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
The John Locke Foundation (JLF) is a conservative think tank based in North Carolina. The organization was founded in 1990 to work "for truth, for freedom, and for the future of North Carolina." It is named after the philosopher John Locke, who was a primary contributor to classical liberalism. JLF was co-founded by Art Pope, a North Carolina businessman active in politics. Pope's family foundation provides most of the support for the center.
The University of North Carolina School of Law, sometimes referred to as Carolina Law, is the law school of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Established in 1845, it is among the oldest law schools in the United States and is the oldest law school in the state of North Carolina.
Thomas Harrison Fetzer Jr. is an American politician and lobbyist who served three two-year terms as Mayor of Raleigh, North Carolina from 1993 to 1999. He was chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party from 2009 to 2011.
The UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media is a nationally accredited professional undergraduate and graduate level journalism school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The school, founded in 1950, is ranked competitively among the best journalism schools in the United States. The school offers undergraduate degrees in media & journalism as well as advertising & public relations. It offers master's degrees in journalism, strategic communication, and visual communication and doctoral degrees in media & communication.
The Black Student Movement (BSM) is an organization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is the second largest student-run organization and one of the largest cultural organizations on the school's campus. The organization was created on November 7, 1967 to combat problems of black recruit, admissions, and integration on UNC-CH campus.
The James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, often called simply the James Madison Program or the Madison Program, is a scholarly institute within the Department of Politics at Princeton University espousing a dedication "to exploring enduring questions of American constitutional law and Western political thought." The Madison Program was founded in 2000 and is directed by Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University.
Richard Lyndell Stroup (1943-2021) was a free-market environmentalist and emeritus professor of economics at both North Carolina State University and Montana State University. He was co-founder of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) and a senior fellow. He was also a research fellow at the Independent Institute, adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, and a member of the Mont Pèlerin Society. At Montana State University, he served as head of the Department of Agricultural Economics & Economics from 2003 to 2006. Stroup was director of the Office of Policy Analysis in the U.S. Department of the Interior from 1982 to 1984.
Jane S. Shaw (also Jane Shaw Stroup) is an American free-market environmentalist, editor, and journalist. She is the former president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and currently is chairman of its board of directors. She is a free-lance editor and manages two blogs, Janetakesonhistory.org. and libertyandecology.org.
James Arthur Pope is an American businessman, attorney and former government official. Pope is the owner, chairman and CEO of Variety Wholesalers, a group of 370 retail stores in 16 states. He is also the president and chairman of the John William Pope Foundation. He previously served in the North Carolina House of Representatives and recently served as the Budget Director for North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory.
The John William Pope Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) private charitable foundation based in Raleigh, North Carolina, that contributes to conservative public policy organizations and think tanks, educational institutions, humanitarian charities, and the arts. Art Pope, a businessman and philanthropist, is the current president and chairman of the board of directors.
David Riggs is the vice president of philanthropic strategy at Philanthropy Roundtable. He is the former vice president of the John William Pope Foundation.
Jeanette Marie Boxill is an American academic who was Senior Lecturer in Philosophy (ethics) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was also Chair of the Faculty and Director of Parr Center for Ethics. Her writing and teaching relate broadly with ethical issues in social conduct, social and political philosophy, feminist theory, and ethics in sports. She is editor of Sports Ethics: An Anthology and Issues in Race and Gender. She is past president of the International Association for Philosophy in Sport, serves on the board of the NCAA Scholarly Colloquium Committee, and chairs both the 2011 NCAA Scholarly Colloquium and the Education Outreach Program for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). For 25 years, Boxill was the public address announcer for UNC women's basketball and field hockey. She is a member of numerous professional associations and has won a number of awards for teaching and professional contributions. She resigned from UNC in 2015 in the wake of the UNC Chapel Hill academics-athletics scandal.
Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones is an American investigative journalist, known for her coverage of civil rights in the United States. She joined The New York Times as a staff writer in April 2015, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020 for her work on The 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones is the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at the Howard University School of Communications, where she also founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy.
John A. Parnell is a professor of Management and Eminent Scholar in Business at the University of North Alabama. He held the William Henry Belk Chair of Management at the University of North Carolina, Pembroke from 2002 to 2019, where he also served as Interim Dean at the UNCP School of Business during the 2014–2015 academic year.