Hell Freezes Over

[Valin]

Townhall:

Mike Adams

Jan 01, 2016

 

Some readers may have noticed that six months have passed since I wrote a column criticizing the whacky leftist administration at my university, UNC-Wilmington. I am happy to report the reason for the silence is that the wacky leftist administrators are now gone. In addition to that, on July 1st of this year our university got its first out of the closet conservative chancellor. You heard that right. UNC-Wilmington is now under the leadership of a conservative chancellor. And he makes no effort to hide it.

 

Jose “Zito” Sartarelli is just the man we have been looking for. Unlike me, he doesn’t end his sentences in prepositions. More importantly, he has business experience. He has it from the private sector and also from the within the academy – as dean of a large business school. This is very good news because we’ve tried putting social science and humanities professors in charge of universities and colleges. It doesn’t work. Their only qualification is their ideology. We need practical problem solvers, not ideologues. And we’ve got one now.

 

Some of us wondered how long it would take for Sartarelli to make a positive impact on our university. It took exactly minus ten minutes. Although he was not supposed to take office until 8 a.m. on July 1st, I got my first email from him at 7:50 a.m. It was sent with an attached letter informing me that an organization I advise (the SAE Fraternity) was being reinstated on campus after years of being banned. It was an important letter because the case had important First Amendment implications.

 

(Snip)

 

Just four weeks later, Sartarelli made another courageous move that enhanced the campus climate for free speech. Prior to Sartarelli’s arrival, the director of the Women’s Resource Center (WRC) was exposed for violating the Southworth decision, which governs the distribution of student activity fees. She had been consistently using university resources to promote the activities of the NARAL student group while denying similar requests from opposition student groups. Southworth said that such viewpoint non-neutrality in funding student groups violates the First Amendment. The situation needed to be addressed, not ignored.

 

Thankfully, the Sartarelli administration promptly asked for her resignation. When she refused she was terminated. Better still, the WRC was demoted from a university wide center to an office within the College of Arts and Sciences. It had been years since a UNCW administrator had been held accountable for violating the First Amendment. There was reason for optimism. But not everyone was happy.

 

(Snip)