John,
This is going to be another long one—I’ve been trying to be better about keeping these short for you, but sometimes we just need to talk about ideas that are too big for that. I hope you’ll stick around to the end, because this is a topic that matters, but if you’re in a hurry this morning, no worries, and I appreciate any support you can give our campaign.
At the beginning of November 1789, our young country was still very much finding its feet. Peace and independence had been secured from the British only a few short years earlier, and the American experiment in democracy was just getting underway. I think it must have been an exciting time for our state—we were laying the cornerstones of our future, our course had not yet been set, and anything must have seemed possible.
It’s always struck me as incredible that one of the first things our leaders did, one of their top priorities for our state, was public education. In fact, at the beginning of November 1789, on the second day of the month, the nascent General Assembly passed an act establishing the University of North Carolina—nearly three weeks before we got around to ratifying the United State Constitution.
That says a lot about their priorities, and over the next few centuries, the UNC system and its seventeen campuses rose to become the crown jewel of a public education system that for much of our history has been the envy of the entire nation. If you wanted to make something of yourself in America, you could pay a whole lot of money and go to a prestigious ivy league school like Harvard or Yale or Princeton, sure. But our leaders wanted our people to have a better option.
Our leaders said that if you were smart and you worked hard, you could get an equally good and equally prestigious education right here, at a North Carolina Public University, without needing to be part of the wealthy élite or taking on a lifetime of debt.
And that’s down to those early founders deciding from day one that in our state, in North Carolina, education should be a public good. That’s pretty remarkable, don’t you think?
But the recent past hasn’t been so rosy.
Over the last decade of Republican governance in our state, legislative leaders have been partaking in a heist—the theft of our education system’s crown jewel. Through mismanagement and power grabs, they’ve slowly chipped away at the UNC system’s autonomy and its ability to do good for our people.
