The most annoying thing about this idea — even more than the squandering of taxpayer money to enrich the consultants who get to do the evaluation on the feasibility of turning NC Wesleyan into part of UNC — is the economic development rationale. Just as we keep hearing that building a new sports stadium will be a big economic boost for a city, we are told that dumping lots of taxpayer money into the creation of another low-level state university will pull up the economy of eastern North Carolina by the bootstraps.
Nonsense. A few people in Rocky Mount will profit nicely if this academic marriage goes through, but the notion that it would be a tonic for eastern North Carolina is fanciful. Drive just a few miles from Greenville, the site of the huge East Carolina campus, and you find poor people living in poor towns. If ECU hasn’t cured poverty in the region, why think that a much smaller UNC-Rocky Mount would?
Note also that this project is evidently driven by its supposed economic benefits with hardly any thought given to the educational merits or demerits. Is there any educational need for an expansion of college capacity in the area? If so, why wouldn’t NC Wesleyan and ECU take advantage of it and expand?
The Global Transpark was expected to be a great boost for eastern NC, but it’s a flop. There have been plenty of other government projects that were supposed to revitalize areas and have flopped. Here’s the root of the problem — when people get to play around with taxpayer money, they don’t bear the cost of being wrong. Big dreams just sail through without hard scrutiny when the taxpayers will eat the loss. That’s why we should keep politics out of education, transportation, and just about everything else.
