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Scientists have identified an antibody that can protect people from COVID-19, its variants and other types of coronaviruses.... It is effective at both preventing infection and at helping treat a person that has already contracted Covid. The research team at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill (UNC) and Duke University, in Durham, says it believes it has found a key piece that can help combat the current pandemic and future virus outbreaks.

A federal judge endorsed the University of North Carolina’s (UNC) use of race as a factor in screening applicants after ruling that the university did not discriminate against white and Asian American applicants.No discrimination: Judge Loretta Biggs ruled on Monday that the UNC’s undergraduate admissions process had not been discriminatory toward specific race groups, reported CNN.The group Students for Fair Admissions alleged in its 2014 lawsuit that UNC deliberately discriminated against certain members by including race in its admissions process.According to the suit, UNC allegedly used “racial preferences in undergraduate admissions where there are available race-neutral alternatives capable of achieving...

On September 29, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) announced that it is investigating what it calls “egregious violations of principles of academic governance and persistent structural racism in the University of North Carolina System.” To do so, it has launched a special committee and will release its findings in early 2022. According to the AAUP’s press release, the investigation was prompted by the “widely publicized mishandling of the tenure case of New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones.” But there has already been a significant—one might even say exhaustive—investigation of that incident. Local and national media outlets of all...

US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a new coronavirus before the pandemic erupted, leaked proposals show. Last month, a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) revealed that an international team of scientists had planned to mix genetic data of similar strains to create a new virus. The grant application was made in 2018 and leaked to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group. 'We will compile sequence/RNAseq data from a panel of closely related strains and compare full length genomes, scanning for unique SNPs representing sequencing errors. 'Consensus candidate genomes will be synthesised...

UNC-Chapel Hill officials canceled classes Tuesday after police investigated multiple reports of suicide since the start of classes this fall. “We are in the middle of a mental health crisis, both on our campus and across our nation, and we are aware that college-aged students carry an increased risk of suicide,” UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said in a statement. “This crisis has directly impacted members of our community – especially with the passing of two students on campus in the past month.”

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is canceling classes on Tuesday to "acknowledge and reflect on the seriousness of mental health illness" after two recent deaths on campus, officials announced Sunday. The move comes after UNC Police investigated two suicides over the weekend, WRAL-TV reported. "We are in the middle of a mental health crisis, both on our campus and across our nation, and we are aware that college-aged students carry an increased risk of suicide," Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz wrote to students in a letter Sunday. "This crisis has directly impacted members of our community - especially with...

In a recent article for the Martin Center, Duke professor Mike Munger asked an important question: should “a political board composed of nonacademics…be empowered to evaluate faculty proposals on hiring and curriculum in the first place?” He argued that, in practice, boards have already ceded that authority. For many years, shared governance, at least on the issue of hiring and tenure, has been reduced to faculty governance. Evidence of this is readily visible. During the recent controversy surrounding Nikole Hannah-Jones and the UNC Hussman School of Journalism, faculty voiced their belief in the faculty-dominance model. Deen Freelon, an associate professor...

A decade ago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was engulfed in a sports scandal that made national headlines, brought down a chancellor who seemed destined for a lustrous career, and caused the school huge expenses in litigation and for public relations experts. For the Carolina faithful, those events are now just a bitter but much faded memory. The university has made the needed changes to avoid any repetition so everything is all right. At least, that is the conventional wisdom. One UNC graduate who has his doubts, however, is Andy Thomason, author of a new book, Discredited:...

Leaked Confidentiality Agreement Shows Moderna, NIAID Filed Covid Vaccine Candidate in 2019 A blockbuster report form Dr. Joseph Mercola has remained under the radar from the press. Even conservative and ‘fringe” outlets have barely scratched the surface of what should be considered a major scandal in the world of Big Pharm. Apparently, certain people at Moderna and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had knowledge of the coronavirus long before the rest of the public. They even had enough time to file an application for a coronavirus mRNA vaccine candidate in December, 2019. ...STORY AT-A-GLANCEModerna, together with...

About two years ago, I spoke to a class of UNC-Chapel Hill students about free speech: what it is and why it is important. I covered some basic points such as the kinds of speech the First Amendment does and does not protect. I also talked about the importance of respecting dissenting opinions, and how shutting down ideas is not the most effective way to get people to change their minds. To my surprise, several students stated that they believed that it was their constitutional right to prevent someone else from speaking, if they disagreed with what was being said....

Trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have voted to grant tenure to New York Times writer and author of the divisive “1619 Project” Nikole Hannah-Jones, amid backlash over her “unfactual and biased” work. The board voted 9-4 in favor of granting tenure to Hannah-Jones after a lengthy closed-session meeting on Wednesday, according to a report by the Washington Post. The vote comes one day before Hannah-Jones had originally been set to start working as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina (UNC)’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The...

The University of North Carolina’s board of trustees voted on Wednesday to grant tenure to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, ending a dispute that stretched on for more than a month. Nine board members voted in favor of tenure for Ms. Hannah-Jones and four against during a special meeting on the campus in Chapel Hill, which some trustees attended via Zoom. The opening minutes were livestreamed on YouTube before the proceeding moved into a closed session. Ms. Hannah-Jones, a correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, had accepted a position as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism...

A dispute over whether a New York Times writer should get tenure at the University of North Carolina would seem to be of little national importance. On one side is Nikole Hannah-Jones...creator of the Times’ 1619 Project. She won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for an extended essay, but some of her claims were debunked by historians and her push for rewriting American history is cited as a reason why she should not get tenure. Her chief critic is Walter E. Hussman Jr... As an evangelist for impartial, fair journalism, he is the polar opposite of Hannah-Jones and says he wishes...

Last week, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees came under fire for “viewpoint discrimination” over its decision not to offer tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, who will join UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism in July. An anonymous source reported that the decision was “a very political thing.” But politics needn’t have come into it at all. For one thing, the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees has a long history of granting tenure to left-leaning faculty members—if the political make-up of the school is anything to go by. But more important is Hannah-Jones’ own record. Her history of shoddy...

Members of the media and faculty erupted into histrionics at the recent appointment of Darrell Allison to the chancellorship of Fayetteville State University. It is a great scandal, they claimed; Allison “cut in line” cried the left-wing think tank NC Policy Watch; the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and FSU faculty senate questioned not just the process, but Allison’s qualifications as well. But, as the Martin Center’s Shannon Watkins demonstrated, the scandal is more optical than factual. Once again, supporters of a Republican appointee, by acting secretively rather than with confidence, gave activists on the other side just enough...

As was shown in the first article in this series, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is a misleading term, indicating a radical political agenda rather than a set of ethical principles. The second article analyzed a couple of specific examples of how DEI is being used to create political litmus tests for hiring and promotion at the University of North Carolina’s flagship campus at Chapel Hill. But Chapel Hill is not the only school in the UNC system that is pushing the DEI agenda. In this article, the third in the series, the Martin Center takes a cursory look at DEI...

The phrase “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” is a loaded one; it does not signify noncontroversial principles, as might be assumed, but instead describes a radical political agenda. Throughout academia, programs and standards based on DEI are proliferating at a rapid pace; this is, in effect, a surreptitious political takeover of the Ivory Tower by academia’s most radical and unhinged elements that has dire repercussions for our society. New directives mandate that, to be hired or promoted, faculty must adhere to—or at least meekly submit to—the tenets of this agenda. Faculty must conceal any reservations they have about the DEI philosophy...

Higher ed leaders love committees and training sessions. The technocratic mind that rules campus sees a problem and usually decides that the solution is more resources and education. Once the money is spent and the trainings, workshops, and seminars are completed, then the problem is solved. Since the police killing of George Floyd, colleges have issued apologetic statements about institutional racism and made grand resolutions to become “anti-racist.” It seems that spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives will continue to rise as they have in recent years. A Martin Center analysis has found that, at some of the largest...

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently released a report decrying the politicization of public higher education governance, entitled The New Order: How the Nation’s Partisan Divisions Consumed Public-College Boards and Warped Higher Education. The report says more about the tunnel vision that pervades the liberal media and academic establishment than it does about the real state of politics in academia. Politicization is indeed a major governance problem, as the report suggests. However, it is not, as the authors claim, a recent phenomenon resulting from Republican dominance in state politics, the Tea Party movement, and the surge in conservative populism. It...

“Sunlight,” Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote, “is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” Few aspects of the contemporary academy more need enhanced sunlight than the Title IX adjudication process, which operates almost entirely in the dark—even going as far as not publicizing the training materials that adjudicators used before the adoption of the new Title IX regulations. Providing only a beam of sunlight, however, can obscure as much as it reveals—as seen in recent litigation involving the University of North Carolina’s Title IX adjudication process. In 2016, the Charlotte Observer, the Herald-Sun, WRAL,...