Southern/Retarded

We're working on it......

Right time, right place for UNCC to grow in center city

As UNC Charlotte's commencement draws near, I take special pleasure in continuing my 16-year tradition of shaking hands with every graduate, congratulating each on a tremendous achievement. Earning a bachelor's, master's or doctoral degree is no small feat. That's especially true for working students -- and one reason why UNC Charlotte's recent announcement to build a permanent classroom building on Ninth and Brevard Streets is such welcome news.

Convenience, access, reliability and quality are important factors for working adults as they pursue higher education. An expanded UNC Charlotte presence will help create more avenues for center city's work force to pursue educational opportunities. What's more, a dedicated 100,000-square-foot facility will allow the university to allocate talent and resources to ensure a broad array of class offerings to meet the schedule demands of working adults.

Since opening its Uptown Center in 1995, UNC Charlotte has offered more than 600 classes, with a total enrollment close to 15,000. This year alone, nearly 1,400 students were enrolled in 68 classes offered in space at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design. In fact, many of this year's graduates in the MBA, Master of Health Administration and Master of Accountancy programs have taken one or more of their classes uptown. Other working professionals have enrolled in courses to secure professional certification or to pursue continuing education opportunities through certificate programs and classes.

Clearly, the need is there -- and growing.

However, that's only part of the story. As evidenced by new and planned condominium construction, center city is fast becoming a hotbed of activity. UNC Charlotte's future $40 million, five-story building -- strategically located in First Ward and close to light-rail transportation --will fuel continued growth, which bodes well for economic development. Equally important, the expanded presence of faculty and students will infuse even more vitality into Charlotte's center city, helping to support a truly dynamic urban core.

As a result, UNC Charlotte will play a key role in turning Center City Partners' and developer Daniel Levine's vision into reality, where center city and First Ward become a destination for people to live, work, study and play. Over the past 60 years, UNC Charlotte has played a vital role in the city's development, sometimes out front and sometimes behind the scenes. I am especially pleased the university will have such a visible impact on Charlotte's future -- and in the process, strengthen its connection to uptown. Within five years, UNC Charlotte will be positioned to serve as many as 7,500 students in the center city with courses in business, architecture, the sciences, humanities and other professional disciplines.

As my successor, Phil Dubois, noted at the April 18 news conference announcing UNC Charlotte's site location, higher education for nontraditional students must necessarily take a backseat to the demands placed upon them by work and family. For that reason, it must be not only affordable and of the highest quality, but more importantly, convenient. The collaboration with Center City Partners and Levine Properties to achieve these goals has been a textbook example in terms of how Charlotte gets things done.

 

Shit, y'all're Boston compared to Fayetteville.

or Chapel Hill.

 

Charlotte makes Asheville look like Boston musically.

 

I'm not insecure...I'm proud of my heritage, but am wise enough to know that we got our good and bad just like every other region/culture. Yin and Yang man....

I must call you on a few erroneous opinions you believe to be fact about the South (again, believing your own press is always dangerous no matter who you are).
The South is not poor....according to the latest census data, the poverty distribution is fairly equally dispersed between the North and South States that made up the original 13 colonies (of course WVA would have to be tallied with the northern states since it's creation was brought about by it's desire to side with the Union during the War of Northern Aggression). The largest growth in poverty is in the midwestern states south of I-40. So..."Southern" depends on your idea of what is and isn't "The South". And, you have to remeber, The War of Northern Aggression was brought on primarily because the Southern economy was much more robust than the Northern economy. This being primarily due to the fact that the South was, and still is to some degree, an agrarian society, with goods that were globally marketable, whereas the North, I'll remind you, was an industrial society that relied on the raw goods produced in the South to function. This fact prompted the Northern delegates, who held a majority, to tax Southern goods at rates greater than Northern goods. This unfair and inequitable taxation was the impetus that ultimately led to the Southern States' desire to exercise their right to secede from the Union and prompted the Northern Hostilities that led to war.

Educationally, the South has undoubtedly, the best Agricultural Universities in the nation (which would make sense since we were and agricultural society). So to say that our education system is poor here, is a statement based on your view of what constitutes educational importance.
And I have to point out that "quality" is a subjective term. I happen to think the food at the Coffee Cup is of superior quality to some I've had in New York. But that's purely an opinion...one man's trash, you know.
To make the claim that Northern cuisine is better than Southern really sorta misses the point that there is not really Northern or Southern cuisine....most of it actually originated in countries whose sons and daughters migrated here. So that's really sort of a moot point either way.

Your choice to home school your kids is based upon your opinion, it's not a verdict on the quality of education here. Just your decision.

All that said, there are those of us, born and bred in the South who are proud of our heritage and accept it for what it is...BUT we don't go banging our chests about it like some of you Northern transplants. We, quietly, go about our business in the tradition of true Southerners,and typically don't start hissing and rattling until some greenhorn starts poking us with a stick. So maybe you understand why the typical Southern response to your culture bashing is simply, "If you don't like it, go the fuck back home."

 

>>e poverty distribution is fairly equally dispersed between the North and South States that made up the original 13 colonies (of course WVA would have to be tallied with the northern states since it's creation was brought about by it's desire to side with the Union during the War of Northern Aggression)

Kinda interesting to skew it twice to your argument's advantage - one, using "original 13 colonies" as if that had any bearing on today, and two, putting WVa in the north for reasons that are as useless as limiting to 13 states born of colonies.

Plus, saying things like "war of northern agression" may as well invalidate the rest anyway. That the South economy in 1860 was better than the North's? No. By 1860, 1/3rd of the nation's total economy came from urban industrialization, of which there was very little in the south. Most of the money that was coming from farming had to go north to be processed into something usable, and the money remaining was controlled by the very few.


But this?

>>BUT we don't go banging our chests about it like some of you Northern transplants.

I don't get it. I mean, there are always going to be transplants who'll have a tie to their birthstate and identify themselves that way, but you'll never see anybody flying a Pennsylvania battle flag. I do kinda identify with the ideal of having a heritage that's of your family's home country a bit more than simply a region during a war, so I'm a bit more on the side of ethnic heritage being more important.

 

damn.

 

I don't even have pride in southen heritage as much as I don't like being called stupid for being from here.

 

Agreed.





And sorry GoldenHammer, I don't want to come down on you like I have an issue with the south. There are tons of great things about it, but I disagree with most everything you said. I mean, between things pre-CW, postwar, and the dust bowl/sharecropping times, there's a huge period of nothing but poverty for a great portion of people that surrounded themselves in agriculture, so while sadic's trying to be inflammatory he kinda has a point.

 

But, there was also poverty for those who surrounded themselves in the industrial revolution.