11/3 Letters: Community Voices forum ‘vital’

Regarding “Charter school forum focuses on 5 debate points” (Nov. 1): Kudos for assembling a diverse panel of opinions and experiences for the charter school discussion. I gained new insights and perspectives and feel better informed.

Please continue to sponsor and organize Community Voices. It is an increasingly vital tool to create public discourse in this age of polarization.

Climate education key

I read “It’s academic: Climate change, sea level rise?” (Oct. 22) with enthusiasm. It is so apparent that we are now faced with the consequences of climate change. We need these students, from a broad range of disciplines, to guide us in building newcommunities and rebuilding the destroyed communities.

Recently, Hillsborough and Orange County signed referendums committing to being fossil fuel-free by 2050. Infrastructure for new neighborhoods and businesses are being built and planned for continually. How fortunate that so many educational institutions are preparing future professionals to design and build our neighborhoods and businesses with the most advanced clean technologies. These architects, city planners and civil engineers will provide the means to protect us from the destruction of climate change.

I challenge all municipalities to hire professionals trained to help us build fossil fuel-free communities so that we can stop the progress of global climate change. I propose that all future building and repair be accomplished with a recognition of our vulnerabilities to climate change, especially on our coastline.

Integrity needed

As “Honor matters – but maybe not at Chapel Hill” (Oct. 27) points out, UNC-Chapel Hill avoided NCAA penalties by arguing, in effect, that any Chapel Hill degree might be worthless, not just athletes’. The writer says he is ashamed of the university, which speaks well for him. More North Carolinians should be.

It was less than 30 years ago that UNC system president C. D. Spangler Jr. observed, “Athletics and academics are in tension by the nature of their time demands, but athletics and academics cannot be allowed to be in conflict in a great university.” Spangler reported that although an investigation of N.C. State University’s basketball program had found no major violations of NCAA regulations, “the spirit [though] not the letter of the law” had been broken, since it was “clear that [NCSU’s] academic processes and standards [had] been misused in a number of instances to benefit some individual basketball players.’’ Consequently, Spangler asked for athletic director Jim Valvano’s resignation. That’s what integrity looks like. We seem to have forgotten.

This story was originally published November 2, 2017 at 6:00 PM with the headline "11/3 Letters: Community Voices forum ‘vital’."