Thread: New UNC President has ties to ACORN

Ross speedily confirmed as President of UNC System, ACORN ties and all

Andrew Henson | August 30, 2010
Tom Ross

New UNC System President, Tom Ross

This is the first of a three part series examining the new president of the University of North Carolina Thomas Ross. Click here for part two.

At a hastily convened meeting on August 26th, The UNC Board of Governors voted to appoint Thomas Ross as the next President of the more than 200,000 students and more than 30,000 staff of the university system. While relatively unknown by most state residents, Ross is well known by the politically connected, especially those on the left.

A friend to many far-left organizations and a relative novice to higher education, Thomas Ross makes for an unfortunately predictable choice to be the next President of the University of North Carolina System. From a career in law to his seven years as Executive Director of the far-left funding mechanism - Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation - and President of Davidson College for three years, Ross is set to succeed current UNC President Erskine Bowles in January 2011. What is really alarming about the North Carolina Board of Governor's choice of Ross as the heir apparent is his long history of steering hundreds of thousands in contributions to dubious organizations like ACORN.

During his almost seven years as Executive Director of the left-wing, Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, Ross oversaw massive contributions to an enormous array of far-left liberal activist organizations. He took what was already a politically active foundation, founded by one of North Carolina’s most prominent families, and turned it into an active organizer and funder of the lefts political agenda in North Carolina. All manner of socially left organizations were on the foundation's dole under Ross's administration, including the radical and nefarious ACORN organization.

ACORN is an organization of community organizers with a tarnished history of fraud, embezzlement, and conflict of interest. ACORN employees have been tried and convicted of systematic voter registration fraud according to Factcheck.org. There have been reported cases of this kind of fraud in Missouri, Washington, Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and in 2007, ACORN's Las Vegas office was even raided by state criminal investigators. In addition to fraud, co-founder Dale Rathke was found to have embezzled nearly $1 million from the so-called "charitable" funds of his organization. ACORN had strong ties to President Obama, and was actively engaged, in conjunction with other groups of identifying and turning out Obama voters in NC and across the nation for the 2008 election.

This infamous organization was heavily funded during Ross's tenure as Executive Director of Z. Smith Reynolds. From 2004-2006, Ross pumped over $100,000 into ACORN. In 2007 alone, Ross's last year as executive director, he contributed an additional $150,000 to the ACORN organization, "for general operating support to support and expand its North Carolina ACORN chapters." These gifts were given with the explicit caveat that the money was to be used to foster local branches of this sort of community organizing planting roots in counties across North Carolina including Wake and Mecklenburg. Ross funneled this money via the American Institute for Social Justice, a sister organization that contributed $5.6 million to ACORN's coffers in 2008. This 2007 contribution helped to develop the infrastructure for a massive get out the vote effort to support Democratic Party efforts in 2008.

ACORN is only one example of the social leftist organizations that Ross heavily funded. Z. Smith Reynolds shelled out anywhere in the neighborhood of $16 million per annum during Ross's tenure to groups like pro-abortion activists Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America, the American Civil Liberties Union, and homosexual advocacy groups like the Rainbow Youth Coalition (RYC) and the Equality NC Foundation.

Another interesting tidbit was the vocational switcheroo that took place upon Ross's departure from Z. Smith Reynolds. The woman who succeeded him, Leslie J. Winner, was at the time the Vice-President of the UNC System. Three years later Ross is coincidentally elected as President of the UNC System; an interesting turn of events indeed.

After scrutinizing Ross's record, it seems clear that the UNC System is positioned to take a decidedly left turn, and the new President's credentials leaves much to be desired. One can only hope that the implications of his leftist background and being a neophyte to the realm of higher education won't be passed on to the hundreds of thousands of North Carolinian students he will oversee.

http://www.nccivitas.org/media/publicat ... es-and-all

Part 2

New UNC System President Funded Abortions and Gay Rights in North Carolina

Jessica Anderson | August 31, 2010

This is the second of a three part series examining the new president of the University of North Carolina Thomas Ross.
Part 1: Ross speedily confirmed as President of UNC System, ACORN ties and all

Thomas Ross, while the head of the Z Smith Reynolds Foundation, steered over $280,000 to Planned Parenthood from 2001-2007 and an additional $50,000 to NARAL Pro-Choice America. Both groups provide abortions and inevitably had the most to gain from the UNC system’s new health care plan, which up until last week included coverage for elective abortions.

Ross gave directly to such groups in the almost seven years he served as Executive Director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, a leftist foundation which gives hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to liberal activist groups that support abortion, comprehensive sexual education, gay rights and radical, third-wave feminism.

As Executive Director, he approved money for the Equality NC Foundation in support of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community, and projects like the Women’s Economic Equity Project. He approved $70,000 for the international non-profit IPAS, whose mission is to empower women by exercising their sexual and reproductive rights. Financially giving to groups like NC Lambda Youth Network, a “youth-led statewide leadership development network for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and allied (LGBTA) young people, ages 13 to 24,â€

Resources over Retribution: Criminal Sentencing under Tom Ross

Andrew Henson | September 7, 2010

This is part three of a series of articles with insightful commentary into Tom Ross, the next President of the University of North Carolina System. This installment looks at Ross's involvement with the Structured Sentencing Act as Chairman of the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission.

Twenty years ago, state prison populations forced the North Carolina Department of Corrections to effectively "legalize misdemeanors." Many existing prisoners were released to be free long before their sentences had required.

To respond to the matter of justice in our legal system, the General Assembly and Chief Justice Jim Exum looked to Tom Ross to chair the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission. This commission's objective was to develop a system of sentencing that brought a jurisprudence of calculated pragmatism through handling the problem of overcrowding prisons from the "front end." 1

The proposal of the commission initiated a shift in the philosophy of sentencing prisoners to prioritize prison resources over the justice of retribution, diminishing the severity of sentences when overcrowding would result, and not considering expanding prison facilities. This was a part of what would later be known as the Structured Sentencing Act.

The state responded to prison overcrowding with efforts to cap the prison system population in 1986. This created a de facto method of controlling prison population, but a method that sacrificed justice and equity in the process. With the prison populations set at an immutable limit, the burden of overcrowding was passed on to the Department of Corrections, which was forced to parole prisoners far earlier than they deserved, thus "undermining the integrity of punishment". Sentences had little predictability or meaning, offenders served only a fraction of their sentences, [and] misdemeanants rotated in and out of prison."2

The commission was created in 1990 to tackle this legal system crisis. With Ross at the helm of the commission, the general philosophy, "envisioned a system in which criminal justice policies and resource considerations were tied together."3 Instead of retributive justice, punishing criminals with the active jail sentences they earned, bed space available became a key consideration.

The General Assembly encouraged this miserly attitude towards the justice system. Members of the commission, including a few of the legislative members, voiced concern of the lack of political will to increase Department of Correction appropriations. A recent prison bond that passed by a slim margin in a public referendum substantiated these claims. Thus, the commission proposed a plan to the General Assembly that kept expenditures at their current operating capacity so as not to incur additional costs.

Ross submitted the final proposal to the General Assembly, which included a massive reduction in the severity of punishments across the board. Certain felonies permitted a non-prison option of sentencing that previously required an extensive prison sentence. All sentence terms irrespective of the severity of the crime were reduced by 17.3 percent, and an additional 10 percent was chipped off of B and D category felony sentences (which includes such crimes as inflicting "serious, debilitating, long-term injury on another," among others). The rollback of punishments revealed a true leniency on crime and a perverted philosophy of jurisprudence, which championed political expediency over justice.

The proposal was so contentious that a number of members of the board could not stomach the effects that such a proposal would have on the judicial system. For these members, "the emphasis on resource allocation and capacity was unpalatable." These members submitted a minority report to the General Assembly in protest of the former proposal. This minority report, however, was summarily overlooked.

The legislation passed easily through the House and Senate and became known as the Structured Sentencing Act of the 1993-1994 Session. Ross went on to be heralded by Governing Magazine as one of the Top 10 National Public Officials of the year, and was lauded with numerous accolades for his work in solving the overcrowding crisis, despite the profound tone of leniency engendered by his work.

The work of the sentencing commission lives on in the fiscal notes that are now prepared for changes that affect punishments for criminal acts. Also a new government bureaucracy was established, the NC Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission, which studies the criminal and prison population and makes recommendations. It maintains the models that predict prison population. One of the good things that structured sentencing did was to end the practice of parole where a group of political appointees would determine if someone was to be released from prison before the completion of their prison term.

1. http://www.nccourts.org/Courts/CRS/Coun ... ug2009.pdf
2. http://www.jstor.org/pss/20639659
3. http://www.nccourts.org/Courts/CRS/Coun ... ug2009.pdf
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