Spellings as President of UNC resulted from the North Carolina Tea Party Taliban's (TPT) political purging within the UNC system. Art Pope, who functions as the chief stooge of those billionaire John Birchers, the Brothers Koch, led the effort to unseat the former UNC president, who was Democratic, experienced, and competent--three strikes against anyone running a public institution in line for corporate takeover.
Below is a clip from a piece in The Nation, which points out two of Spellings' most recent exploits after leaving the White House that made her resume even more attractive to the TPT:
Spellings went on to work in the troubled for-profit industry after leaving the White House—an experience, she told UNC’s board of governors, that taught her “a lot about how we can serve our students and think of them as customers in providing a product in convenient ways for them.” Beginning in 2012 she served on the board of the Apollo Group, the parent company of for-profit chain University of Phoenix. That “diploma factory” is now under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, in part for its aggressive recruiting of military veterans. Its online program has a graduation rate of just 7.3 percent, and the student loan default rate is up 5 percent from the national average.
Spellings also chaired the board of the Ceannate Corporation, a student loan–collection agency. It’s not surprising that she had connections there: During Spellings’s tenure the education department was accused of acting “as a wholly owned subsidiary” of the student-loan industry. Preying on student borrowers is lucrative business: profit margins for loan collectors average 30 percent. “Despite widespread calls to reform the student loan industry, Spellings and the Ceannate Corporation have simply profited off of it,” two UNC professors wrote in a recent op-ed. “Spellings’ defense of for-profit colleges [following her appointment] is perhaps just as disturbing as the predatory practices these institutions use to fleece students.”
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