Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) is a HBCU struggling to justify its existence in the University of North Carolina system. It won’t help that the school has such ineffective oversight of long-distance calls that it paid for about $140,000 worth of calls to Senegal over a period of 43 months. The Raleigh News & Observer has the story.
Evidently, state taxpayers shouldn’t have had to cover this expense, but federal taxpayers should. The money, we learn was supposed to have come “from federal funds aimed at creating textbooks for students in Senegal.”
Why on earth does the federal government need to create such textbooks? Paraphrasing James Madison, “I cannot lay my finger upon the passage in Article I, Section 8 that gives Congress authority to spend money for textbooks at all, much less in foreign nations.”
I would hazard a guess that the phone calls are just the tip of the iceberg of waste.