North Carolina was once the most progressive state in the South. Since the Tea Party swept the Legislature, the state is in a race to wipe out every last vestige of its social progress.

The Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina selected former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings as the president of the state system. Faculty objected, since Spellings has no advanced degrees or research or scholarship. It was a purely political decision.

Now the board, presumably with Spellings’ approval, has voted to abolish its Center for Civil Rights. This may be outrageous but it is also appropriate, since the very concept of civil rights has been downgraded in the state and by the Trump administration.

“After months of contentious back-and-forth, the UNC Board of Governors voted this morning to ban the UNC Center for Civil Rights from doing legal work on behalf of the state’s poor and minority populations. The ban would effectively neuter the Center from providing legal representation to those who cannot afford it—groups it has been advocating for since it was founded by the famed civil rights attorney Julian Chambers in 2001.

“Since then, however, the UNC Board of Governors has taken a turn to the right. That’s because board members are elected by the state legislature, which, since 2010, has been controlled by Republicans. In many ways, the reorientation of the board’s political makeup is a reflection of the state’s dramatic rightward shift over the past seven years, which has made its imprint on everything from the redistricting process to, now, the law school’s ability to sue on behalf of the indigent and the poor.

“The Center for Civil Rights is not the only progressively-oriented UNC body that has taken hit as of late, however. In 2015, the Board voted to close the law school’s Poverty Center, which, true to its namesake, focused on the state’s low-income populations. The General Assembly also recently slashed the law school’s budget by $500,000.

“The Center’s opponents say that it’s inappropriate for one body of the state, such as the UNC system, to sue another; proponents say marginalized communities that would likely be unable to afford legal support in civil rights cases rely on its work. Over the years, the Center has litigated a long list of cases that are almost all related to low-income African-American communities: school segregation, racial discrimination in affordable housing, victims of the state’s eugenics program, and more.”

In the perspective of the UNC, the poor don’t deserve legal representation, at least not legal representation funded by the state.

Let them eat cake. But they should pay for it themselves.