Isn’t it amazing how people can make a career decrying poverty and end up collecting big bucks from taxpayers for not much work? Consider the case of University of North Carolina Law School Professor Gene Nichol, who teaches one course per semester, and pulls down almost $213,000 per year in that state-funded school, as a professor and head of the school’s Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.

Add in his wife, also on the UC payroll ay the medical school and Health Care System, and this fun couple pulls down over 600k per year.

The College Fix has the goods on Nichol, in an article by Lauren Dooley, and it makes for educational reading on the nature of liberalism. You get to cloak yourself in righteousness and lead a cush lifestyle on the taxpayers’ dime if you play your cards right in the academic world. Shades of Paul Krugman. 

Nichol doesn’t confine himself to a classroom:

…in the past he served as president of the College of William and Mary from 2005 to 2008, that is, until his contract was not renewed following a string of controversies.

Among them, he allowed a sex workers’ art show on campus and removed a cross from permanent display in the chapel of the historic Christopher Wren building, citing the facility’s use for secular events.

Prior to that, Nichol was the dean of UNC’s law school from 1999 to 2005.

Today at UNC, Nichol runs the UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, which was founded by the now-disgraced Democrat John Edwards. The center is a self-proclaimed non-partisan, interdisciplinary institute that aims to study and mitigate poverty in North Carolina and the nation.

In his leadership role there, Nichol is known to use inflammatory political rhetoric.

For example, on the center’s website he writes that “the scourge of debilitating poverty is the largest problem faced by the people of North Carolina – even if our political leaders ignore it, or declare, with a breathtaking stupidity, that it doesn’t exist.” North Carolina has a Republican-controlled majority of lawmakers.

It figures that John Edwards, who wrote the book about posing as a righteous warrior for the poor while getting rich and being a lying sleazebag would have founded thie center that Nichol now heads.

Hat tip: Michael Savage