Month: July 2023

Texas A&M Shares UNC’s Shame

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Dr. Mimi Chapman is a professor at UNC’s School of Social Work. She joined the faculty in 2001 and was Chair of the Faculty from 2020 to 2023. She is a co-founder of the Coalition for Carolina.

As a frequent flyer, I’m well-versed in the virtues of various airlines. I’m an expert packer, ready to fly on a dime. Before the pandemic, I was on a plane twice a month or more, sometimes heading a few states over and sometimes to the other side of the world. Our family portfolio includes airline stock, so I keep up with the industry’s ups and downs. 

But never, even if I flew my own plane, would I call the airlines and tell them how to hire, fire, recruit, promote, assign and evaluate their pilots.

Yet, that is exactly what is happening in public higher education. Now, Texas A&M has joined UNC in the academic hall of shame. Just like here two years ago, a Black female journalist was recruited, then given the bait-and-switch to a much less stable employment status.

In the summer of 2021, I was finishing the first year of a three-year term as Chair of the Faculty at UNC Chapel Hill.  Pockets of post-pandemic normalcy were springing up: small indoor dinner parties, an occasional in-person meeting.

As someone who read The 1619 Project cover to cover when it first appeared in The New York Times Magazine, I was delighted to learn that Nikole Hannah-Jones would be joining our faculty.

In April, we heard that she would join us on a five-year, fixed-term contract. But in May, I learned that the situation was more complicated; she’d been approved by the faculty for tenure, but she couldn’t get a vote from our Board of Trustees, and therefore her offer had been changed from tenured to fixed-term.

Kathleen O. McElroy’s situation at Texas A&M is all too similar. A Black woman, a thought leader, a professor of journalism and media, writing in national publications about her views and scholarship, receives an offer inviting her to contribute to a program where she had come of age and launched her own career.

Student makes good, wants to give back to the place that gave them their start. An advancement officer’s dream. A feel-good story all around. Indeed, all of us get excited when thought leaders such as Hannah-Jones or Frank Bruni – who joined the university-that-shall-not-be-named down the road – join the academy.

I was more than a little starstruck thinking Hannah-Jones would be a colleague. Maybe we’d get to be friends? Gossip over drinks at the Carolina Inn? Would some stardust rub off?

But, behind the scenes, other actors were at work. Our trustees took the heat, but pressures came from interest groups, legislators and donors – all of whom believed they should have a say in how our campus does its work.

As I told our trustees at the time, the processes by which tenured or tenure-track faculty are hired are rigorous. They take hours of painstaking work. I calculated 170 hours for any one tenure decision, and that’s likely an undercount.

Reading of the trials of Professor McElroy, that difficult summer floods back: the hope, frustration and then disappointment. Students and faculty alike mobilized. The campus spoke with one voice. We moved the needle, and we were able to get Ms. Hannah-Jones the positive tenure vote she deserved. She chose not to accept it.

Seeing this again at Texas A&M fills me with sorrow. These women made plans. Resigned other positions. Prepared their homes for sale. Looked for new places to live. They were considering schools for children, saying good-bye to colleagues and friends in places they’d called home. They were excited about a new venture, a chance for a new kind of creativity in their work. Their partners or spouses were reorienting, supporting these smart, powerful women they love.

I wonder about people who demand that someone not be tenured or hired because their scholarship makes someone else uncomfortable. Do they stop to think of the human toll? Do they recognize that these women are not objects to grace the conference room table, but are accomplished people, with lives to manage and contributions to make?

Professor McElroy decided to return to her work at UT-Austin. She’s grateful, I’m sure, but perhaps also awkward. Do her colleagues at UT believe she no longer wants to be there? Will she feel at home again? What if UT hadn’t welcomed her back?

If the individuals who treated these women this way were treated the same way, I’ll bet that a river of grievance and head-rolling would roar down like a waterfall.

At UNC, the Hannah-Jones situation was not our first or last rodeo with outside political interference. They come fast and furious, sometimes bursting onto public view and always eroding campus morale.

We are hardly alone. Texas, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Georgia, Tennessee: the list of public higher education institutions under fire becomes longer by the day. But these controversies are not just headlines. The costs to the individuals involved – and to all of us – are steep.

The United States has the greatest university system in the world, responsible for scientific, artistic and economic advancement across generations. We know how to fly the plane, thank you. If you’re unhappy, let’s talk about it. If you don’t like the airline, choose a different one.

But unless you want me to pick your pilots, let faculty and administrators hire professors.

Dr. Mimi Chapman

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Related News:

In alarming and related news, Joy Alonzo, an expert on the opioid epidemic and a professor in Texas A&M University’s Department of Pharmacy Practice, was recently placed on administrative leave and investigated simply for raising questions about the political interference in higher education. 

Follow this link to read more about this incredibly chilling and horrific situation.

Who’s “Obsessed”?

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The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal has an obsession with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

In a July 10 post, the Center breathlessly declared, “Chapel Hill’s DEI Obsession Was Mandated at the Top: The Martin Center has uncovered a startling email from the chancellor’s office.”

In tones that echo UFO conspiracists, the post said DEI plans at UNC “may be traceable to an email sent on behalf of UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz in July 2020. The Martin Center obtained a copy of the email via a public records request last month and was startled to find an explicit directive that every Chapel Hill school or unit ‘submit measurable deliverables around diversity and inclusion initiatives’.”

Our response: So what?

DEI initiatives promote fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups that have been underrepresented or discriminated against.

Thirty years ago, as President of Sara Lee Corporation, Paul Fulton – one of our coalition’s founders and Chair of Higher Ed Works – wrote:

“What does strategic diversity really mean? I believe it means creating an environment that is attractive to and embraces a culturally diverse work force. It requires a management and peer attitude that recognizes that each employee has the ability to contribute to the enterprise, and that each has different needs and will require different types of support to succeed.

“The real goal of managing for strategic diversity is to enable all members of the work force, no matter who they are, where they came from, or how different they might be, to perform to their full potential. At Sara Lee, we see this as a goal that is absolutely consistent with our financial goals, because we must have the participation of all of our people if we are to continue to be successful.”

The Martin Center continually attacks our university. We eagerly await the day they say something positive about one of North Carolina’s most valuable assets.

Chapel Hill’s DEI Obsession Was Mandated at the Top

Defending Carolina’s priceless gem, Part 3 of 3

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is the third installment of a three-part essay by Lloyd Kramer, a professor of history and former Chair of the Faculty Council at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he has been a faculty member since 1986. You can access parts 1 and 2 at the links below:

Affirming Academic Freedom at the Nation’s First Public University

Some academic colleagues and some critics outside the university argue that professors would be more respected or supported in the wider society if they remained silent or simply spoke quietly to members of the legislature and governing Boards.

Critics of the recent UNC faculty letter, for example, argue that legislative and Board interventions are mainly taking place because our university’s governing officials believe that institutional neutrality has given way to liberal ideological conformity. The outside interventions, in this view, would mostly disappear if the faculty adhered more closely to what key state leaders envision as the educational purpose of the university.

The Justification for Faculty Action

People within universities have obligations to look for the truth and to teach accurate information, yet they also have the right to interpret that information in new ways.  This search for knowledge inevitably reveals complex information and creates debates about disconcerting truths that some powerful people dislike (the realities of climate change, for example, or the effectiveness of vaccines or the history of systemic racism or the anti-democratic meanings of election denialism).

Our knowledge is always moving in new directions, and people on all sides of the political spectrum are tempted to denounce scholars as “ideological” whenever they describe new knowledge that challenges widespread beliefs. There would be no reason for outside interventions if academic institutions could assure state leaders that the ideas of their faculty and students generally converged with the main beliefs of governing officials.

In the real world of academic life, however, professors and students often express ideas or pursue actions that some influential officeholders view as objectionable or one-sided, so critics of the university have decided that outside interventions are needed to correct academic imbalances and fix political problems.

Has the faculty letter therefore exacerbated a conflict that would go away if professors would stop speaking out or if they would change their behavior? This is the kind of question that Martin Luther King, Jr., eloquently addressed in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which he wrote after he was arrested in April 1963 for leading Civil Rights protests in Alabama.

Blaming People Who Protest for Causing the Actions They Dislike 

Birmingham’s city government and police forces were violently repressing the advocates for racial equality, and some local clergymen stated publicly that while the police interventions were regrettable, they would likely cease if the protestors reduced their public marching and stopped speaking in such challenging language.

The pastors suggested, in other words, that the protestors contributed to repressive public actions because they were pursuing actions that most of the state’s governing leaders disliked.

The significance of a faculty statement about academic freedom is by no means equivalent to King’s “Birmingham Letter,” but King responded to the pastors with insights that might offer useful perspectives for those who question the UNC faculty’s critical response to the legislative and Board divergence from the modern university principles of shared governance.

“We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension,” King wrote to his critics. “We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with…. In your statement” King continued, “you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion?…  Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock?”

Every strategic action carries risks.  But I think that almost 700 UNC faculty signed a recent letter opposing legislative and BOG/BOT campaigns to reshape their university because they see that the interventions continue to expand.

If silence is the only way to reduce or stop these interventions, then we need to ask if this strategy could become the faculty’s own version of academic hemlock.

Although no public statement can include all the nuances that may be needed to explain complex issues, I joined numerous UNC colleagues in signing the recent faculty letter because such statements offer an important (though modest) strategic action for defending the public value and cultural traditions of academic freedom.

By Lloyd Kramer

OTHER NEWS

Higher Ed Works:

Charlotte Observer:

Daily Tar Heel

URGENT NEWS – Legislature – Again – Politicizes UNC Board of Trustees

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We normally don’t send three emails in a week, but are making an exception to bring you timely news in hopes you can help make a difference with legislators.

The North Carolina General Assembly once again is poised to inject partisan politics into the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees.

The Senate is poised to pass a bill that will appoint as a trustee the chief political adviser to Senate President Pro-Tem Phil Berger.

James C. D. Blaine, II, of Wake County will serve a four-year term on the board.

We have nothing against Mr. Blaine personally. We do have great concerns that the legislature continues to stack the board with trustees whose main qualification is their political ideology.

This is part of an ongoing effort, including creation of the School of Civic Life and Leadership, to impose a right-of-center philosophy on Carolina.

Political interference like this would be just as wrong coming from progressive Democrats.

For decades, trustees put Carolina first and party last. The legislature and governor both appointed trustees.

But in 2016, the legislature took away the governor’s appointments. Why? Because he is a Democrat.

The legislature is putting Carolina’s reputation and its accreditation at risk.

Please help us by spreading the word to your friends, families and associates. Forward this email to them. Post it on social media.

Contact trustees and legislators. Let them hear your opinion.

Who is Jim Blaine?  Read our post from last year: https://coalitionforcarolinafoundation.org/who-is-jim-blaine-the-politically-connected-consultant-advising-unc-system-leaders/

You can support our Coalition’s work – and help us reach more people – by making a financial donation to our efforts. Click HERE.

Defending Carolina’s Priceless Gem – Part 2 of 3

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Part 2 – The History and Future of Academic Freedom at UNC

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is the second installment of a three-part essay by Lloyd Kramer, a professor of history and former Chair of the Faculty Council at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he has been a faculty member since 1986. This piece was first published by Higher Ed Works.  We have been granted permission to republish it in entirety. If you missed part 1 you can follow this link to access it.

Over most of UNC’s history there were strict limits on academic freedom and free speech, but these limiting interventions often surged in response to the campaigns of Black North Carolinians to achieve freedom and equality.

The history of attacks on academic freedom at UNC

  • In 1829 the African American writer David Walker (who grew up in Wilmington, NC) published an anti-slavery book entitled Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. When copies of Walker’s book began to appear in North Carolina, the state legislature passed laws that criminalized the distribution of “seditious” abolitionist texts.

    No teacher or student could legally distribute abolitionist writings in the state’s schools and universities before the Civil War. There was no academic freedom for faculty or students to use anti-slavery texts at UNC.
  • In 1856 a UNC chemistry professor named Benjamin Hedrick stated in a letter to a local newspaper (not in his classes) that he supported the “Free-Soil” Republican candidate John Fremont in that year’s presidential election.  Both the faculty and Board of Trustees immediately voted to fire Hedrick from the university for his “political” statements about slavery, though another faculty member – the biologist Elisha Mitchell – had previously defended slavery in his public writings. 

    There was no tenure to defend academic freedom or free speech outside the university. Mitchell spoke publicly on the same issue as Hedrick, but Hedrick was fired, and Mitchell was honored. Mt. Mitchell carries his name, and we still have Mitchell Hall at UNC.
  • As Black citizens asserted their rights to vote and hold public office in the decades after the Civil War, the early 20th-century state legislature enacted Jim Crow segregation laws that effectively prevented African Americans from voting and blocked the enrollment of Black students at UNC-Chapel Hill.

    Until the late 1950s, no department could appoint Black faculty members or admit Black students.  There was no faculty control over this aspect of faculty hiring or student admissions.
  • When the Civil Rights Movement gathered strength in the early 1960s, members of the state legislature charged that it was a communist movement. 

    The General Assembly thus passed a speaker ban law which prohibited campus talks by anyone deemed to be a communist sympathizer (meaning also Civil Rights activists).  Academic freedom and free speech were again restricted.
  • In 2015, as some North Carolinians began to call for the removal of Confederate statues and the renaming of university buildings that honored enslavers or Klansmen, the state legislature banned the removal of such statues from public spaces; and the BOT (after renaming one building) passed a 16-year ban on renaming University buildings.

    Angry protestors eventually tore down the “Silent Sam” statue, and the BOT later rescinded its ban on changing the names of buildings, but there was still no legal way for faculty, administrators, or students to freely alter Confederate symbols on their own campuses.
  • In 2021, the faculty at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media recommended Nikole Hannah-Jones for a tenured faculty appointment, but the Board of Trustees stalled the faculty recommendation because of political opposition to her work on the 1619 Project.  Like David Walker in 1829, Hannah-Jones described historical patterns of systemic racism, and some legislators sought to ban her book (like Walker’s book after 1829) from North Carolina schools.

    Although a small majority of the BOT finally approved her appointment, there was strong outside opposition to a faculty recommendation for hiring and tenure, and Hannah-Jones accepted an appointment at another university.

This history of restrictions on academic freedom and faculty control over academic policies (and I have noted only a few salient examples) suggests why the recent faculty letter condemned four proposed or enacted interventions in the sphere of faculty autonomy and expertise. UNC’s long history shows that such actions are now reviving past patterns of legislative interventions, which have always claimed to represent or protect the views of most state citizens outside the university.

Today’s faculty therefore honor the struggles of past generations when they reaffirm the long-developing principles of academic freedom and the hard-earned expertise of academic scholarship.

Current Threats to Academic Freedom and Faculty Expertise

UNC Faculty who signed the recent public letter have good reasons to believe that the University’s national reputation, evolving diversity, and future ability to recruit faculty and graduate students will be adversely affected by new legislative and Board proposals.

We are now regularly losing faculty to private universities because our colleagues (especially faculty of color) are deciding that the struggle to flourish at UNC is not worth the price in their professional and personal lives. 

My own department has lost two valued colleagues to private institutions over the past two years, and our departmental experience is not unusual. People leave for many reasons, but faculty of color feel especially drawn to other places during these times at UNC. 

Recruiting new faculty colleagues will be difficult, however, when job candidates ask about tenure policies at UNC or ask about the university’s future commitment to diversity or ask why the BOT is mandating a new School that was proposed outside the usual academic processes of faculty governance. 

The national standing of UNC is thus threatened in the academic world, so professors are responding with explanations for why they oppose top-down interventions that increasingly affect their professional and intellectual work.

Future Faculty and Students at UNC

We can’t know the issues or concerns that faculty and students will face in future decades, but we can safely assume that the struggle for democracy – and the struggle for academic freedom that helps to sustain democratic societies – will remain important components of their intellectual communities and public lives.

I appreciate the ways in which our academic predecessors challenged recurring attacks on academic freedom by establishing tenure policies, securing faculty control over the curriculum and professional hiring policies, and defending their expertise as scholars and teachers.

We stand on the shoulders of those who built the great system of public universities in the United States, but how can we be sure that these achievements and traditions will endure?

Future generations will look back at our own era to find historical patterns of hostility for university cultures and to look for reassurance in the power of enduring academic values. They will face similar or new challenges in their own time, but they will also be protecting an intellectual baton that was carried in different ways during earlier centuries (even in 2023).

All of us make mistakes, and we cannot easily see the problematic aspects of our own actions or cultures which future generations will recognize and criticize. But choices must be made, and we should take public actions whenever we can – though we never know where our actions may lead or how others may view what we have done.

It seems unlikely that the recent faculty letter will have much immediate impact on policymakers who are trying to transform UNC because they believe it is hostile to conservatism or to their own political ideas.

Some version of a well-funded, new UNC School of Civil Life and Leadership seems to be emerging, whereas academic tenure may well survive for an ever-declining percentage of future university professors. The recent faculty letter thus responded to present-day issues with a defense of long-term principles, but these enduring principles should remain influential in shaping institutional values, memories, and identities.  

By Lloyd Kramer – Professor of History, UNC Chapel Hill

If you missed part 1 you can follow this link to access it.