Happy new year, Tar Heels and friends! We are excited for the year ahead and the work we will do together over the next 12 months to support Carolina and its mission.
We want to start this year by highlighting an important announcement that was made last month and that headlined yesterday’s print edition of the Daily Tar Heel.
UNC-Chapel Hill is home to six area studies centers, all six of which UNC announced would be “sunsetting” in 2026 due to budget cuts.
These centers have been built up over decades and further UNC’s mission of being a global research university. The centers link students and faculty with colleagues around the world, and their closure would be a huge loss for the University. These centers serve the state in more ways than many North Carolinians know.
As described on the College of Arts and Sciences website, “UNC-Chapel Hill’s six Global Area Studies Centers provide services and resources for instruction, learning and research related to global issues, world regions and modern foreign languages. The Centers cooperate to better serve the University and public by hosting their own events as well as informing a wider audience about events, research, and funding through newsletters, event calendars, and social media. By pooling resources, the Centers develop programs that provide a deeper understanding of the world’s regions and the importance of international education.”
The centers in question are the Center for European Studies, the African Studies Center, the Carolina Asia Center, the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, the Institute for the Study of the Americas and the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies. Sunsetting these centers is a blow for UNC’s stature as a global university – a distinction that has made us a leader among peer institutions.
As highlighted in a 2020 UNC Global Affairs news story:
“Carolina is one of few universities to have five of its centers recognized as National Resource Centers by the U.S. Department of Education, a distinction that places UNC-Chapel Hill first among universities in the Southeast U.S. and sixth among public universities. Carolina is also home to one of 11 European Union Jean Monnet Centers of Excellence in the United States.”
Many in the Carolina community were angered by this announcement. A rally protesting the planned closure turned out hundreds this week.
UNC spokesperson Kevin Best told the News & Observer, “A working group comprised of staff and faculty identified the centers and institutes for sunsetting based on a variety of issues including their long-term financial viability.”
The outpouring of support for the centers and pushback on the University’s decision to close them leads us to question the extent to which widespread input was sought in this decision, though.
There is the additional concern that the centers’ closures are politically motivated. Per the News & Observer, “Project 2025, the wide-ranging far-right policy agenda laid out by the Heritage Foundation prior to the 2024 election, specifically calls on Congress to “wind down” area studies programs, Inside Higher Ed reported.”
The motivations for these closures are relevant to explore, but just as important is the fact that this is just plain bad policy and prioritization on the University’s part.
The Daily Tar Heel paraphrased the thoughts of UNC’s Burton Craige professor of political science Gary Marks, who co-founded the Center for European Studies in 1994 and served as its director until 2006, writing, “sunsetting of the centers would have profound effects on UNC’s standing among public universities. This will impact the University’s ability to establish itself in research spaces through statewide outreach and beyond.”
At the Coalition for Carolina, we want to thank the people who put in the hard work to create these centers. We know putting together thoughtful programs on a global scale is not easy. As Professor Marks told the DTH, “It took us a long time to create the institution and put a lot of work into that, but it’s vastly, vastly easier to destroy an institution than to create it.”
The work of Professor Marks and so many others does not go unrecognized by the Coalition for Carolina. Their contributions have made our University a better place. We are dismayed by this announcement, and we hope to see the decision reversed. Carolina should not abandon its commitment to being a truly global university.
If you feel as passionately as we do about preserving these centers, please contact members of the Board of Trustees to let them know your thoughts. The Board is expected to include this on their meeting agenda later this month.