Category: Free Speech

No Joking Matter, Mr. Speaker

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As UNC students were being removed from the North Carolina House gallery last week for protesting against gun violence, Speaker Tim Moore laughed, joked that the protesters must secretly be Duke students and quipped; “This is not a pep rally.”  

They know that, Mr. Speaker.

The next day, the campus was on lockdown again. Another man with a gun was on campus. Students hid under desks, and faculty and staff sequestered in dark offices to the sound of sirens and helicopters.  

Speaker Moore’s response? He questioned why the campus is a gun-free zone.

“You’re not just going to snap your fingers and get rid of guns,” he said. “That’s not reality; criminals are going to have guns. And the best deterrent against a criminal with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

More guns and more jokes are not what we need, Mr. Speaker.

As we went on lockdown for the second time this month, we wondered: Would another member of the Carolina family be dead? Should we expect copycats or clusters? Are we doing better in our preparation than we were two weeks ago? Is this how we live on this campus?

Some of us have been with Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz during these terrible and terrifying moments. He feels the impact deeply. He knows how these incidents compromise the work of this institution and the well-being of those who work, live and study here.

He takes calls from worried parents, provides counseling resources for the campus and sits with grieving families.

Speaker Moore, you are supposed to represent every North Carolinian, not just those who agree with you on policy issues. Students were asking for action that ensures their safety on campus. That is no joking matter.

The Chancellor met the test of leadership. Speaker Moore failed it.

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

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

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

Defending Carolina’s Priceless Gem – Part 1 of 3

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Part 1 – Academic Freedom is the Foundation for Great Universities

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is the first 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.

Almost 700 faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill signed a statement in late April to express their opposition to recent actions of UNC’s governing boards and to recent legislative proposals in the North Carolina General Assembly. 

Some skeptical colleagues have questioned the rationale for this statement, and critics outside the university have asked why professors in Chapel Hill are so concerned about policies that seek to reshape the culture and faculty influence within a public university that serves people throughout our state and far beyond North Carolina. 

Are close-minded professors simply refusing to listen to North Carolinians whose beliefs may differ from their own ideas? 

Why did UNC Faculty Write and Sign a Letter?

I am one of the professors who signed the statement, so I would like to offer my perspectives in a three-part discussion of why the letter became timely and important for many of my colleagues who work and teach at our state’s outstanding public university.

As a longtime faculty member and a former chair of the UNC-Chapel Hill Faculty Council, I have often gained valuable insights from my conversations with members of our Board of Trustees, so my concerns about the actions of UNC’s governing boards and legislative leaders do not come from personal conflicts with any specific individuals. 

I nevertheless disagree with evolving structural changes in the traditions of shared governance at the University, and my critiques of recent interventions reflect my belief that the UNC faculty must expand our dialogue with both our own Board of Trustees (BOT) and with the Board of Governors (BOG). 

The recent faculty statement is thus part of an ongoing effort to sustain this dialogue, to affirm the value of academic freedom, to protect UNC’s national stature, and to continue the best possible institutional service to North Carolinians.

Faculty members from every school of the university (including more than 220 from the Schools of Medicine and Public Health) signed this public letter, which expressed broad concerns about threats to the principle of academic freedom. 

More specifically, the letter (1) opposed a legislative bill that would eliminate tenure in state universities; (2) criticized another bill that would create a state-mandated graduation requirement for a course on American history/government (with a list of required readings); (3) challenged the BOG’s restrictions on various strategies to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion; and (4) stressed that BOT and legislative interventions to establish a School of Civic Life and Leadership violate long-established academic traditions of faculty governance. 

In the view of most faculty who signed the letter, such interventions in the university’s internal management of academic affairs have become part of an ongoing transformation of academic freedom that seeks to limit the faculty’s control over decisions about professional expertise, academic curricula, hiring processes, and the creation of academic departments or teaching-research programs.

The Mission and Achievements of the Nation’s First Public University

Like most of my colleagues across the whole university, I am deeply committed to the mission and achievements of UNC as key components of education and democracy in our state. 

I have therefore always appreciated the statewide support for our excellent university system as well as the opportunity to serve on UNC’s faculty for more than 35 years. But I also appreciate how the struggle to establish and protect academic freedom has required a long-developing, endless campaign in our state and university.

The current faculty continue to build on (and benefit from) 20th-century efforts to establish tenure and academic freedom, so I signed the letter because of the past history of attacks on academic freedom, the present-day attacks which are linked to that history, and the responsibility we have to pass these freedoms on to future faculty and students at UNC.

As 21st-century faculty members, we are like runners in a long academic race, who have been given the vulnerable baton of academic freedom by our predecessors and who must carry this baton toward the next generation in the ongoing campaign for a democratic society. 

It is not simply a historical coincidence that authoritarian regimes always deny academic freedom and remove dissenting faculty from their universities.  Academic freedom is one of the foundations of a democratic society. 

In our state and elsewhere, the legislative campaign to control what can or should be taught about history or gender or racial identities is now spreading from K-12 education into the governance of our public universities. There is a long history of such interventions, however, and the troubling legacy of that history remains important for every teacher who seeks to defend public education in our own era. 

By Lloyd Kramer – Professor of History, UNC Chapel Hill

In other news, The Assembly reports on what might be a case of right-wing retribution at UNC Wilmington for someone who told the truth.

“Van Dempsey knew that talking to the press about what he described as a directive from his chancellor to give a big university award for education to a conservative could cost him.

The Dean of the Watson College of Education at University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) put both the school leadership and a member of the Board of Governors on blast earlier this month for both the award and the response to protests over it. 

He was right. Dempsey was removed as dean Monday.”

Follow this link to read more.

Coalition Survey Results

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We wanted to know what you think about what’s going on at the University of North Carolina. So, we asked you.

Almost 500 of you – 486, to be exact – responded to our online survey last month. Here is what you told us:

  • You see an inherent value in pursuing higher education, and you are extremely positive toward UNC.
  • You have deep-seated belief that the state legislature is having a negative impact on the UNC system.
  • You believe that professors, faculty, and administration – not politicians – should have the greater role in deciding public university curriculum.
  • You are paying attention to recent debates involving UNC, and you recognize the importance of our coalition.
  • A significant number of you are willing to take action in support of our university and our coalition.

We were struck by your high degree of interest and concern. The poll was lengthy – 33 questions, many with multiple parts. Despite the length, nearly every person who started the survey completed all the questions.

In the weeks ahead, we’ll share more insights from the survey with you.

The Truth Matters

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Once again, some members of the UNC Board of Trustees aren’t shooting straight with the University community.

This time, it’s about origins of the ideologically driven “School of Civic Life and Leadership” that the trustees rammed through – with the support of politicians in the state legislature – without informing and adequately consulting the University’s faculty and administration.

Trustee Perrin W. Jones from Greenville has twice written articles, the latest on May 22, claiming that the idea for the new school “goes back years—and has involved faculty input from the beginning.” (Link below.)

That is what Abraham Lincoln once called “a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.”

Here is what really happened.

Beginning in 2017, then-Chancellor Carol Folt and others at the University initiated discussions about a proposed “Program for Civic Virtue and Civil Discourse.”

But early conversations suggested that the goal was to create a new, donor-funded center that would explicitly embrace political, right wing ideas. Many faculty members strongly and vocally opposed that.

In 2019, Interim Dean Terry Ellen Rhodes announced the establishment of the Program for Public Discourse in the College of Arts & Sciences, to bring in various speakers and offer students a forum for debate.

Some faculty members still had questions and concerns, and a resolution to delay implementation of the program was presented to the Faculty Council.

The resolution failed, but that vote certainly didn’t represent faculty endorsement of the program. And the faculty clearly never endorsed creating a course-offering, degree-granting entity like the School of Civic Life and Leadership.

It certainly isn’t right to claim that what the faculty did then is an endorsement of what the trustees are doing now.

David Boliek, chair of the trustees, made clear the political purpose of the School of Civic Life and Leadership when he was interviewed on Fox News in February, introduced as someone “who helped create the school.”

He acknowledged “we have world-class faculty” at Carolina, but added, “We however have no shortage of left-of-center or progressive views on campus, like many campuses across the nation. But the same really can’t be said about right-of-center views. So this is an effort to try to remedy that.”

Now, legislators want to spend $2 million in taxpayer money on the school in each of the next two years – to promote “right-of-center” viewpoints.

Trustees and legislators shouldn’t be creating new degree programs and deciding what is taught at public universities like UNC, especially if the motivation is purely political. Whatever motivated the board of trustees, the process they deployed wound up shutting out the faculty and administration.

Further, we don’t know if a Faculty and Administration designed and implemented School of Civic Life and Leadership is a good idea or not.  Certainly, if its purpose is to promote a particular political agenda and viewpoint it is not.

Faculty members are reliable, professional and have been proven leaders for decades.  That is a major reason that Carolina is great. Any new program must include the faculty and administration from the beginning.

That didn’t happen here.

No “specious and fantastic arrangement of words” can prove this horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.

Jones article: https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2023/05/the-true-story-of-unc-chapel-hills-new-school/

Watch the Boliek interview on our March 2 post: https://coalitionforcarolinafoundation.org/the-gop-playbook-for-intervening-in-higher-education/

Carolina First

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In the 18 months since the Coalition for Carolina was formed, more than 22,000 people have joined our email and social media networks.

We are alumni, friends, family, faculty, students, staff and supporters of the University. Many of us live in North Carolina, and others live in Utah, Maine, Florida, New York, other states, and overseas.

Check out a partial list of our supporters here: https://coalitionforcarolinafoundation.org/

We are Republicans, Independents and Democrats.

We want what is best for Carolina.

Yet, one member of the UNC Board of Trustees continues to attack us on Twitter, on Facebook and in paid newspaper ads.

He claims that our coalition’s “sole purpose is to try to convince North Carolinians that Republican-appointed trustees are hell-bent on destroying the university.”

He is wrong.

What we want is for members of the Board of Trustees – whatever their party or ideology – to put Carolina first.

We want the trustees to embrace and work within the shared governance model that has served Carolina for decades.

We want trustees to advocate for adequate faculty compensation and badly needed repairs and renovations.

We want the trustees to protect tenure – and academic freedom.

We want the trustees to protect Carolina’s accreditation.

We want the trustees – and politicians in Raleigh – to stop meddling in the University’s day-to-day workings.

We want the trustees to stop ambushing the Chancellor and faculty with poorly conceived, ideologically driven new departments and schools.

We want good governance and a spirit of cooperation among trustees, the administration, faculty, students and, yes, alumni.

That spirit is the Carolina Way.

It serves the University far better than shrill partisanship.

Let’s put partisan politics last and Carolina first.

Roger Perry Responds to Trustee’s Attack

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Marty Kotis of Greensboro, a current trustee of UNC-Chapel Hill, last week published an attack on me, the Coalition for Carolina and the University itself. You can read it here.  https://nsjonline.com/article/2023/04/kotis-the-hypocrisy-of-the-coalition-for-carolina/

When I had the honor of serving on the Board of Trustees (2003-2011), trustees put party, politics and personalities aside. We put the University first. Times certainly have changed.

I feel compelled to correct statements Marty made that aren’t true. Marty said I am a Democrat. No, I have been a registered unaffiliated voter for a number of years.

He said our coalition is a partisan vehicle. No, we are Democrats, Republicans and Independents.

He said the University, its administration and former trustees mismanaged finances and failed students and the State of North Carolina. No, that is demonstrably false.

He is correct that when I was a trustee and board chair (2007-2009), Carolina faced severe budget challenges. That’s because the legislature imposed draconian budget cuts on all universities after the 2008 recession. We overcame that challenge. Carolina became one of the nation’s top five university recipients of federal research dollars, $2 billion in revenues. We attracted faculty members who do groundbreaking research that fights AIDS, Covid, genetic diseases like Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and other diseases. 

We worked across party lines to secure permanent funding for the Lineberger Cancer Center, which has saved countless lives of North Carolinians and their families. We funded the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), which brings together researchers, government, and industry to develop and deploy advanced technologies that enable research discoveries and practical innovations.

Applications for admission to UNC have soared in the last two decades. Over 57,000 students applied for 4,800 slots in the Class of 2026. These students and their parents don’t think Carolina is failing.

The bipartisanship – truly, the nonpartisanship – behind that success is jeopardized by partisan attacks like Marty’s.

His is part of a national pattern of far-right political attacks on public universities, led by Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Greg Abbott of Texas. Marty’s essay ran in the North State Journal, a conservative publication with close ties to the public relations firm that he and the trustees hired, apparently to attack our Coalition.

They won’t stop us from shining a light on what several of the current trustees are doing. Instead of supporting and advancing the University, they are sowing disruption and disrespect.

Our audience includes thousands of people – Democrats, Republicans and Independents – who are concerned about political interference at Carolina. One example: The legislature has taken away the power of the Governor of North Carolina to appoint any trustees at any university. Why? Because he’s a Democrat. Elected officials certainly should have a voice in the University. But legislators represent 170 separate districts. The governor, Democrat or Republican, represents the whole state.

Historically, UNC has been served well by shared governance: trustees, administration, faculty and student leaders working together. Today, we see pure politics, not good governance.

Our Coalition will stand up to political attacks. We will stand up for the University’s independence and academic integrity. We will stand up for the light that is the University of North Carolina.

Roger Perry

Is the UNC System Headed Down a Dangerous Path?

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That is the question pondered by Inside Higher Ed. The piece begins like this; “The University of North Carolina system is grappling with accusations of partisan overreach by state legislators and their governing board appointees, fueling concerns that the system is headed down a dangerous path.” Inside Higher Ed goes on to describe several concerning governance incidents as it incorporates responses from interviews held with several people.  Here are a few comments from those they interviewed:

Regarding the “compelled speech” resolution recently passed by the Board of Governors:

  • “Nathan Grove, a chemistry professor at UNC Wilmington and the chair of the campus’s Faculty Senate, said that vote served as a wake-up call for him and his colleagues. They saw it as a sign that the Board of Governors, which was “usually pretty hands-off,” he said, could take “a more heavy-handed approach” on certain issues. Worse, Grove said, the decision was based on a misunderstanding.”
  • “Art Pope, a member of the Board of Governors since 2020 and a prolific Republican donor, denied that the compelled speech vote was motivated by politics.”
  • “Jane Stancill, the system’s vice president for communications, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed that the “policy revision” banning compelled speech is ‘content neutral’.”

The Inside Higher Ed piece also reflects on other periods when UNC System governing bodies engaged in overreach. They cite the 2015 “shut down [of] a center on poverty and opportunity at UNC Chapel Hill”(along with other centers), the Nikole Hannah-Jones debacle, former president Tom Ross being pushed out of his job, and more. Paul Fulton was interviewed and here is part of what he said:

“Paul Fulton, a former member of the Board of Governors from 2009 to 2013, said he doesn’t think UNC has quite reached the tipping point, but he is increasingly concerned about the future of what he calls ‘one of our state’s greatest assets.’ ‘We’re a resilient system, and we’re nowhere near the Florida or Texas level [of political influence],” he said. “But we do have a hint of that nowadays. And it is worrisome’.”

The Inside Higher Ed article is comprehensive, excellent, and well worth your time to read in entirety.  Follow this link to access the full article.

In addition to being interviewed by Inside Higher Ed this week, Paul Fulton wrote a response to an opinion piece in The Pilot about the proposed new school of  “School of Civic Life and Leadership”.  The writer incorporated personal projection, misinformation, and mischaracterizations in The Pilot piece. Mr. Fulton sets out to correct the record.  Here is some of what he says:

“Comments in the media immediately after the board’s vote made it seem like a done deal.

But the chancellor made it clear the faculty – as always – will build the curriculum.

‘Any proposed degree program or school will be developed and led by our faculty, deans, and provost. Our faculty are the marketplace of ideas and they will build the curriculum and determine who will teach it,’  Guskiewicz said in his campus message.

‘I will be working with our faculty to study the feasibility of such a school and the ways we can most effectively accomplish our goal of promoting democracy in our world today,’ he said.

That work can take years.

There’s a reason faculty shape the curriculum. I spent eight years on the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees. And believe me, they [the faculty] are the experts – you do not want trustees shaping or dictating curriculum.

…

So yes, UNC-Chapel Hill welcomes robust debate. No, there is no evidence that it’s a center of liberal indoctrination. No, a final decision has not been made on the School of Civic Life and Leadership. And yes, faculty will continue to have a strong role shaping any such school.”

Follow this link to read all of what Paul had to say.

The GOP Playbook for Intervening in Higher Education

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Yes. There appears to be a national playbook for the egregious governance overreach happening at Carolina. 

The Chronicle of Higher Education obtained, through public-records requests and which have not been previously reported, emails which … “shine light on an increasingly popular mode of intervention into public higher ed. In establishing the Hamilton Center, Florida joined other states— Arizona, Texas, and Tennessee — that have in recent years given millions to fund civics-related units at state universities. Plans are underway for such a school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which some professors oppose. These moves have been inspired, at least in part, by criticisms that professors lean too liberal, that debate on campus is imperiled, and that teaching the foundations of Western thinking is no longer a priority. Those criticisms are all the more alive in Florida — a state with a governor who has warned against universities becoming “hotbeds for stale ideology” and recently announced plans for a host of reforms to the state’s colleges, including the imposition of a Western-civilizations curriculum.” Follow this link to read the entire article. 

(This video clip was first published by Fox News and can be found on this Fox News post.)

And, if Florida is the model, it will get worse for Carolina and colleges in the UNC system.

“In recent months, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has laid out a comprehensive vision that would place public higher education under extraordinary state control. A bill introduced this week would write that vision into law.

[Florida]House Bill 999 takes up almost every bullet-pointed goal that DeSantis included for public higher education in a press release last month. It would prohibit public colleges from funding any projects that ‘espouse diversity, equity, and inclusion or Critical Race Theory rhetoric,’ no matter the funding source; allow boards of trustees to conduct a post-tenure review of faculty members at any time for cause; and put faculty hiring into the hands of trustees. It also has new specifics DeSantis hadn’t proposed, such as a ban on gender studies as a major or minor. ‘This bill will be a gut punch to anyone who cares about public education in a democracy or academic freedom or the fact that our system of higher education is the envy of the world,’ said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors. ‘Because higher ed in America is organized around the fact that research and teaching and decisions involving research and teaching are best made by experts and scholars in the field.’”  Follow this link to read the entire article.

Don’t believe it can happen in North Carolina?  Not only is it happening, as cited above, with trustees overstepping their authority in instructing Carolina to create a new academic program promoted to right-wing media as a way to increase conservative faculty before even consulting/advising the faculty or the chancellor, but just last week the UNC Board of Governors made their move and it was reported by Fox News like this:

“University of North Carolina moves to ban ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ statements in anti-woke backlash … NC voted to ban DEI statements and compelled speech from admission, hiring, promotion and tenure … The University of North Carolina (UNC) moved against encroaching woke culture and voted to ban diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) statements and politically preferential hiring. UNC voted to ban DEI statements and compelled speech from admission, hiring, promotion and tenure at its Board of Governors meeting Thursday.”

Don’t like the direction this is heading?  Contact your legislator, trustees, and the Board of Governors members to let them know.

Other News:

Michelle Goldberg writes in a New York Times opinion piece; Florida Could Start Looking a Lot Like Hungary

“Last week, one of DeSantis’s legislative allies filed House Bill 999, which would, as The Tampa Bay Times reported, turn many of DeSantis’s ‘wide-ranging ideas on higher education into law.’ Even by DeSantis’s standards, it is a shocking piece of legislation that takes a sledgehammer to academic freedom. Jeremy Young, senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, described it as ‘almost an apocalyptic bill for higher education,’ one that is ‘orders of magnitude worse than anything we’ve seen, either in the recent or the distant past.’”   Read more here.

D.G. Martin’s opinion piece on WRAL entitled; UNC’s ‘Don’t ask; Don’t tell’ policy, begins with; “If UNC-Chapel Hill is to recruit the new school’s faculty “across the ideological spectrum,” it will have to inquire about prospective faculty members’ connections, something the UNC System’s Board of Governors has now prohibited.” Follow this link to read more.