Critical Race Theory, CRT, Critical Theory or whatever they are calling it these days, is not being taught in NC public schools. North Carolina public universities are not being used for liberal indoctrination, socialist indoctrination, woke indoctrination, or any of the other scary indoctrinations some people are trying to get North Carolinians and Americans to believe is happening. What is being done is propagandists, and people with ideological agendas, are using these terms to divide Americans in order to pave the way to power, censorship, and control over our current freedoms.
Those driving the division cherry pick examples in order to convince readers, and listeners, that scary “indoctrinating” and “critical” teachings are real. Two of these scare pieces were recently sent to us. (We will not link to them so as not to further spread the “alternative facts” and misinformation.) One of the pieces uses examples from UVA to try and make their case. The other is written by someone who scoured the course list of NC universities to find courses that deal with race and/or diversity. They then categorized these courses as being related to, what they call, “critical theory”. The writer concludes with their real goal; “more control” is needed to stop these courses from “indoctrinating”.
We’re seeing what “more control” looks like with books being banned, Pulitzer Prize winning professors being denied tenure, and other authoritarian type laws and actions being implemented. Don’t fall for the deception. The propagandist vision for America is the antithesis of American democracy.
What should Americans and North Carolinians believe? The facts. They speak for themselves. We asked former UNC-CH Chancellor Holden Thorp about such indoctrination scare tactics and he gave a very thoughtful, fact-driven common-sense response. Check out his remarks in the accompanying video.
Coalition for Carolina: Some say that schools like UNC-CH churn out liberals, is that true?
Former Chancellor Thorp: Well, I used to always say about this, if the goal of the University was to get more Liberals in the world, they’re doing a pretty lousy job because North Carolina is a conservative state, and it’s probably the case that the alumni are more conservative than Liberal by pretty wide margin. And so to think that because College professors tend to be more Liberal than the alumni, that that is creating some kind of change in the ideology of the graduates. There’s no data that support that. And we have plenty of professions that lean one way or the other. I mean, airline pilots tend to be pretty conservative. I don’t get on a flight and say, ‘Hi, I don’t want you to fly my plane because you don’t agree with me about politics.’ So why do people say that about their College Professor? If more Liberals want to be College professors, then why is that any different from airline pilots or professional golf or lots of other professions that go to one side or the other?
What I think would be better would be to acknowledge the fact that there’s this difference and have an open and honest discussion about it. I’m not a fan of College presidents, for example, feeling like they have to look like they’re in agreement with both sides. That doesn’t help anyone. And for example, when you have controversial speakers, one of the things that happens is because the President might be trying to hide their politics and not wanting to upset their conservative stakeholders. They’re afraid to come out and say, Well, I disagree with this speaker because they don’t want to make their political constituents upset. So then the students and faculty correctly don’t trust them when if something happens, they say, Well, I didn’t agree with this person, but I thought the University should be a place where they could give their talk. Well, that all happens after the fact. Why not say at the beginning what this is? There’s a great example of this. When Ahmadinejad gave a talk at Columbia, there was a huge controversy. And the President of the University said, I’ll tell you what, I’ll do the intro. And he got up and did the intro and said, I’m introducing this person who I think is a petty dictator.
And he said a bunch of other terrible stuff about him. But the guy gave his talk. It turned out to be bad. I mean, he was out of power very shortly thereafter. It was bad for him, good for the world. And it’s too bad we can’t achieve that more. But a lot of it comes down to the administrators trying to code switch between the board meeting and the faculty Council meeting rather than just being honest about their views with everybody.
Visit our YouTube channel for more of our conversation with former Chancellor Thorp.