We knew UNC was under attack.
Now we know it’s an attack on universities across the country.
It’s a well-funded, coordinated, nationwide campaign against diversity.
The New York Times has exposed the strategy – and the underlying bigotry – of the campaign, one conceived and carried out by a network of conservative donors, think tanks and political activists.
Read the full article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/20/us/dei-woke-claremont-institute.html.
Target: North Carolina
The Times uncovered a trove of documents, including a fundraising proposal that “set a first round of targets, in states including Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.”
The story reported that, in June, the North Carolina legislature “passed a law barring public universities and other agencies from requiring employees to state their opinions on social issues.”
In February, the UNC System Board of Governors prohibited the state’s universities from asking applicants for employment, promotion or academic admission to describe their beliefs on “matters of contemporary political debate or social action.”
Read more about the board’s action: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article276434291.html#storylink=cpy.
UNC’s controversial new School of Civic Life and Leadership – which powerful legislators and trustees pushed through without adequate involvement by the faculty – wasn’t mentioned in the article. But it reflects the national campaign’s goal of countering what conservatives claim – falsely – is “left-wing bias” on campus.
Heather Mac Donald
A prominent figure in the Times article is Heather Mac Donald, a critic of affirmative action and anti-discrimination efforts who spoke to the UNC Board of Trustees’ External Affairs Committee in November.
Trustee Ramsey White is the committee chair. Mac Donald was introduced by Doug Monroe, acting president of the UNC Alumni Free Speech Alliance.
The Alliance had hosted Mac Donald the night before, where she delivered a wide-ranging and free-wheeling attack on higher education. (Photo above.)
Mac Donald told the trustees’ committee that affirmative action had led universities to admit unqualified and ill-prepared students – a charge that was immediately challenged by then-Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz, one trustee and the student body president.
You can read more about her remarks at UNC and watch the video here: https://coalitionforcarolinafoundation.org/a-new-assault-on-carolina-is-happening/
The Times said emails from Mac Donald and others revealed “unvarnished views on race, sexuality and gender roles.”
That’s putting it mildly.
In one email, Mac Donald said gay men “are much more prone” to extramarital affairs “on the empirical basis of testosterone unchecked by female modesty.”
Last year, she wrote this email about a “curse of feminism”:
“As I was taking my evening power walk in the hood here (upper east side) and seeing all the nannies of color walking school children back to their apartments, it struck me again the bizarreness of females deciding that their comparative advantage is in being an associate in a law firm, say, and thus that they should outsource the once in a lifetime unduplicable unrepeatable experience of raising a unique child to some one else, especially someone from the low IQ 3rd world, while they do the drone work of making partner. The child is evolving so quickly, absorbing so many influences, and yet they would rather absent themselves from its life to show that they are as good as males. such a distribution of labor is allegedly pareto optimal. Another curse of feminism.”
Neither Mac Donald nor the Manhattan Institute, where she works, “replied to emails seeking comment,” the Times said.
Where It Started
The Times said the anti-diversity movement “centered at the Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank with close ties to the Trump movement and to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.”
The group “coalesced roughly three years ago around a sweeping ambition: to strike a killing blow against ‘the leftist social justice revolution’ by eliminating ‘social justice education’ from American schools.
The strategy was to “partner with state think tanks, and with the hundreds of former fellows scattered through conservative institutions and on Capitol Hill,” identify diversity programs and personnel at public universities and then “lobby sympathetic public officials to gut them.”
“Our project will give legislators the knowledge and tools they need to stop funding the suicide of their own country and civilization,” Claremont said in one proposal to a foundation.
In their private emails, the university critics didn’t hide their true feelings:
“(E)ven as they or their allies publicly advocated more academic freedom, some of those involved privately expressed their hope of purging liberal ideas, professors and programming wherever they could. They debated how carefully or quickly to reveal some of their true views — the belief that ‘a healthy society requires patriarchy,’ for example, and their broader opposition to anti-discrimination laws — in essays and articles written for public consumption….
“In candid private conversations, some wrote favorably of laws criminalizing homosexuality, mocked the appearance of a female college student as overly masculine and criticized Peter Thiel, the prominent gay conservative donor, over his sex life.”
Where It Succeeded – and Failed
The anti-diversity campaign has spread to at least a dozen states, the Times said.
- Florida and Texas passed wide-ranging bans on diversity programs.
- Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas issued an executive 0order banning “indoctrination and critical race theory in schools.”
- Oklahoma’s Gov. Kevin Stitt issued an executive order similar to North Carolina’s ban on discussing social issues.
But Governor DeSantis’s presidential campaign failed, and “conservative campaigns against left-wing education began to lose traction in some parts of the country.”
Congress Gets in the Act
The Times reported that the next platform for the anti-diversity campaign will be the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which is chaired byNorth Carolina 5th District U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx.
She says her committee will be “investigating many schools in terms of … where is their focus these days.” https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/01/03/congress/foxx-reacts-to-harvard-ouster-00133650
“This is just the beginning,” pledged Representative Elise Stefanik of New York. “Our robust congressional investigation will continue to move forward to expose the rot in our most ‘prestigious’ higher-education institutions and deliver accountability to the American people.”
Fight Back
What can you do?
- Join our coalition.
- Share information about what’s happening.
- Make a financial donation to our Coalition. Help us reach more people.
- Let UNC’s trustees, Interim Chancellor Lee Roberts, members of the Board of Governors, UNC System President Peter Hans and members of the General Assembly know how you feel.
Together, we can stop the attacks on free speech.
We can combat racism, bigotry and discrimination.
We can protect the values that make Carolina great.
I am a retired teacher of history and educational administrator, and I support increased freedoms of thought, speech, and debate and the freedom from fear in academia. To be relevant and serve effectively the people of North Carolina, diversification of the student body, faculty, staff and programs of UNC-CH is necessary. “The University of the People” must reflect the diversity of the state’s population; those who have been absent from or marginalized by our educational system need to feel welcome, involved, and heard. I am appalled at the lengths to which right-wing extremists from the Board of Governors, the Board of Trustees, and the NC Legislature have gone in their efforts to dismantle true academic freedom, reframe world history, and inject politics into the hiring, teaching, administration and governing structure of our flagship university and the university system. Their use of fear tactics to bring individuals into line with their extreme views on what is right, what is wrong and what is fact and what is fiction. The rise of partisan, political operatives and recent, overtly political decisions concerning the University should scare all North Carolina citizens. Where will these maneuvers stop? The tactics remind me of the Red Scares and McCarthyism. North Carolina deserves an educational system in which roles of governance, administration, research, and teaching are defined clearly. Let there be freedom and independence for experienced and talented folks to do their jobs. It works, and we know that because UNC-CH and the UNC System used to operate exceptionally as such. Let the teachers teach!