Linda P. Brady, who was elected by the Board of Governors to be the new chancellor of UNC-Greensboro last week, seems to be the safe protector of the status quo—an academic insider unlikely to take any sort of stand against her peers. Her election illustrates another opportunity lost to install a bold, dynamic, innovative leader at the helm of a state university.
Of the eight chancellors appointed during the two-and-a-half years that Erskine Bowles has been president the UNC system, seven have been drawn from the ranks of academic administrators (the choice of John Mauceri, an orchestra conductor, to run the School of the Arts hardly counts as a deviation from this pattern).
At the time of his appointment in January of 2006, it looked as though Bowles, whose background is in business rather than academia, would seek candidates who also have experience outside the narrow confines of mainstream academia and government service.
Indeed, other universities have tapped such individuals. Recent years have seen, in North Carolina, such accomplished business and professional leaders as Bill Thierfelder and Nido Qubein rise to the president’s chair at Belmont Abbey College and High Point University respectively. Many other proven leaders in world of business, the military, or the ministry would welcome the chance to “give back” in their final productive years by serving at the head of a university or college.
Certainly, Brady has no shortage of qualifications: her resume is filled with a multitude of accomplishments and accolades. She is the author of three books and numerous scholarly articles. She served under both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in the departments of Defense and State from 1978-1985, participated in arms control negotiations with the Soviets and taught at West Point Military Academy during the 1991-92 school year. In 1984, she wrote an article with then-assistant secretary for defense Lawrence Korb that was highly favorable toward Reagan’s Cold War defense strategy.
Although this range of experience suggests that she has some conservative inclinations, her more recent outlook appears to be more influenced by Carter than by Reagan. In fact, after leaving government service, she worked directly with the former Democratic president at the Carter Center of Emory University.
Perhaps even more telling about her political beliefs is her answer to a question concerning ideological bias at the University of Oregon at the June 12 press conference after the announcement of her selection. She said that she had “not sensed a particular ideological orientation on the part of our faculty or staff.”
Yet there are strong indications that an ideological imbalance does exist at the University of Oregon. According to the Huffington Post’s political donation tracker (as of June 14) in the last two presidential elections, 69 employees of the University of Oregon gave donations to Democratic candidates, and only four gave to Republicans. In the most recent election period, Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate considered to be farthest to the left, received donations from 36 university employees, while Hillary Clinton and John Edwards received a total of six donations. The only Republican to receive any donations (a total of two) was Ron Paul, whose libertarian tendencies are viewed favorably by some segments of the left.
In fact, the University of Oregon is not just a Democratic stronghold; rather, it is a bastion of radical left-wing politics. Perhaps the leading theorist joining environmentalism with Marxism, John Bellamy Foster, is a tenured professor there. Leaders of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals such as Michael Christian of Earth First! and Paul Young of the Animal Liberation Front are regularly invited to speak or hold workshops on campus. The school’s chapter of MEChA, a Hispanic organization that advocates restoring much of the United States to Mexico, calls the United States an “Anglo-American melting pot of materialism, greed, and intolerance,” and once proudly featured a picture of Fidel Castro on their Web site. And so on.
There is no equivalent radical right-wing presence on campus. There is a conservative newspaper, the Commentator, but its policies are well within the mainstream of American politics, unlike the left-wing groups and individuals mentioned above. And the city of Eugene, where the University is located, is poised to become officially designated as the United State’s first so-called “Human Rights City,” a socialist-inspired concept backed by the United Nations.
When an experienced professor of political science like Brady is unaware of any particular ideological orientation in such an environment, she is either oblivious to her surroundings, assumes that the disparity is normal and balanced, or is denying the existence of the political imbalance as a form of defense.
Some of her policies at Oregon might suggest the latter.
In an extended curriculum vitae provided by the UNC system, Brady proudly claims credit for implementing the University of Oregon’s “Strategic Diversity Action Plan.” This plan, peppered with phrases like “Bias Response Team” and “cultural competency,” extends “diversity” considerations deeply into many areas of campus life, including orientation for new students, academic advising, tutoring programs, admissions and recruitment, campus residential programs, and staff development.
Although it was not listed as one of her achievements, Brady also signed off on the creation of an Ethnic Studies Department at Oregon. This move was favored by professors teaching ethnic studies courses, since they are no longer bound by the more stringent requirements of traditional disciplines like history.
Given Brady’s statement at the press conference that “diversity” will be a focus of her administration, it is likely that the Greensboro campus will see a similar promotion of the current trendy view that people are essentially members of aggrieved minority pressure groups, rather than as individuals responsible for their own failures and achievements.
And given her refusal to acknowledge the pervasiveness of the liberal mindset at the University of Oregon, it can be expected that UNC-Greensboro will also see a leftward drift. She might claim faith in a “clash of ideas” as a key element of education, as she did at the recent press conference, but when the imbalance is already 69 to 4, it is a bit disingenuous to suggest anything other than that the clash is one-sided, and that the victor is pre-ordained.
While it is understandable than one might wish to place an experienced academic administrator atop a university, this means that chancellors are selected from a pool that, like Oregon, tends to think very much alike (The imbalance of political donations on the Huffington Post was even greater at UNC: 75 for Democrats and 4 for Republicans.) and not representative of the whole of society.
Dr. Brady is an accomplished woman, but she does not appear to be the type of leader who will swim against the tide of mainstream academia to restore the diversity of ideas absent on many campuses. The only way to do that, given the current climate in academia, is to deliberately bring in a few strong individuals from outside the academic mainstream. People with backgrounds more like Erskine Bowles himself.