On October 12, the recently appointed chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill, Holden Thorp, delivered his first big speech.
Speeches by higher education leaders seldom contain anything new and unexpected. Chancellor Thorp’s speech was no different, but some components of it are worth reviewing because they reveal his beliefs on important issues.
Let’s take a look at a few particulars.
Diversity
Evidently, Chancellor Thorp is not someone to question the mania for “diversity” that has taken over most of American higher ed. If he were, perhaps he would have avoided the subject, but he didn’t, saying, “we want our undergraduates to reflect our state’s growing and diverse population. We cannot realize the transforming power of higher education unless everyone participates.”
The familiar refrain that higher education should be nearly universal can’t be taken literally. Thorp can’t mean everyone since large numbers of young people in North Carolina neither desire to attend college nor are even remotely qualified academically. What he means, I believe, is that all groups of people must be “represented” on UNC campuses. That is the essence of the demand for “diversity” – college student bodies and faculties need to be engineered so that there are proper proportions of people from all the various socio-economic groups in society.
I disagree with that objective. We ought to drop the foolish notion that the student body is necessarily better simply because it has a higher percentage of people from certain “minority groups.” The truth is that human beings are different in so many ways that you’ll always have tremendous “diversity” no matter which students are accepted or which professors hired. Ward Connerly is right in suggesting that it’s time for America to stop fixating on personal characteristics that have nothing to do with capabilities or achievements.
The Obsession with State Borders
Another concern voiced by Thorp was the supposed need to keep North Carolina students within the UNC system. “Financial aid practices of the top privates have made it easier for students to choose excellent universities outside North Carolina. When that happens, they are less likely to come back and contribute to our state and our economy,” he said.
The Chancellor’s concern is needless. Due to the mobility of labor in the United States (indeed, the world), it doesn’t make any difference where people go to college. If a top student who grew up here decides to go to, say, Yale, and ultimately winds up taking a job with a company located in California, that doesn’t mean his productivity is lost to the state’s economy. People can and do buy things made elsewhere and benefit from research done elsewhere.
If a company located in North Carolina needs top talent, it is going to recruit the best person it can for the position. Geography won’t matter in the least. To North Carolinians, it’s irrelevant whether the next researcher Glaxo hires was educated at Chapel Hill, Stanford, MIT, or anywhere else. There are government policies that can affect economic prosperity, but trying to keep top students from studying in another state is not one of them.
Thorp is laying the groundwork for policies to give added incentives for North Carolina students to remain in the state for college. If a few super students choose Carolina rather than a prestige school elsewhere, that slightly improves the school’s U.S. News ranking, but it does nothing for the citizens of the state, except to channel more tax dollars where they aren’t needed.
Liberal Arts Education
American students benefit from a broad education that acquaints them with a wide range of intellectual disciplines in the fine arts, humanities, and social sciences. Thorp was right to say that it’s important for colleges to foster students’ “curiosity and passion,” and observe, “In today’s rapidly changing world, it’s not always possible to choose something to study when you’re 18 that’s where you’ll make your mark when you’re 30.”
Very well and good. Thorp went on to say, “Carolina’s proud liberal arts tradition is more relevant today than ever.” But the trouble is that while it is possible for Carolina students to get a solid liberal arts education, nothing ensures it. Like most colleges and universities today, UNC has a “distribution requirements” system for undergraduates that requires them to take at least a few courses in a number of different fields. The weakness in that system is that it amounts to putting a huge smorgasbord of courses, many of them narrow and trendy, in front of students and saying, “OK, now choose some.”
Several years ago the Pope Center published a study of the general education requirements at the schools in the UNC system. The conclusion was that while some of the smaller schools succeeded in guaranteeing a good liberal arts education for their students, the biggest ones did not.
Is Chancellor Thorp planning to take any action to turn away from the “smorgasbord” approach? If so, he did not mention it in the speech. This is an issue that should be among his top concerns.
That’s enough. Holden Thorp is undoubtedly a man of deep concern and the best of intentions. Neither of those characteristics, however, necessarily leads to good decision-making. Sometimes they even get in the way.