Great outrage has erupted from inside the University of North Carolina system due to the closure of three academic centers by the system’s Board of Governors. The local media has published story after story by UNC academics excoriating the Governors for everything from a denial of free speech to being “agents of wealth, privilege and exclusion.” Student protestors disrupted the meeting of the BOG at which the closure was finalized by a vote of the entire board.
There has been considerable national attention as well. The Washington Post and New York Times also chimed in; the American Association of University professors issued a formal statement on the issue. Conservative observers have started to mount a defense of the Governors actions.
Although there may be a tendency to see the clamor as much ado about nothing, one very important issue stands out. It is not, as some faculty and media members suggest, about the unjust denial of academic freedom. Rather, it is whether the state’s (and nation’s) public universities are to be the private playgrounds of the faculty or answerable to a higher authority chosen by the taxpayers.
The issue arose in this case because, when the faculty and administrators fail to maintain a proper degree of objectivity concerning the system’s academic mission, somebody else must step up to the plate. If not, the system may devolve into a partisan stronghold for a single ideology.
That very concern was voiced in the foundational document of the national faculty professional association, the American Association of University Professors. The AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles of Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure made the following key statement:
If this profession should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of the incompetent and the unworthy, or to prevent the freedom which it claims in the name of science from being used as a shelter for inefficiency, for superficiality, or for uncritical and intemperate partisanship, it is certain that the task will be performed by others…
Today, the North Carolina state legislature and the University of North Carolina Board of Governors deserve to be commended for acting in the true spirit of the AAUP and stepping up when needed. For too long, the UNC system has allowed “intemperate partisanship” to creep into various sectors of its operation; in particular, some of its supposedly “academic” centers had become advocacy agencies with political agendas rather than centers of objective scholarship. UNC faculty and administrators have long failed to acknowledge this impropriety.
In response, last spring the legislature initiated a process mandating that the Governors examine how academic centers conduct their affairs. Last week, despite a great outcry by vested interests in the UNC system, the Board assumed its rightful role as the final word in UNC governance. Many critics accused the BOG of overstepping its authority, but it clearly has not done so. Rather, the Board properly derived its authority from the system’s policy manual (state law), which declares, “the Board of Governors shall determine the functions, educational activities, and academic programs of the constituent institutions.”
Critics also claimed that the center closures infringe upon the free speech or academic freedom of the center directors. That is also not true; the BOG merely severed ties with the three centers and ended any state funding. The right to free speech guarantees that individuals can say pretty much whatever they choose, but not that individuals have the right to state funding or state imprimatur to do so. And there has been no denial of academic freedom: no professors have lost their jobs or suffered censure.
Furthermore, academic freedom is merely an extension of the natural right all of us have to seek the truth. A free society cannot allow a privileged elite to have the sole right to determine what constitutes objective inquiry and what is political. Public debate about the creation, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge is too important to be completely controlled by an infallible privileged few. That is a recipe for the scholarly class to harden into rigid dogmatism—an end to academic freedom rather than its safeguarding.
And the eliminated programs were indeed overtly political rather than objective. One eliminated organization, the Center for Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at Chapel Hill’s law school, was especially egregious in its political activities. It was born of partisanship as a thinly veiled political springboard for John Edwards to mount his 2008 presidential campaign and has maintained a one-sided stance ever since. Its current director, law professor Gene Nichol, mounted political attacks against Republicans mixed in with defenses of the Poverty Center’s redistributive economic platform in the local media.
Additionally, the Poverty Center consistently ignored free market solutions to poverty, aggressively attacking those who ardently wish to raise their fellow citizens out of despair, not by wasting money on failed government programs, but by increasing the general level of prosperity and helping struggling citizens develop as productive individuals. The center’s automatic rejection of potentially viable solutions is hardly in the spirit of objectivity demanded by the AAUP back in 1915. It therefore deserves its fate.
By ignoring outraged criticism by a vocal and self-interested few, the legislature and BOG exhibited the leadership needed to maintain UNC as a system of excellence. Rather than attacking them, North Carolina should thank them for upholding the spirit of free and open inquiry and not letting the university system become a playground for partisans.
It is heartwarming to see state officials do the jobs they were elected to do. Too often they have shied away from their obligations to ensure that the university system adheres to appropriate standards of scholarship. This time, they stood fast by the AAUP’s standards and state law, and for that we applaud them. May they continue such welcome vigilance and representation of all North Carolinians.
(Editor’s note: This article is a slightly altered version of an op-ed that appeared in Durham’s Herald-Sun on February 25, 2015).