Recently the new dean of the school of humanities, arts, and sciences at NC State asked to meet with Art Pope, who heads the John W. Pope Foundation. The Foundation has given substantial financial assistance to higher education in North Carolina over the years and Dean Toby Parcel wanted to see if it would be possible to arrange additional support, particularly for foreign language programs.
The meeting was cordial and productive. Afterward, however, when Dean Parcel reported to her faculty on the prospect of Pope Foundation support, many members threw the adult version of a tantrum. One professor declaimed that money from the Pope Foundation was “dirty money” that would corrupt the university. Another opined that taking money from the Pope Foundation would be as bad as taking money from the Ku Klux Klan.
What is behind the outrage?
The angry faculty members have mounted their soap boxes because they dislike the fact that the Pope Foundation and the organizations it helps to fund, including the John Locke Foundation and the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, take issue with their aggressively leftist politics. They don’t want the minimal, Jeffersonian-model government that the Locke Foundation consistently argues for. They don’t want the traditional approach to higher education that the Pope Center advocates.
They are entitled to their views, of course, but not to false accusations. The Center has often criticized what we see as frivolous, academically weak courses and programs like Women’s Studies. That is not at all the same as “denigrating women” as one faculty member says. The Center has also criticized “affirmative action” programs designed to engineer a student body that is “diverse” in respect to race as having a deleterious impact on the educational mission of the university. That, however, does not “denigrate minorities.” Attacks like that, impugning motives rather than dealing with the substance of arguments, ought to be beneath faculty members at a major (or any) university.
If the NC State faculty members knew anything about the operations of the Pope Center, they would realize that we have always been scrupulously fair in allowing people who disagree with us to have their say. Our conferences always feature speakers from many different points on the political compass. We are always open to reasoned argumentation.
Apparently, the same cannot be said of many members of the NC State faculty.