Larry Chavis is clinical professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC. He has taught there for 18 years on a renewable contract. He has now been told that his contract will not be renewed this year. The university has apparently acted in a totally legal way, but Chavis and his supporters are upset:
- Because of his long service, which seemed to promise some job security.
- Because a few of his lectures were apparently recorded, by built-in security camera. This arrangement is also apparently legal, though it seems tacky. As far as I know, the faculty have made no organized objection to the arrangement. Chavis says he did not give permission for the recordings.
- Because the administration has not told Chavis of the reason for the ending of his employment, although he speculates that it was due to his “strong support of LGBTQ rights.”
Is Chavis’s termination unjust? In other words, is the problem Professor Chavis or the school administration? Or, perhaps, both?
Many of the details of the Larry Chavis case are unknown and likely to remain so. But the context is clear.First of all, obviously Chavis is an activist. Equally obviously, he has a right to promote “LGBTQ rights” outside the classroom. Turning his classroom lectures into activist propaganda, however, is definitely improper, but we don’t know if he did so. Chavis did say to a reporter, “We’re talking about issues of race and inequality and income and gender, and I think in a way that’s very inclusive … but we do talk about sensitive issues.”
So, many of the details of this case are unknown and likely to remain so. But the context is pretty clear. Chavis is a fan of a movement called stratification economics (SE), first proposed by Duke professor William “Sandy” Darity in 2005. SE had difficulty getting recognition as a separate field by the economics community, but it seems to be accepted now. The reasons for the initial resistance are not clear, but the problem with the idea is obvious. SE proposes to study black-white wealth differentials while explicitly excluding anything to do with behavioral differences between the two groups. There are many well-established differences in interests and abilities between self-identified blacks and whites, but Darity is basically claiming that these have zero effect on social measures such as income and wealth. Unless he can decisively prove that these variables have no effect—and many disagree, including at least one influential black economist—this whole enterprise is simply illegitimate.
Chavis cannot be blamed for supporting a field that, despite its flaws, is very popular. Professor Darity has grants from many private foundations, as well as the National Science Foundation. He has received awards for his work from professional organizations. His Samuel DuBois Cook Center at Duke is well respected. In short, Chavis is just following a very popular crowd.
But the crowd is heading in the wrong direction. Darity’s Center, for example, is an advocate for reparations, a political aim that does not belong in an academic institution. Part of SE’s “theorizing” embraces standpoint epistemology, the idea that there is no one truth: Whites and blacks have their own truth, and the trouble with whites is that they want to impose theirs on black people. In 2020 Chavis criticized the new UNC Program for Public Discourse, saying, “There is a vein of thinking that there is an objective reality that we can put our identities and ourselves aside and discuss something in a very objective way.” Many on his side will agree, even though this view is utterly opposed to veritas. Eminent race and ethnic-studies faculty elsewhere have condemned objectivity while still pretending to be scholars. In other words, these folks believe that there is no single truth, even as it is just such a truth that is the aim of science. A belief that truth is personal, rather than something real that is discoverable, is simply antithetical to science and to the core values of any university. Belief in multiple truths is the death of science.
As UNC has come under pressure from its governing board, deans have become more sensitive to activist teaching and scholarship.I sometimes wonder if religious universities like Oxford were on to something in the19th century by having dons, as they were called, swear to the 39 articles of the Church of England. Perhaps something like an oath—not a loyalty oath but an oath to the principles that make science possible, such as a single truth, curiosity, honesty, open debate and so on—is necessary at this time when these principles are so widely forgotten.
What of Professor Chavis? It looks to me as if Kenan-Flagler, along with UNC, Duke, and countless other universities, started going off the rails decades ago. Motivated by sympathy and racial guilt, plus pressure from activists, they allowed the founding of departments and institutes that were motivated more by social justice than by the search for verifiable truth. These entities subsequently grew in power and influence as money poured in from government and activist private foundations.
The result is that, over the years, the departure of these entities from the core values of science and honest scholarship has become more and more apparent. But recently, as UNC has come under pressure from its governing board, deans have presumably become more sensitive to activist departures from straight teaching and scholarship. It seems to have been Larry Chavis’s misfortune, in a vulnerable untenured position, to put his head above the parapet and give his seniors an opportunity to “show willing,” in conformity with the pressures from the university’s new governors. So the fault is not with Chavis but belongs to the system that once encouraged his activism and now has a few regrets.
Above all, those in responsible positions at UNC, Duke, and many other major universities need to look carefully at the monsters they have created by encouraging a whole range of pseudo-disciplines, animated much more by rent seeking, in the form of social-justice activism, than by an honest commitment to truth.
John Staddon is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Professor of Biology Emeritus at Duke University. He was profiled in the Wall Street Journal in January 2021 as a commentator on the current problems of science. His book Science in an Age of Unreason (Regnery) came out in 2022.