The North Carolina Governor’s School (GS) was established in 1963. The program was the first of its kind in the nation: a residential summer program for the state’s most academically and artistically gifted high-school students. Over 60 years later, GS has both an East and a West campus, and approximately 800 rising seniors and juniors from across the state arrive each June to spend the next four weeks living in college dormitories, eating in college dining halls, and attending advanced classes in college classrooms.
Governor’s School is self-consciously a stepping stone for our state’s elite high-school students.The resemblance to collegiate life isn’t incidental. The program’s webpage describes GS as “clearly situated between high school and college,” boasting that it “grants students many freedoms associated with university study.” In other words, it is self-consciously a stepping stone for our state’s elite high-school students in their quest to become North Carolina’s—and, indeed, our nation’s—elite university students.
This is why it should be profoundly concerning that GS has lost its way.
I attended the West Campus of GS (Governor’s School West or GSW) in the summer of 1995, and from 2013 to 2021 I was a member of the GSW faculty. I taught English primarily but also, occasionally, a course on “Self and Society.” In those roles, I had the privilege of teaching hundreds of incredibly bright, passionate, and ambitious students. To my great joy, I remained in touch with scores of them, watching as they graduated from high school, entered college, declared majors, earned bachelor’s degrees, pursued graduate studies, and began promising careers. I even had the honor of writing letters of recommendation for a dozen or more along the way.
At the same time, however, the program was becoming increasingly dominated by an ever-narrowing set of acceptable ideas and arguments. From my first day on the faculty, in June of 2013, it was clear that GSW was not a welcoming environment for social, political, or religious conservatives. I wasn’t surprised: The same had been true when I had attended GSW as a student. Even then, the ideas, perspectives, and arguments presented had tended toward the left end of the ideological spectrum. They became increasingly slanted in this direction, however, during my tenure as an instructor.
During that period, a general preoccupation with “social justice” found more precise expression in obsessions with “identity,” “intersectionality,” and “privilege.” These concepts were most firmly entrenched in the aforementioned “Self and Society” courses. But as calls for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” began to spread—aided by “critical race theory” and doctrines of “anti-racism” and “white fragility”—they became more prevalent in “Applied Philosophy” courses designed to teach “critical, creative, and philosophical thinking.” DEI also became more prominent in standard disciplines such as the social sciences and mathematics. And it increasingly informed more and more of the extra-curricular “optional seminars” offered by GSW faculty.
The problem wasn’t that students were exposed to these things; it was that they weren’t regularly presented with meaningful alternatives or equipped with the means to question or critique DEI-related assumptions. Indeed, conservative, libertarian, and classical-liberal ideas were widely disparaged, as were those who were brave enough (or foolish enough) to express them. I witnessed and experienced this firsthand. Conversations with liberal/progressive and conservative or libertarian students alike only exacerbated my concerns.
By the 2021 session, GS was a place where citing empirical statistics that challenged progressive narratives was widely deemed “problematic” by staff. Factual data were dismissed by faculty on the grounds that they failed to capture “the lived experience” of certain members of preferred groups. Merely claiming that “identity” might not be the most important criterion by which to judge others was enough to put a target on one’s back. Suggesting that there are valid alternatives to identity politics, intersectionality, and critical theory incited opposition. And arguing that a lack of viewpoint diversity has negative consequences—and that students benefit from considering alternative points of view and opposing arguments—was not tolerated.
Governor’s School had become what Jonathan Haidt calls a “tribal moral community”: a social group that coheres around a set of sacred values.In other words, GSW had become what Jonathan Haidt calls a “tribal moral community”: a social group that coheres around a set of sacred values. A “sacred value,” according to Phil Tetlock, a social psychologist whom Haidt quotes, is “any value that a moral community implicitly or explicitly treats as possessing infinite or transcendental significance” and that therefore cannot be questioned or contradicted without threatening the group and its unity. Perceived violations are, therefore, taboo.
By the time I left GSW in the summer of 2021, it had long since sacralized the values of the contemporary American Left:
- “Diversity” (which in practice meant the promotion of minority and historically marginalized groups and the denigration of “majority populations”).
- “Equity” (which in practice meant “leveling the playing field” to enforce equality of outcomes).
- “Inclusion” (which in practice meant the affirmation not only of declared “identities” but also of the theoretical frameworks and worldviews that supported them).
These values have supplanted and often stand as an obstacle to the open inquiry, intellectual exploration, and free thinking that are necessary to discover the truth. The great irony is that these are precisely the ideals that GS claims to value, practice, and promote. What the program actually valued, practiced, and promoted was ideological groupthink.
Groupthink is linked to any number of cognitive biases and logical fallacies—from motivated reasoning and confirmation bias to selective sampling and cherry-picking. It is antithetical to the academy’s traditional truth-seeking mission and the modern liberal values that underlie it. (To better understand academic groupthink see Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern’s 2009 paper “Groupthink in Academia: Majoritarian Departmental Politics and the Professional Pyramid” and Neema Parvini’s 2018 Quillette article “The Incentives for Groupthink.”)
What makes groupthink so formidable is that there is often a double incentive structure at work:
- Individuals who conform their thinking to that of the group are rewarded with the sense of security and pleasure that come from belonging—a basic human psychological need.
- Free thinking and inquiry are punished, as James Mortimer notes, by “mind guards” who “protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group’s cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions.”
This idea of “protection” was taken literally by the self-appointed “mind guards” at GSW, who enforced taboos by appealing to the “safety” of those who were “harmed” by any challenge to their ideological assumptions and assertions. Students weren’t merely taught, implicitly or explicitly, that only socio-political progressivism, postmodern epistemology, and critical theory have intellectual and moral validity. They also learned what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt call the three Great Untruths, as well as how to wield them as ideological weapons:
- “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”
- “Always trust your feelings.”
- “Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”
These are the lessons that GSW alumni took with them at the end of the summer when they returned to their communities and began to apply to colleges and universities throughout the country.
The picture of the academy that is painted for these students informs the expectations they take to college.The substantial number of students who are marginalized at GS are only the most obviously injured. All of the students are ill-served, for they are deprived of the educational experience that the program advertises and that they might mistakenly believe they are getting. That genuinely educational experience is also the one that we as a society need them to have.
The picture of the academy that is painted for these students by GS faculty, staff, and administrators informs the assumptions and expectations that they take with them to the institutions of higher learning where they matriculate. It informs the academic values that they adopt and the intellectual habits that they cultivate. It informs the way that they approach their studies and the way that they process information. It informs how they evaluate and make arguments. It informs the discussions that they participate in or shout down. It informs the relationships that they cultivate or preclude. It informs virtually everything about the experiences that they choose to have and the experiences that they allow others to have in their college careers and beyond.
It’s been more than three years now since I left GSW. I don’t know if the culture and climate are what they were in June 2021. If nothing else has changed, at least this much has. This past spring, as part of a lawsuit settlement, the North Carolina Governor’s School adopted a policy that commits to offering “elective seminars that present a wide range of viewpoints” and to allowing “faculty members the freedom and responsibility to craft academic and intellectual experiences that reflect their unique viewpoints and expertise.” I hope that these are more than just words in a faculty/staff handbook. I hope that they are the first step in turning toward the program’s stated mission and vision. And I hope that the next class of the North Carolina Governor’s School will have the kind of experience that they—and we—deserve.
David C. Phillips is an English teacher who lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.