The Dionne article anticipated last week’s big Edwards news. He now has an issue: the alleviation of poverty. Dionne doesn’t write that Edwards has no idea about how to accomplish it; instead, as he graciously puts it, Edwards is “planning to set up a center to study ways to alleviate poverty.” That would be UNC’s new Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, of which Edwards will be director.
Democritus, the “laughing philosopher,” was described by Laurence Sterne as “trying all the powers of irony and laughter to reclaim” the town of Abdera, “the vilest and most profligate town of Thrace.” Meanwhile, some UNC-Chapel Hill faculty members complain about the mockery of the Pope Center.
Remember H.L. Mencken’s famous jest about Puritanism? “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere is happy.” Apply it to F.H. Buckley’s observations that “The modern Puritan devotes himself to political rather than religious duties” and that this Puritanism “is particularly pronounced in the academy.” Does that not explain this spectacle of self-righteous UNC professors carping about mockery and fearing political infidels in the classroom?
What if the petty, snarling villain in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol were Bob Cratchit? What if Ebenezer Scrooge had tried from the beginning to help the hobbling young Tim, but Bob threw his money back in his face? What if the other Cratchits sat mute in fear of Bob as he said, “Bah! You don’t believe as I do, Mr. Scrooge! Sometimes you criticize my work! To me your money is tainted!”
Here’s what: You would have the situation now playing out at UNC-Chapel Hill.
The College of Arts and Sciences is putting together a proposal to give students the opportunity to partake in a program on Western Civilization. This is welcome news indeed. The study of Western Civilization is history making the case for liberty.
UNC-Chapel Hill leftists list articles by George Leef and our Course of the Month honorees as proof that UNC-CH should not accept a grant from the Pope Foundation to fund the study of Western Civilization at the flagship institution (which they termed “Accept[ing] $12 Million from Racist, Sexist, Classist, Homophobic Donors”).
RALEIGH – General-education requirements at 11 University of North Carolina institutions are weak, according to a new study commissioned by the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. UNC students are seven times more likely to be required to take a cultural diversity course than they are to study a foreign language, unlikely to be required to study Western history or civilization or even introductory literature, and not required at all to study United States history.
RALEIGH – By now it is well known that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill made national headlines again for something that, depending upon whom you ask, demonstrates its animus against Christian groups or its passion for the principles of diversity. Specifically, UNC-CH is being sued by a Christian fraternity, Alpha Iota Omega, for officially derecognizing the group because the group wouldn’t sign a “nondiscrimination” pledge.
North Carolina taxpayers are supporting, through the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an “independent news” site that regularly features calls for the execution of George W. Bush, promotes armed uprisings in America, and receives dozens of other conspiratorial rants too bizarre to explain.
For the second time in as many years, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill stands accused of discrimination against a Christian student group.