UNC-Chapel Hill Shows the Way
Adherence to orthodoxy is a house of cards
UNC-Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees is taking a stand on intellectual diversity – and they’re winning
Here’s a comforting idea: Reason will trump irrationality…eventually. We’re seeing it play out in real time as the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees finds its backbone and says, “enough is enough.”
They have the winning argument, and they’ve found the courage to assert it. We urge leaders at other universities to follow suit. (How much longer, for example, will NC State require high schoolers to submit DEI statements with their college application?)
Here’s what’s happening.
“Open and Civil Inquiry”
A few weeks ago, the Board of Trustees voted to support a new “School of Civic Life and Leadership” at the university. Board Chair David Boliek and Vice Chair John Preyer explained the school this way:
“Its mission would be to develop students’ capacity and knowledge necessary for healthy democratic citizenship. The school would promote a culture of free speech and open and civil inquiry in which we recognize members of divergent political groups as friends to learn from instead of as foes to vanquish.”
At the school, students would “develop capacities for deliberation and debate as they accommodate varying viewpoints in their studies and conversations.”
This comes as the UNC System’s own survey concludes large proportions of students feel the need to self-censor their political views in class and with friends.
So the School of Civic Life and Leadership fills two needs: 1) It falls well within the traditional purpose of a university, which is to facilitate open discussion of multiple perspectives, and 2) It responds directly to UNC’s own data showing there’s a problem with open discussion of multiple perspectives.
Opponents
The response from the perpetually aggrieved – probably a small but ceaselessly vocal minority of faculty, plus a few sympathetic opinion writers – was swift and predictable. Conservatives are “snowflakes,” the News & Observer snorted. “I am flabbergasted,” faculty chair Mimi Chapman said. Former UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp speculated there was some conservative conspiracy afoot.
But none of them – not one – addressed the actual purpose of the school or its proposed curriculum. Instead, they complained that faculty weren’t appropriately kept in the loop, that the Board of Trustees shouldn’t be in the business of opining on curricular matters, and that there’s no problem at all – that intellectual diversity is in full bloom at UNC-Chapel Hill. The News & Observer even wrote, without evidence, that the true goal of the school is “owning the libs.”
This episode has revealed the void within which opponents to free inquiry live. They reflexively opposed the school because the Board of Trustees endorsed it and the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote about it (the horror!). How many times, we wonder, has Chapman been quoted in News & Observer opinion columns? But it’s somehow wrong when other people do it.
The opponents didn’t address the substance of the school because they couldn’t. Here’s much of the proposed curriculum, as reported by The Daily Tar Heel:
“The Good Life: Religion, Philosophy, and Life’s Ultimate Concerns”
“Democracy: Ancient and Modern”
“Liberty and Equality in American Political Thought”
“Race and the American Story”
“Capitalism and its Critics”
“Conservatism and its Critics”
“Liberalism and Its Critics”
Does this sound like “owning the libs”?
A Different Path
Instead of shrinking away from controversy like university leaders usually do, the trustees took it head on. That’s the right call because they have the winning argument.
They published more op-eds about the school. They gave more interviews about its purpose. They earned more coverage from the Wall Street Journal editorial board. They pressed on.
This is the way forward.
Activists like Chapman have abandoned the middle ground – the place where reason and perspective reside. They’re so far over their skis they’re enlisting accrediting agencies to threaten UNC-Chapel Hill, and over what? Over classes like those listed above?
The end game here is to reoccupy the center: To return UNC System schools to an environment where critical theory and Enlightenment-era liberalism and traditional conservatism can all be studied and debated and dissected without people losing their minds.
That’s the ground the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees moved to claim, and that’s the ground that other university leaders need to claim, too.
