A harmful political ideology is posing a threat at NC’s top public university

An air of illiberalism has taken hold at a prominent school within UNC-Chapel Hill, America’s oldest public university. If unchecked, the pattern threatens a liberal arts education’s very foundation: the freedom to challenge orthodoxy.

Last year, UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health adopted a “strategic plan tied to the Gillings School’s mission and values,” called the Inclusive Excellence Action Plan (IEAP). The 2021 document shows that Gillings premises hiring and tenure decisions on faculty performance in “antiracism” and “equity” trainings. The connection between social justice dogma and career advancement is explicit in the IEAP’s list of strategic action items: “Link (antiracism) training expectations to promotion and tenure for tenure-track faculty.”

Elsewhere in the same document, the IEAP explains that “Gillings Human Resources” is building “an improved tracking system,” and the team continues to “link training expectations to promotion, tenure, and annual review.”

Antiracism and social justice doctrine is an ideology, and a controversial one. It reaches far beyond basic principles of nondiscrimination. One of the most prominent works on the subject, Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist,” teaches that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” Kendi writes that being “not racist” is actually “a mask for racism.”

Columbia University professor and prominent Black intellectual John McWhorter calls the doctrine not an ideology but a “religion” because of “a certain fervency in how this ideology is conducted.”

Lest there be any question about the ideological nature of the antiracism training, the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal published in full the Gillings School’s faculty retreat seminar. It is dripping with the race essentialism that defines social justice and antiracist ideology.

For example, the seminar warns faculty against “featuring white guest lectures (sic) who describe research with communities of color.” A public university, then, would withhold an expert lecturer because of her skin color.

Say a tenure-track professor raised his hand during the critical race theory section of the faculty retreat and, quoting Columbia’s McWhorter, said, “In the name of helping black people, I believe this philosophy often harms Black people instead.” Is there any question his career would be in jeopardy?

A university that premises promotion and tenure on adherence to an ideology — or a religion — is a seminary, not a liberal arts institution.

And the purification of Gillings may go deeper. The IEAP lists just two organizations that conduct its social justice trainings. One, Durham-based “We Are,” just launched a social media campaign called #SomePeopleNeedToBeFired.

The group says it seeks “to hold our education profession to a higher standard, removing those who should not be in schools due to their racist thoughts or actions.” Of course, We Are doesn’t define what constitutes a racist thought or action, or who has the power to judge.

Thus, the organization the Gillings School hired to train its staff is leading an effort to purge faculty who think the wrong way, all while Gillings explicitly “links training expectations to promotion and tenure.”

And Gillings isn’t the only school at UNC to embrace illiberalism. In a 2020 memorandum, the now-former dean of the Hussman School of Journalism wrote the school intends to “revisit diversity of viewpoint in our definition of diversity” because “racial equity and diversity of thought…cannot sit side by side without coming into conflict.”

It’s difficult to square this dogmatism with the university’s purported embrace of the Chicago Principles, which state, “It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.”

UNC declined to answer questions about premising career advancement on performance for antiracism training.

Whether the other schools within UNC-CH choose the Chicago Principles or the intellectual suffocation on display at Gillings remains to be seen. If left unchecked, illiberalism may come to define America’s oldest public university.