UNC won’t prosper in a world of red and blue college systems | Opinion
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released an impressive study this month examining changes to higher education underway in Florida. It concluded: “academic freedom, tenure and shared governance in Florida’s public university system face a politically driven assault unparalleled in U.S. history.” It threatens “the very survival of meaningful higher education in the state.”
Many of Florida’s alterations are familiar to Tar Heels, though reporters have noted that North Carolina revisions have been less nationally visible and sometimes slower to emerge. That’s likely because we haven’t had a governor running for president out to prove himself to the far-right fringes of the Republican Party. If we elect Mark Robinson and Dan Bishop, we’ll fix that in short order.
UNC-CH has its Republican trustee-created School of Civic Life and Leadership and the University of Florida has its new Hamilton Center — designed to “remedy” a shortage of “right of center” professors. (It is fascinating to hear Trump loyalists emphasize the centrality of “civil discourse”.)
Both states moved to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. Both limited workplace training related to racism and sexism. Both, oddly, have acted with vengeance to attack accreditation agencies. And both have radically politicized their governing boards and administrative hiring.
As the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, the selection of UNC-CH’s new interim chancellor “may represent the culmination of a decade-long effort by Republican politicians to seize control of the system’s governance and its flagship university.”
The AAUP study argues that Florida’s actions “constitute a systematic effort to dictate and enforce conformity with a narrow political and ideological agenda.” The assault has been made possible in part because “academic administrators in Florida not only failed to contest attacks on the (university) system but have, too frequently, been complicit in supporting them.”
It is interesting to note how profusely our Republican-named administrators — presidents, chancellors, provosts — speak of their love for Carolina. They are less apt to enthuse for the substantive Republican agenda they are hired to either pursue or abet. It is complicated to join a modern campus — pressed with thousands of diverse, college-age students — and explain that your main assignment is to push back against the pluralistic, multifaceted, democratic and liberalizing society they see unfolding before their eyes.
Trying to tell 20 year olds you’ll decide what they’re able to learn about race, or history, or misogyny, or that they should despise transgender folks, or that “wokeness” needs to go somewhere to die is tough work. Trying to force them into the worldview of the Republican caucuses of the N.C. General Assembly is, literally, mission impossible. Perhaps it’s better to keep it to yourself.
I’m guessing that Republican lawmakers in Florida and in North Carolina misjudge, powerfully, the cultural chasm which lies between them and the university communities they seek to regulate and master. They undertake a miserable and inevitably failing task. Pushing against an inexorable and engaged tide. Trying to return a genie to a longed-for, nonexistent bottle.
These politicians now open another divide they likely don’t anticipate. Public flagship universities in red states increasingly find themselves at disadvantage compared to peers in blue states and at private universities. Red state public universities are under near-continuous assault — in what they teach, what they write, who they hire. They dwell at the front line of a divided society’s heated culture wars. Sensible folks will undoubtedly seek more congenial climes. As SMU’s Michael S. Harris has noted, we move toward “two separate systems, one red and one blue.” In that regime, neither Florida nor North Carolina will prosper.