The higher education empire strikes back
Kaylee McGhee White
Though I’m too pessimistic to predict a turn for the better in higher education, it does seem that a number of schools are committed to reforming their ways — that is, if their faculty and students will let them.
The University of North Carolina’s board of trustees voted unanimously last week to open a new school on campus dedicated to free expression and ideological diversity. The School of Civic Life and Leadership will hire professors from across the political spectrum and introduce a curriculum that ends the “political constraints on what can be taught in university classes.”
“I don’t want to indoctrinate on the Right any more than I want to indoctrinate on the Left,” said the board’s vice chairman, John Preyer.
Preyer’s intentions are good, but he had to have known that declaring a commitment to open debate and diversity of thought would be akin to declaring war. Indeed, that’s exactly how many current UNC faculty members interpreted it.
Mimi Chapman, the chairwoman of the faculty, told UNC’s student newspaper that she is “flabbergasted” that the board of trustees thought the School of Civic Life and Leadership was necessary in the first place. The new school, she said, is a “solution in search of a problem.”
Holden Thorp, who was UNC’s chancellor from 2008 to 2013, agreed: “The board doesn’t have any ability to propose a class, to propose a degree, or, for God’s sake, to propose a school.”
The UNC meltdown proves just how necessary the School of Civic Life and Leadership is — and also how difficult it will be to make it a reality. Unraveling the groupthink that has consumed UNC’s campus (and just about every other university’s campus, for that matter) will be no small feat unless leaders are determined and willing to make serious, structural changes. In Florida, for example, Gov. Ron DeSantis has proposed legislation that would overhaul the state university tenure system so that faculty members can be held accountable.
It sounds like UNC needs to follow a similar path.