BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN
The Old Well at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Photo by Caroline Culler (CC BY-SA 3.0), Wikimedia Commons Images.
Joe Knott, a member of the Board of Governors of the UNC system, wrote in a News & Observer op-ed on May 25th that UNC-Chapel Hill’s faculty suffers from lack of “viewpoint diversity,” by which he means too few conservative professors for his liking.
How does he propose to fix this alleged problem? He wants to create a separate honors college within the university, “with the stated purpose of bringing to North Carolina the best, most respected and accomplished scholars in the world who love and defend Western civilization.”
To some minds, this might seem like a reasonable project. But loving and defending are not the essence of research and scholarship. Careful analysis, using the tools of one’s disciplinary trade, is what faculty do. The ratio of liberals to conservatives is irrelevant.
Knott also wants his honors college to be free from control by existing faculty. To Knott, faculty members at UNC-Chapel Hill are a problem—the problem—so they must not be allowed to impede his political project. Ironically, he invokes scholarly respect and accomplishment, but wants to insulate a stable of conservative professors from evaluation according to the standards by which faculty routinely judge each other and by which scholarly respect is achieved.
It’s clear that Mr. Knott’s ideological war against UNC faculty is highly selective. He hasn’t complained about balance between free-marketeers and proponents of regulation among the business school faculty. Nor has he questioned the intellectual diversity of the faculty at the Center for Banking and Finance. The faculty he is at odds with are those whose scholarship critically examines Western civilization and contemporary capitalist society.
On the other hand, it’s unclear if Knott understands the concepts and practices of faculty governance and academic freedom at the heart of a modern public university. This is a troubling possibility, given Knott’s position on a university governing board.
The 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, a document jointly created by the American Association of University Professors, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges states: “The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process.” This is a principle embraced by generations of leaders in American higher education.
Mr. Knott’s opinions notwithstanding, faculty are the ones with the necessary expertise to create and control academic programs, as well as to decide who meets standards of professional competence in research, scholarship, and teaching. It is this faculty control, based on expertise, not ideology, that keeps universities from becoming mere think tanks in service to whoever controls the purse strings.
Because faculty control of the curriculum has not led to the political results Mr. Knott favors, he wants to bypass faculty control. In effect, he wants to unabashedly establish political criteria for hiring, tenuring, and promoting faculty, and for curriculum formation. This would be a step backward and a threat to the intellectual independence that has made America’s universities great.
What’s wrong here is that a member of the governing board of the UNC system has no respect for the values and operating principles that have made UNC-Chapel Hill a top university. A board of governors should let the faculty do their work and, in the best of all worlds, ask faculty what resources would help them do their work better.
How many more wrongheaded proposals by the Board of Governors will UNC faculty have to fend off? How much more damage will be incurred and need to be repaired later? Mr. Knott’s latest proposal for evading faculty control over academic programs is an embarrassing threat not only to UNC-Chapel Hill, but to the essence of higher education.
Guest blogger Sherryl Kleinman is Professor Emerita of Sociology at UNC, Chapel Hill.
See also a response by John Wilson to Knott’s op-ed.
