BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN

Years ago a colleague scolded me for saying that UNC employees can’t have a union. Yes, they can, he said; it’s collective bargaining that’s proscribed.

Rudy Fichtenbaum, national president of the AAUP, reminded us of that message this past weekend at the annual meeting of the North Carolina state AAUP conference, attended by faculty from public and private schools across the state. Fichtenbaum spoke at UNC–Chapel Hill on the importance of faculty organizing, whether public employees can engage in collective bargaining or not. Faculty should recognize threats to academic freedom and shared governance, acting in solidarity against those threats. We can create a “union” of tenure-track, tenured, and non-tenure-track faculty.

Another speaker, Jasmine Banks, director of UnKoch My Campus, described the history of the Koch Foundation and its affiliated organizations, including the intention to turn colleges and universities into the kinds of places that will make students true believers in free-market ideology. As Banks noted, the Kochs have learned to rebrand their efforts so as to hide their overall goal.

Banks’s talk brought to mind two questions. First, will faculty who take money from funders with a clear political agenda find themselves, even unconsciously, shaping their program in ways that keep the donor happy? If donors are displeased, they will stop supporting a program after the initial gift. Second, who would a faculty member or director not take money from? Everyone has a line they will not cross. Medical schools, for example, stopped taking money from the tobacco industry. As Jane Mayer wrote in Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, the Kochs are among the major funders of climate change denial. Taking money from the Koch Foundation legitimates an organization that denies the major crisis of this historical moment.

Banks noted that UNC–Chapel Hill has a Koch-funded minor in philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE) and a certificate offered under the same name at Duke University. UNC also has a just-launched Koch-funded Center for the Science of Moral Understanding. The Center seems redundant with an in-progress UNC Program in Public Discourse, first named the Program in Civic Virtue and Civil Discourse. Both direct attention away from the use of wealth to distort public discourse, in favor of examining individual-level debates between liberals and conservatives. In addition to faculty members outside UNC–Chapel Hill, the program has two members from the board of trustees and one member from the board of governors on the advisory board. To say that these political appointees are out of their lanes is to put it mildly. The accrediting organization, SACSCOC, should take note.

UNC–Chapel Hill has a checkered past when it comes to administrators and outsiders interfering in the curriculum. In the early 2000s, administrators worked with Art Pope, a wealthy conservative in North Carolina, to create a minor in “Western Civilization.” Faculty-at-large were kept out of the loop and later challenged administrators’ lack of transparency. Faculty also pointed out—in a petition to administrators, op-eds, and letters to the editor—that over eight hundred courses already existed on “western civilization.” The points were lost on administrators, but Art Pope, miffed by the faculty pushback, decided to take his money and go home. Later he gave millions to support the PPE minor.

More recently, a faculty member at UNC-Chapel Hill who criticized the university found his academic freedom at risk. That’s another story, one that I recount in my article “The Tale of Professor X” in the recently published Journal of Academic Freedom. Sometimes the threats devolve to the level of interference with individual courses.

UNC–Chapel Hill has long been called the university of the people. But which people? If we do not want the university to serve the interests of only those in the richest 1 percent, the rest of us will have to resist. That means faculty need to step up and fight back.

Guest blogger Sherryl Kleinman is professor emerita of sociology at UNC-Chapel Hill. She continues to work against attacks on academic freedom and faculty governance with the university chapter and the NC state conference of the AAUP.