BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE

The higher education news from China late last year was chilling to all who value academic freedom. Three major universities—Fudan, Nanjing, and Shaanxi Normal—under the direction of the government’s Ministry of Education, deleted “freedom of thought” from their charters and added pledges to follow Communist Party leadership, according to reports from Reuters. Fudan’s revised charter said the party committee is “the core of the university” and that the university would “weaponise the minds of teachers and students using Xi Jinping’s socialism ideology.”

Efforts by the Chinese government to quash academic freedom are not new. Chinese academics know that certain topics—the Tiananmen Square massacre, Taiwanese independence, China’s domination of Tibet—are off limits, and censor themselves accordingly. A sure way to attract a visit from the police is to discuss government corruption, criticize repression of Uighur Muslims, or comment favorably on the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong. So perhaps deleting “freedom of thought” from university charters is just a matter of bringing those documents into alignment with reality.

For now, things are different in the United States. Thanks to our laws, political traditions, and the efforts of the AAUP over the years, we can study, teach, and publish pretty much whatever we like, without fear of government repression. Even if we get flak for what we say or write, respect for academic freedom and the First Amendment mean that we generally needn’t worry about losing our jobs or being visited by the state police. This is, by historical standards, a remarkable arrangement, one that helps keep our society as free and democratic as it is.

Yet it is an arrangement that is more fragile than we like to imagine, as suggested by the emboldening in recent years of forces that threaten academic freedom. North Carolina is a case in point. The UNC System Board of Governors has, in its own way, tried to weaponize higher education in the state.

The Board of Governors—or “BOG,” for short—is the body that oversees the seventeen campuses in the University of North Carolina system. Though originally intended to be nonpartisan, the BOG has become a political body. Its twenty-four voting members are elected to four-year terms by a Republican-controlled general assembly that is itself a product of gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Seats on the BOG go primarily to big campaign donors from the world of business. Expertise in higher education is not required. As the state’s major newspaper, the News & Observer (Raleigh), recently editorialized: “[T]his not a sensible and balanced board. It is a Republican group dominated by white, middle-aged or older men who owe their seats to their fealty to Republican legislative leaders.”

Oversight of North Carolina’s public higher education system is thus in the hands of a group that is roughly eighty percent male and ninety percent white; that consists entirely of registered Republicans and a few unaffiliated voters (who are also donors to Republican campaigns); and that functions largely as an arm of a right-wing state legislature. Although the BOG has not yet directly attacked tenure or academic freedom, some of its behavior suggests it aspires to operate as a ministry of education.

In early 2015, the BOG ousted UNC system president Tom Ross. There were no complaints about Ross’s performance. The problem was that Ross is a Democrat, and the BOG wanted a member of its own political team in the job. They hired Margaret Spellings, former secretary of education under George W. Bush. Even she proved to be insufficiently conservative for the BOG. Friction between Spellings and the BOG led to her departure in 2019.

The same year it fired Ross, the BOG closed UNC’s Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity. Again, the issue was politics. The center’s director, law professor Gene Nichol, had been a vocal critic of policies favored by right-wing legislators. As the dean of the law school, Jack Boger, said about the board’s decision to close the center, it “rests on no clearly discernible reason beyond a desire to stifle the outspokenness of the center’s director . . . who continues to talk about the state’s appalling poverty with unsparing candor.”

The BOG went after other targets. It also closed East Carolina University’s Center for Biodiversity, and North Carolina Central University’s Institute for Civil Engagement and Social Change. Both units had done work that angered right-wing legislators.

Two years later, the board barred the UNC Center for Civil Rights from litigating cases. Lawyers for the center had run afoul of conservative legislators and BOG members by suing government bodies in the state. Arguments that the center represented citizens’ groups that could not afford legal aid, that the center gave law students practical experience, and that its efforts were largely supported by private funds were to no avail. Within a year, the BOG approved creation of a new clinical legal program to serve business and fill an alleged gap in North Carolina’s “entrepreneurship ecosystem.”

Recently the BOG has intruded into curricular matters, pushing to create the Program for Public Discourse at UNC-Chapel Hill. This innocuous sounding program is a thinly-disguised attempt to establish a center for conservative thought in what many legislators and BOG members see as a too-liberal university. The program was conceived not by faculty but by BOG members, one of whom sits on the program’s advisory board. University administrators, eager to please the BOG, have pushed the program despite faculty objections.

Brazen infringement of academic freedom by the Chinese Ministry of Education and demands for party allegiance are extreme forms of what we’ve seen in North Carolina. The difference is one of degree, not kind. In both cases, state actors seek to serve the interests of the powerful by controlling what is studied, taught, written, and said.

Our laws and policies and traditions still limit BOG encroachments on academic freedom. But conditions are ripe for a collapse of the protections we take for granted. We have a legislature dominated by one party, a politicized governing board, compliant administrators, and an unorganized faculty. It is the latter condition that we can change. The alternative is to kowtow to a homegrown ministry of education, and we know where that road leads.

Michael Schwalbe is professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.