BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT

Since the release last week of the report by the AAUP’s Special Committee on Governance, Academic Freedom, and Institutional Racism in the University of North Carolina system, UNC administrators have responded to the charge that, as the report puts it, the UNC system is “in trouble.” Unsurprisingly, responses from university officials wind up confirming the very problems the report identifies.

Indeed, one could read the UNC administrators’ response to the AAUP report as exemplifying a distinctive form of administrative self-justificatory rhetoric—the “we’re-always-right” discourse with which faculty are all too familiar. What is amusing is that administrators are so out of touch and so insular that they have almost lost any sense of how hollow their language rings.

Here are some of the main tactics that UNC administrators have used in responding to the report.

Rule 1: Don’t respond to the actual report

Surprising though it may seem, two responses to the report from university administration did not refer to the final report, published on April 26, but to the draft report, which was precirculated to various parties, including university administrations, in mid-March. The special committee precirculated a confidential draft to ensure the report’s accuracy. It gave administrators a chance to comment and make corrections. Indeed, the special committee integrated some of the comments it received from administrators into the final report.

Yet following the release, Kimberly van Noort, the UNC system’s senior vice president for academic affairs (the system provost) shared with the press a letter, dated March 23, that only addressed the precirculated draft. Appalachian State University, whose administrative failures were addressed in the report (notably Chancellor Sheri Evert’s unilateral appointment of Provost Heather Norris), responded similarly. Megan Hayes, associate vice chancellor and chief communications officer, sent a document to the press consisting of line-by-line criticism of the draft report. The document’s heading is dated March 15, but Hayes’s email to the press fails to mention that her document relates to an earlier and confidential draft.

Informed of this fact, Anita Levy, senior program officer in the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance, observed that “the associate vice chancellor shared with the media comments that the administration made on a confidential draft of the report. . . . After those comments were received, the special committee made changes accordingly to accounts of events and cases, which the media is now free to speculate on because they have the entirety of the comments made on a confidential draft. This appears to be a perfect example of incompetence and disregard for due process on the part of the administration.”

Rule 2: Shhh . . . Don’t mention “shared governance”!

One of the key concerns the report addresses is “violations of standards of shared governance.” While van Noort and Hayes criticize the report, which van Noort calls “disheartening” and “relentlessly grim,” they barely mention shared governance. Besides a pro forma reference to “the value of shared governance in a public university system,” van Noort makes no attempt to refute the significant decline in shared governance that the report amply documents. The report details the way tenure processes were tossed aside in the Nikole Hannah-Jones case. Van Noort’s letter is radio silent on this issue.

Rule 3: Say we’re too inclusive to be affected by institutional racism!

According to van Noort, the UNC system has done a lot to overcome North Carolina’s legacy of systemic racism. She notes that the system has “improved graduation rates among low-income and minority students” and touts the system’s “historic investments in growing and supporting our system’s six historically minority-serving institutions.”

Yet her response is deafeningly silent on some of the key issues highlighted in the report. For instance, in removing—under pressure from the students and faculty—the “Silent Sam” Confederate monument on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus, the board of governors (which runs the system) entered into an agreement in which it paid a neo-Confederate organization, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, $2.5 million to dispose of it.

The UNC system is, in short, happy to take minority students’ tuition dollars—provided that they don’t challenge the university leadership’s white privilege.

Rule 4: Say you practice precisely what you don’t preach!

Full disclosure: as a faculty activist who teaches at Appalachian State University, I experienced many of the events discussed in the special committee’s report firsthand. From 2019 to 2021, I was chair of my institution’s faculty senate. The report mentions an incident in which I was involved: “On August 17, 2020, the faculty senate voted no confidence in Chancellor Everts’s leadership. Within an hour of the meeting’s adjournment, the chancellor sent a letter to the entire faculty informing them that she and the provost would no longer attend senate meetings, ostensibly because some senators were plaintiffs in a class-action suit against the UNC system for reopening the campus in the midst of the pandemic (no other chancellors took similar action).”

Though I took no public position on the no-confidence vote (which was widely reported), I organized it because my colleagues scrupulously followed appropriate procedure and collected the requisite votes. I was disheartened but not surprised by my administration’s retaliation.

What shocked me, however, was the support Everts’s administrative boycott of the faculty senate received from the UNC system. On October 22, 2020, I wrote to the UNC system president, Peter Hans, explaining my deep concern about Everts’s unilateral decision.

On November 5, I received a response not from the system president but from none other than Vice President van Noort. Ignoring the detailed case I laid out about Everts’s failure to uphold her shared governance obligations, van Noort wrote, “It is clear that Chancellor Everts has established methods of meeting and consultation with constituent institution departments and faculty and is acting in accordance with the requirements of the Code.”

In short, the same Kimberly van Noort who, in her comments on the AAUP report, breezily claims to “value . . . shared governance in a public university” also condoned a chancellor’s decision to break off connections with a faculty senate because she was upset by a no-confidence vote.

If a report in which so many UNC faculty were consulted strikes van Noort as “grim,” she might consider how her actions contributed to that mood. Doctor, heal thyself.

More generally, what is striking about the response both from van Noort and Hayes is how profoundly they don’t get the report’s key message: the faculty’s rights and professionalism are under threat. Their assumption is that a university can be strong, “vibrant,” and “productive” while riding roughshod over the values that are central to our professionalism—specifically, the values that the AAUP defends: academic freedom, shared governance, and tenure.

Unwittingly, administrators like van Noort offer the best possible testimony to the failures the special committee identifies. When she says that “it’s nearly impossible” to square the system portrayed in the report with “the thriving campuses we know and love,” she is making her own vision of higher education all too clear.

Michael C. Behrent is president of the North Carolina State AAUP conference and professor of history at Appalachian State University.