BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN

When the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees chair David Boliek explained the trustees’ rationale for seeking to create a new School of Civic Life and Leadership, he cited an imaginary problem in search of a blatantly political solution. On January 28, on the Fox and Friends news program, Boliek said, “At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we clearly have a world-class faculty that exists and teaches students and creates leaders of the future. We, however, have no shortage of left-of-center, progressive views on our campus, like many campuses across the nation. But the same really can’t be said about right-of-center views. So, this is an effort to try to remedy that with the School of Civic Life and Leadership, which will provide equal opportunity for both views to be taught.”

As Boliek, a personal injury attorney based in Fayetteville, North Carolina, sees it, what professors offer students are “views,” perhaps akin to competing stories fashioned in courtrooms. He apparently understands little about how people become professors or what they do.

Every faculty member spends years developing expertise in their areas of research and teaching. This learning continues throughout a professor’s career, perhaps entailing decades of study, research, writing, and teaching. None of this matters, according to Boliek, who says that faculty members offer students only “views” describable in simplistic left, right, and center terms.

We can see how far short Boliek sells faculty by contrasting his image of professors foisting “views” on vulnerable students with one of the essential processes of academic life: peer review. It would be good if more people outside the academy understood this process and how it is antithetical to the notion of “views” embraced by Boliek and his fellow conservatives. Here’s a brief account: The author of a scientific or scholarly paper, usually a professor, submits a manuscript to the editor of a journal, who then recruits two to five professors at other universities to serve as expert reviewers. These reviewers scrutinize the author’s assumptions, theory, methods, evidence, and arguments, then decide whether the author’s conclusions are warranted. This typically results in pages of comments, revisions, and resubmission. Reviewers read the revised manuscript, often suggesting further revisions.

The competition for journal space is fierce, and manuscripts that can’t be satisfactorily revised to meet professional standards are rejected. Every faculty member knows that when an article appears in a peer-reviewed journal it has survived this long process of review and has been judged worthy of a place in the literature. Nowhere in this process does political party membership matter.  

Scientific and scholarly work is, and must be, judged by scientific and scholarly criteria. Faculty expertise consists in large part of knowing what these criteria are and how to meet them. This same expertise, employed to produce work that warrants publication, is what underlies faculty prerogatives to create and teach courses, develop and revise curricula, and evaluate the quality of their colleagues’ work. The politics of left, right, or center—in the way that Boliek claims—have nothing to do with it.

By implicitly discounting faculty expertise, reducing what faculty offer to “views,” and usurping the academic prerogatives that rightfully rest on demonstrated scientific and scholarly expertise, UNC’s board of trustees has engaged in overreach that cheapens the core process that makes universities places of special value: creating valid and reliable knowledge and sharing it with students.

As knowledge develops, departments and universities hire faculty members to catch up. This is how course offerings and curricula ought to evolve. It’s also how the university remains true to its mission. To hire faculty members to satisfy a quota for right-of-center “views” would betray this mission.

That Boliek and others on the board of trustees invoked a political frame to justify the pursuit of explicitly politicized faculty hiring shows that they do not know how a university should work. This also makes it clear that it is the trustees and their legislative backers who are politicizing the academy, not the faculty.

Unfortunately, UNC administrators seem poised to capitulate, either as a matter of expediency or shared ideology. Echoing the trustees’ rhetoric, both the chancellor and provost have said that the newly proposed school will be good for students and will promote democracy. Both notions are false.

The politicizing of hires and curricula would betray students, who expect that what they’re offered is knowledge based on genuine expertise, not ideology. Accreditors are right to worry about this and what it means for the quality of the university. As Belle Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges said to the board of trustees, “How come you’re in the curriculum when you have a faculty?”

As for democracy, what’s happening is just the opposite. The trustees are trying to create a school within the university by fiat. As former UNC chancellor Holden Thorp noted, academic initiatives properly come from faculty, not trustees. The irony is that even while the trustees tout the value of democracy, their actions teach a different lesson: if you have enough power, there’s no need for consultation or honest debate—you just issue directives.

When the UNC Faculty Council recently passed a resolution opposing the school, Boliek responded by saying, “The current leadership of the Faculty Council is certainly free to take whatever position they want . . . My sense is, however, that the current Board of Trustees will continue to strive to keep Carolina a national leader on many fronts. Ultimately, we are appointed to represent the 11 million people in North Carolina who own the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.” So much for listening and modeling “civil discourse.”

A comprehensive 2022 report by the AAUP on the UNC system documented a pattern of troubling political interference in academic affairs. This interference isn’t just a threat to faculty prerogatives; it’s become a threat to accreditation, to the university’s national reputation, and to the quality of education it offers students.

It’s time for a wider swath of faculty, students, and members of the public who care about the quality of the university to fight back against know-nothing political threats to the university’s integrity. If faculty expertise is displaced and the university is driven by the interests of politically appointed trustees, eventually there will be no real university left to defend.

Sherryl Kleinman is professor emerita of sociology at UNC–Chapel Hill.