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.…
BY CHRISTOPHER S. ROSE Christopher S. Rose is a postdoctoral fellow with the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His 2019 dissertation, “On the Home Front: Food, Medicine, and Disease in World War I Egypt,” examines the impact of the war on the Egyptian civilian population. The following, which began…
MICHAEL C. BEHRENT The bold print of UNC-Chapel Hill’s decision earlier this week to build a $5.3 million museum for “Silent Sam,” the controversial Confederate statue, was bad enough. But as people have had time to read the report released by the campus’s Board of Trustees on Monday, December 3, it has become apparent that…
BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT On Monday, December 3, the Chancellor and Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill delivered their formal plan for what to do with “Silent Sam,” the controversial Confederate statue. They managed to formulate a decision that was almost perfect in its absurdity. To lay to rest…
BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT, ALTHA CRAVEY, AND JAY M. SMITH Nearly three months after the Confederate statue was toppled by activists, “Silent Sam” continues to roil the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Despite the controversy’s campus-specific particularities, the questions it raises are emblematic of the issues confronting many campuses in our age of…
BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT Last year, North Carolina became one of the first states to adopt a so-called “campus free speech” law (S.L. 2017-196). This law, like similar legislation that has been proposed or approved in other states, was drafted by a partisan conservative think-tank and supported by sympathetic legislators. Premised on the dubious proposition…
BY SHERRYL KLEINMAN 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…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Joe Knott, one of the Republicans who dominate the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, published an op-ed on May 25 that imagines an alarming future for higher education under the headline “We need more conservative professors. Here’s how we can do that at UNC.” Knott generously declares his support for…
POSTED BY KELLY HAND In a new op-ed* in the Wall Street Journal, Jay Smith, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, comments on reforms to college basketball recently proposed by Condoleeza Rice and her NCAA-appointed Commission on College Basketball. He is skeptical about the commission’s recommendations to address corruption because they…
BY HANK REICHMAN “We do not fear arrest.” So declared seventeen full or endowed professors at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in a letter to UNC Chancellor Carol Folt demanding the University take down Silent Sam, a Confederate monument that has been a focus of controversy on the campus since the Charlottesville events last…