Victory for Academic Freedom at UNC
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CounterCurrent:
DEI on the Decline
Victory for Academic Freedom at UNC
CounterCurrent is the National Association of Scholars’ weekly newsletter, bringing you the biggest issues in academia and our responses to them.
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Category: College Governance/Ideological Diversity;
Reading Time: ~4 minutes
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** Featured News - University of North Carolina Moves to Ban Compelled Speech ([link removed])
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The calm before the storm is now concluded. The battle over “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives in higher education has begun in earnest. And today we can report another major victory at the University of North Carolina, where the school’s Board of Governors has voted to ban DEI statements ([link removed]) —otherwise known as “diversity” statements—in hiring, promotion, and admission decisions.
The board stated that UNC “shall neither solicit nor require an employee or applicant for academic admission or employment to affirmatively ascribe to or opine about believes, affiliations, ideals, or principles regarding matters of contemporary political debate or social action as a condition to admission, employment, or professional advancement,” nor may an employee or applicant “be solicited or required to describe his or her actions in support of, or in opposition to, such beliefs, affiliations, ideals, or principles.”
In addition to the board’s resolution, UNC has proposed a new school—the School of Civic Life and Leadership—to promote viewpoint diversity on campus.
“At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,” said David Boliek ([link removed]) , UNC Board of Trustees Chair, “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 cannot be said of right-of-center views. So this is an effort to try and remedy that with the School of Civic Life and Leadership, which will provide equal opportunity for both views to be taught at the university.”
“This is all about individual freedom and intellectual vigor,” Boliek said, “and we want that to always be alive at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Research shows that students, especially conservative students, routinely self-censor themselves in many of America’s leading colleges and universities—including here at North Carolina. We want to provide that opportunity for students to express themselves, to learn and develop the skills necessary to be leaders.”
The steps that UNC has taken are certainly in the right direction. As I wrote about last year, the DEI bureaucracy found within UNC and elsewhere may be regarded as “an extended parasite ([link removed]) .” Those “diversity statements” that the Board of Governors banned are, quite literally, step one in creating psychological traps to manipulate people’s behavior—lessons derived from the Milgram experiments, ([link removed]) and outlined in The Lucifer Effect ([link removed]) by Dr. Philip Zimbardo. The lack of right-of-center faculty and staff, moreover, works as a sort of auto-immune disorder on an institutional level, making the academy a welcoming environment for parasitic and predatory personalities, like Machiavels, narcissists, and psychopaths.
That lack of right-of-center faculty and staff has become extreme. Back in January 2020, researchers Mitchell Langbert and Sean Stevens conducted a study ([link removed]) exploring just how politically imbalanced our universities have become. This political imbalance, or even “ideological homogeneity” at times, can lead to questionable research practices due to “confirmation bias, group polarization, motivated reasoning, and the tendency for these phenomena to be even more pronounced among the highly educated.” These trends also do a disservice to higher education generally, as the partisan campus climate fuels an understandable distrust of our universities among those center-right of the political spectrum.
Langbert and Stevens’ conclusions were shocking. By discipline, economics had the least political skew, where Republicans were outnumbered by Democrats at a rate of three to one. By region, the Midwest has the greatest parity between the political parties, where Republicans were outnumbered at a rate of only about five to one.
One should keep in mind that Langbert and Stevens’ conclusions are dated to early 2020, before 2020’s summer of unrest and the rapid rise of DEI in higher education shortly thereafter. In other words, these figures are probably underestimating the political bias on campuses today.
The steps that UNC and its Board of Governors have taken are not only admirable, but hopefully inspiring. We await university administrators, alumni groups, and governing officials to join the fight against DEI in higher education and restore our universities to their proper, politically neutral state.
Until next week.
Mason Goad
Fellow
National Association of Scholars
Read the Board Motion ([link removed])
For more on DEI and American higher education:
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January 17, 2020
** Partisan Registration and Contributions of Faculty in Flagship Colleges ([link removed])
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Mitchell Langbert and Sean Stevens
The overwhelming political homogeneity of faculty members has raised concerns that it may lead to questionable research practices, as well as lead to increased skepticism about higher education.
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February 03, 2023
** UNC Board Moves to Prohibit Compelled Speech ([link removed])
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John D. Sailer
A UNC Board resolution seeks to restrict the school's use of compelled speech in the form of "diversity statements," which often act as political litmus tests.
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January 19, 2023
** Report: Comprehensive Restructuring ([link removed])
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John D. Sailer
This study of the University of Texas at Austin surveys the most influential policies enacted on campus in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
** About the NAS
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The National Association of Scholars, founded in 1987, emboldens reasoned scholarship and propels civil debate. We’re the leading organization of scholars and citizens committed to higher education as the catalyst of American freedom.
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