Today, Carolina Journal Radio’s Mitch Kokai talks with Dr. Michael Adams, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at UNC-Wilmington, about the direction the UNC System has taken since Erskine Bowles took over as president. (Go to http://www.carolinajournal.com/cjradio/ to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: You are taking a look at the changes that Erskine Bowles has made since coming on board as the UNC System President.
Adams: Right.
Kokai: Why is this important to people out there in North Carolina?
Adams: Well, I think it is important because during the years that Molly Broad was president of the UNC System we saw just an unprecedented deterioration in constitutional rights. It was a bad period. I am not picking on Molly Broad. It was a bad period across the nation in higher education with the emergence, and I should say the spread, of speech codes and unconstitutional non-discrimination causes for student groups that were actually quite Draconian, things of that nature. Also, free speech zones and things of that nature on college campuses that banned free speech on 99 percent of the physical areas of certain campuses, including UNC-Greensboro. When you look at some of the things that happened roughly in the period of the mid-90s until the time that Erskine Bowles took over the system, we got ourselves into a big mess. And we are having to get ourselves out of that slowly by undoing a lot of that damage. And I actually welcome the change of having Erskine Bowles come into the UNC System because I honestly — and again, not trying to be personal — I think that any change would have been for the better given some of the things that were happening. And I think that since he has taken over, we have seen some evidence that he is willing to listen on certain issues that have a constitutional dimension, where his predecessor wasn’t willing to listen at all. And so I am optimistic about the future.
Kokai: What are some of the things that he has done that have been positive?
Adams: Well, we have seen some positive things take place under his leadership. Now you notice the way that I word that. I am not in any way certain that there has been direct involvement. I suspect it, but clearly within the first couple of months after Erskine Bowles took over, we did see some unconstitutional policies go away. I was in the midst of organizing a lawsuit, by the way — a federal lawsuit with the Alliance Defense Fund [ADF] against Appalachian State University over their unconstitutional speech code. I had been working together with FIRE [Foundation for Individual Rights in Education], the ADF, and I did identify a plaintiff. We are in the process of actually drawing up a civil complaint to file a federal lawsuit, and this was a case actually where the ACLU got involved — the local chapter at Appalachian State. And we had a great victory there because Appalachian State was convinced to get rid of their clearly unconstitutional speech code before we had to go to court, and that is always the way to go. We do not want to have unnecessary litigation. We don’t want to see the taxpayers foot a bill that isn’t necessary, and that happened under his leadership right around the time that we saw the withdrawal of the unconstitutional free speech zones at UNC-G and also they are backing off of an issue concerning an unconstitutional non-discrimination clause. These are things that happened within just a period of a few months of Erskine Bowles taking over. I don’t have proof that he was directly involved, but I can see that we were not able to budge or make any progress on these issues at all while his predecessor was still in power.
Kokai: So in looking at where things stand with the UNC System now, is there more work that needs to be done?
Adams: Oh, there is absolutely more work that needs to be done because we still do have sexual harassment policies that have sort of morphed into speech codes on college campuses. Sometimes when we talk about the concept of hostile environment, you see that they end up being very, very broad, all encompassing bans on free speech. You see sometimes in the computer use policies and things like that — you understand what I’m saying? They are sometimes several different actual speech codes hidden in different places on various campuses, and you sort of multiply that across the different campuses in the UNC System, you realize that we still have a lot of policies that need to be struck down. I think that is the most difficult challenge — is that we are actually going to have to recruit plaintiffs to take on some of these policies. I have been doing some of that at various schools around the country in the last year, and we have to do some of that work here in the UNC System. We still have, for example, unconstitutional speech zones, free speech zones on some of the campuses, including UNC-Wilmington, that are going to have to be challenged. But I think almost every campus in the UNC System has some unconstitutional policy that is going to have to be challenged in or out of court. So there is a lot of work to do. I think it’s actually going to take several years to get rid of all of these things if we start acting now. But, yes, there is work to be done.
Kokai: Do you have a sense of why things have changed with the regime change at UNC General Administration?
Adams: I think it had a lot to do with the joint report between the Pope Center [for Higher Education Policy] and the Foundation for Individual Right in Education. It was an amazing report that was done, and it just pointed out specifically the policies that were illegal. And I know that when Greg Lukianoff and Samantha [Harris] came down from FIRE — the two principal attorneys for that organization — now when they came down here and explained in a press conference that, you know, it’s very simple. If any of this goes to court, you — the UNC System — will lose, I think maybe they were taken seriously. I think there are people out there who are listening in the legislature. I think that Erskine — I get a sense that he is listening and that is probably the principal reason for the opportunity that we have now to move forward. And I do, again, feel very optimistic about the future.
Kokai: Why is it important to roll back some of these codes that are unconstitutional? For some people out there they might say, kids at college campus — who cares what they say. Why is it important that we actually address this issue?
Adams: Well, you know, these are the future voters out there, and if we have people, you know, who are being exposed to only one side of the story, and that’s what happens at campuses where you have speech codes. They are used exclusively to prevent conservative thought on college campuses. You just don’t hear them being used to suppress pro-socialist or liberal thought. It is simply not happening at all. I think that what it is producing is an uninformed electorate. People who go out there and eventually, years later, after working out there in the real world, eventually realize that there was more to the story than they had been taught in college. And I think ultimately, what the speech codes produce is uninformed public policy. And no one wants that. We want to have a free and open marketplace of ideas, and if people on the Left believe that their ideas are superior, let them be juxtaposed against conservatives like me, and our ideas that are supposedly false. If our ideas are really false, and their ideas are really true, then they could benefit from the contrast. So there is no real reason why anyone should be opposed to a free and open marketplace of ideas.
Kokai: Are you optimistic that these changes will take place?
Adams: I am optimistic that they will take place within the next five or ten years, but a lot of the work, especially in the area of speech codes, is going to be slow unless the UNC System just rolls over out of court like we have seen that happen on some campuses. I don’t think that they are always going to do that, so I think that the battles will be hard fought and long, but ultimately we are going to prevail.