Academics discussed several challenges facing higher education in North Carolina at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy’s conference in Chapel Hill on Oct. 26. Those included answering the calls for increasing accountability, restoring liberty and dignity, and translating lofty goals into practical application.

The conference’s opening address was delivered by Dr. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina state senator who has held teaching and administrative positions in community colleges and universities. Foxx said public schools and community colleges have increasingly been held accountable by citizens and legislators, but universities so far have not. She said she expected that to change soon, based on several factors: changes in the makeup of the General Assembly, a population shift toward more elderly with different ideas on where state money should be spent, watchdog organizations such as the Pope Center, talk radio, and increasing alternatives for obtaining job skills, and the perception that the private sector can do it faster and better.

Foxx said questions likely to be asked by legislators and citizens are: What are the educational opportunities universities are providing in North Carolina? What is it that universities are doing or not doing? What is the value added by universities? What are their priorities? How do we know what students are learning? How much longer are we going to pay for the same instruction through “remedial education?” Can we afford institutions that duplicate programs?

Foxx criticized universities for not being specific with their reported numbers, citing examples of universities inflating their enrollment and application numbers and deflating their budget numbers. She also said universities resist critiques and self-examination. They must be pushed and shoved, usually by money issues, to examine themselves, she said — an observation she called “my most disappointing feeling about the university system.”

Foxx also discussed the successes of private institutions, successes she attributed to private higher education’s “entrepreneurial spirit.”

The crime of a generation
The keynote address was delivered by Dr. Alan Charles Kors, University of Pennsylvania professor of history and coauthor (with Harvey Silverglate) of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses. Kors spoke on the topic of “The Betrayal of Dignity and Liberty on America’s College Campuses.”

Kors traced the betrayal in the title to radicals of the 1960s entering academe and being presented with students who mocked the ’60s and voted for Reagan. These radicals, Kors said, decided to “save” these students from their own ideas, and the first thing out the window was students’ freedom.

The process the radicals imposed involved getting rid of the American individualist idea of each person as “a minority of one.” They taught that blacks, women, and other “minority groups” are not just oppressed, but also that they don’t understand the nature of their oppression and need to be instructed in it. It also involved transforming the curriculum, but that transformation has been ineffective, Kors said. After all, he said, most minorities still want to think for themselves, most whites do not feel guilty for the accident of their birth, and women and men, instead of viewing each other as class enemies, continue to fall in love. Therefore, the radicals have decided, they “need” administrative crackdown.

“Thus we’ve moved from their [the 1960s radicals’] Free Speech Movement to their speech codes,” Kors said. “American students are victims of a generational swindle of truly epic proportion.”

Kors said that so-called diversity and multicultural education has seen racial integration in education become desegregation. Diversity and multiculturalism teaches, Kors said, that the dominant culture of the West — Greek, Judeo-Christian, and enlightenment — is the enemy of authentic debate and freedom. Thus what’s considered diverse and multicultural are “any voices that challenge that culture” — black radicals are multicultural, not black conservatives; gays are, except Log Cabin GOP’ers; Sandinistas are, but not entrepreneurial Cuban immigrants.

With that viewpoint governing campus, Kors said, academic freedom becomes distorted. While Christians must bear any number of affronts to their religion and beliefs, as they should under academic freedom, Kors said, women, blacks, and gays must be protected from the punchlines of jokes. Saying campus speech codes “should be a national scandal,” Kors read aloud an extensive list of codes on campuses, quoting from them verbatim to the audiences’ shocked laughter.

“Speech codes could not exist a nanosecond without inherent double standards,” Kors said.

Kors said the “crime for which this generation will have to answer before history” is the notion of “officially designated group identities.” This idea has segregated and balkanized campuses, Kors said, and intrudes upon own’s right to self-designation and identity without outside pressure. Multiculturalists view race, sex, and sexuality as if each category had just one world view attached to it, Kors said. “More than half a century after the defeat of Nazi Germany, we equate blood with culture.”

At the conclusion of Kors’s talk, Pope Center Director George C. Leef presented Kors with the Caldwell Award, named after two pioneers in higher education in North Carolina, David Caldwell and Dr. Joseph Caldwell. Previous recipients of the annual award were Abigail Thernstrom and Peter Aranson.

Challenges facing private institutions
The afternoon session, on “Challenges Facing North Carolina’s Independent Colleges and Universities,” featured Dr. Johnnetta Cole, president of Bennett College, and Dr. Billy Wireman, president emeritus of Queens College. Cole spoke of the importance of special-mission institutions, historically black colleges and universities (HBCU’s) and women’s colleges. HBCU’s are responsible for a disproportionate amount of black lawyers and professionals, Cole said, and that is because they provide a climate that affirms their students, have teachers who believe in their students and expect them to do well, and feature greater parental involvement than other institutions.

Cole said that the challenges facing HBCU’s are “fundamentally fiscal,” in part because they lack a rich, white alumni base and that most of their students are the first in their families to attend college. They are also challenged by competition from private, white institutions now seeking a diverse faculty and student body.

Wireman talked about a change in the academic climate since the 1960s. Then the percentages of college students attending public vs. private institutions was 50-50; today it is 80-20, he said. Saying there was “no coherent vision driving American higher education,” Wireman echoed former University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chancellor Michael Hooker in asking, “What does a baccalaureate degree certify?” He said that while there was “so much focus on expanding access to higher education,” there was “precious little thought on what we want to teach them once they get there.”

Wireman said private higher education in North Carolina needed to find a way operationally to translate the institutions’ lofty ideals into each student graduating.

Sanders is assistant editor for Carolina Journal.