So here are a few things I don’t understand about a short-lived controversy at UNC-Chapel Hill over its anti-discrimination policy and the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.
In case you haven’t been following this story – and I can’t imagine what recent commemorations might have distracted you – the university, following the lead of others, decided to create a policy against discrimination on campus, including discriminatory practices by approved student groups. Exhibiting their trademark lack of common sense, university officials then sent a letter to the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), which has operated on campus for decades, demanding that it eliminate its rule requiring fellowship officers to be professing Christians.
Earlier this week, after my friends at the indispensable Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) called attention to UNC-Chapel Hill’s move, Chancellor James Moeser backpedaled. He affirmed IVCF’s right to ensure the Christianity of its leaders, but defended the university’s attempts to handle what was not, he said, a “simple matter”.
Okay, back to the things I don’t understand. First, having just fought a high-profile political and education battle about what you said was religious toleration on campus (the Qur’an reading assignment), how feeble-minded do you have to be to threaten a religious group with expulsion from campus facilities unless it drops that religious stuff? I hear that there’s a public-relations curriculum over at the J-School, in case some of you might want to consider dropping in for a chat.
Second, how brilliant an academic mind do you have to possess not to misunderstand the legal implications of an “anti-discrimination policy” that appears to sanction discrimination against religion? No one suggests that a secular group, say an environmental group or a student publication, can’t create ideological or philosophical conditions for assuming leadership. It is clearly discriminatory to, well, discriminate among these two similar practices simply because one is based on secular ideas and the other is based on religious ideas.
Third, and this is for UNC critics who think they’ve finally won a round against the campus chuckleheads, why are you celebrating the successful defense of the practice of compulsory funding of a Christian group at a state university? IVCF, like many more objectionable organizations, receives appropriations from mandatory student fees. There is something outrageous about compelling a Jewish or Muslim or Hindu student, at risk of attending the school of their choice, to help fund an explicitly Christian institution. Of course, logic and the law requires that if UNC-Chapel Hill is going to allow students to be compelled to support peacenik groups, the abhorrent Campus Y, environmentalist wacko groups, race-conscious groups, and so on, it must accept all reasonable comers. The proper response is to advocate the abolition of student fees as a funding source for such groups. Let students, faculty, and interested observers patronize the organizations they believe in. Period.
As has often been the case in political debates at UNC-Chapel Hill, just about everyone involved comes away looks worse than they did before.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.