They’ll scream “censorship” again, you just know it they will.
The UNC-Chapel Hill thought police, I mean. They took criticism Wednesday from conservative students and state legislators who questioned why the university thought it appropriate to make the 2003 freshman reading assignment the Barbara Ehrenreich screed Nickel and Dimed. The group has taken out ads in The News & Observer of Raleigh and The Daily Tar Heel to criticize the choice, which resembles last year’s pick of Approaching the Qur’an only in its manifest unsuitability to the task supposedly at hand: to foster meaningful and balanced discussion of a serious and topical issue.
In 2002, critics of the Michael Sells book on the Qur’an erred to the extent that they tried to make an issue of religious freedom out of it, or to invite state politicians to intervene. UNC-Chapel Hill may be governed by left-wing bigots, but its academic assignments, no matter how ill-advised, shouldn’t be overruled by legislators. Instead, its lack of interest in diversity — the real kind, the kind that matters a great deal in providing a sound educational experience — should lead policymakers to push for changes in leadership, and to reduce the extent to which state taxpayers are compelled to subsidize the propagation of leftist political ideology.
It looks like this year, the critics of the university have gotten it right. Their stated goal is to question why UNC administrators thought it proper to foist Ehrenreich’s ill-informed nonsense on unsuspecting freshmen. They say that other, more appropriate assignments would have allowed the students to engage in meaningful dialogue about how the economy works.
Of course, UNC defenders likely won’t notice. Some simply can’t imagine departing from the well-worn script (“it all started, you may remember, with the Communist speaker ban of the 1960s and it will end with John Ashcroft’s fascist takeover of . . .”). Others know very well that academic freedom is the cause of the conservatives here, not the “liberals,” but will try to cloud the issue to protect their own.
If freedom of thought were truly the goal of the decisionmakers at UNC, they would stop doing things like making freshmen read socialist agitprop. Indeed, they’d go further. They’d take affirmative action (a usefully descriptive phrase) to rectify the gross and damaging imbalance of political views represented among the university’s faculty members. They’d take affirmative action to make sure that university-sponsored forums and events include various points of view — be it on the war, on economic issues, or on social issues.
They would, in other words, act like educators — tax-funded educators, at that. Instead, mark my words, UNC-Chapel Hill administrators will squirt out dark and impenetrable rhetorical ink, like an octopus in fear for its life, and try to obscure the issues. Their goal will be to portray their liberty-loving critics as knuckle-dragging ogres. As gullibility in such matters is commonplace, and media connivance likely, there is a good chance their goal will be achieved.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.