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What is going on at the University of North Carolina?

John Fea   |  October 29, 2023

Here is Brianna Atkinson at WUNC-North Carolina Public Radio: “The UNC System Board of Governors allocated $3.7 billion of operating expenses from the state budget. The two-year funding plan includes money for new university programs, rural healthcare partnerships and faculty salary increases. The state budget also reduced funds in some areas, including an over $52 million decrease across the UNC System due to lower student enrollment.”

The Board reserved $10 million to go to the the “Distinguished Professors Endowment Trust Fund, a fund used to recruit leading scholars to the university. Here is Atkinson again (italics mine): “The board approved new rules for which subjects can have distinguished professorships. They will now only be given in STEM-related (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. Subjects outside of this category will keep the distinguished professorship positions they’ve already established, but are no longer allowed to create new ones.

Learn more here.

Several scholars are responding to this news on social media. Here are two that caught my attention.

Sam Haselby is an editor at AEON magazine and the author of The Origins of Religious Nationalism. Sam’s Twitter account has become indispensable for its class-based critique of academia, intellectual elitism, and political culture.

What this new configuration will likely produce, because it is already doing so, is a distinctive style or kind of radicalism which combines left positions with cultural theory and youth pastor vibes or focus on emotions and emotional regulation

— Sam Haselby (@samhaselby) October 27, 2023

Deindustrialization has destroyed the working class and lowered life expectancy it has also cratered humanities majors. Every humanities professor in America can publish an op-ed and it won't replace the power of having majors, having popular classes, and lots of students. pic.twitter.com/M2PboM7rBj

— Sam Haselby (@samhaselby) October 28, 2023

Tyler Austin Harper, an African-American environmental studies professor at Bates College in Maine, is also a man of the left. We have covered his work here.

Universities have always been tacitly left-leaning and faculty have always been openly so, but institutions have never been this transparently, officially political. Almost every single job ad in my field/related fields this year has some kind of brazenly politicized language. 2/

— Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper) October 27, 2023

Imagine if a public university job ad instead read: "We see this position as building on recent hiring in the English department in traditionalist pedagogies and practices as well as a recent cluster hire in research related to pro-life ethics, nationalism, and family values." 4/

— Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper) October 27, 2023

This isn't about the right of individual faculty to *be* political or teach political subject matter. That's the whole point of academic freedom! This is about universities shamelessly embracing, as their official institutional posture, an openly ideological framework/stance 6/

— Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper) October 27, 2023

I don't care if I'm a broken record. Our society desperately needs the humanities, and a functional public higher education system more broadly. And *at the very moment* we're under sustained assault, some of us are still pouring fuel on Chris Rufo's bonfire. UNC is the result.

— Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper) October 27, 2023

What I find heartbreaking is that I really believe this was preventable. Or I at least believe that if defunding the humanities was inevitable, given the transformation of universities into Hedonist Experiential Luxury Resorts, it didn't have to happen this fast or in this way.

— Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper) October 27, 2023

And here is a second thread:

It’s funny. I’ve read tons of comments blasting this thread for “victim blaming.” But you know what I haven’t seen? I haven’t seen anyone defending the job ads I’m criticizing! The use of brazenly ideological language by college admins! Why? Because it’s not defensible! 2/

— Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper) October 28, 2023

The defunding we are seeing is part of a decades-long project of transforming universities into Hedonistic Luxury Resort Credentialing Facilities. The right is not attacking us *because* uni’s are woke, they’re using this as a *pretext* for the defunding they desired all along 4/

— Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper) October 28, 2023

The fascists ruining public education are abhorrent. I am not excusing them. I’m saying this: why the fuck are we making their jobs so easy? Why are we providing all the evidence and excuses they could possibly want? And for what? A project that isn’t even left or radical! 6/

— Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper) October 28, 2023

Anyway, you can be smug. You can accuse me of giving succor to fascists. You can refuse to consider that perhaps *we’ve* made any mistakes. But we are pouring gasoline on the bonfire of the humanities rather than attempting to strategize against our own obsolescence. It’s dumb.

— Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper) October 28, 2023

Filed Under: Way of Improvement Tagged With: higher education, humanities, liberal arts, Sam Haselby, Tyler Austin Harper, University of North Carolina