We’re watching progress be rolled back at UNC, other universities | Opinion
University of North Carolina System President Peter Hans has done all of higher education a huge service by appointing an interim chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill who is clearly not the best qualified for the job.
The move illustrates not only hypocrisy, but how important it is to fight back against bad-faith actors determined to undermine higher education or reshape it in their preferred image.
Hans appointed Lee Roberts, a member of the UNC System Board of Governors — but also a man who “has no previous professional administrative experience in higher education,” according to the Daily Tar Heel student newspaper.
The appointment, announced Friday, comes as the nation debates the usefulness of higher education in the wake of a much-discussed House hearing in which presidents of three high-profile institutions were unprepared to answer a bad-faith question about the increase of antisemitism on campus.
One of those presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard University, has come under special scrutiny for supposedly being unqualified, never mind her impressive resume and level of experience, and working her way up through the ranks. Gay has been targeted that way because she is a black woman. The other presidents who have been criticized since that hearing, including one who resigned, have not endured those types of attacks.
But Roberts is neither Black nor a woman. He’s a man with strong connections to people with the political power to make him interim chancellor even though it’s obvious that an institution as prestigious as UNC could have found someone with actual higher education professional administrative experience as it transitions into new leadership. It very much reminds me of the decision by the College of Charleston in South Carolina to make Glenn McConnell president despite his lack of experience or expertise but who was among the most politically-powerful men in the state.
In North Carolina, like South Carolina and a growing number of states, education has been under attack by those who’ve convinced themselves there’s only one right way to achieve academic excellence, and that way just happens to prioritize their worldview. It’s why you have “don’t say gay” bills in Florida, anti-critical race theory laws and proposals, and Moms for Liberty — a group against academic freedom if it leads to results they don’t like. Oklahoma’s governor gutted diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
North Carolina’s Virginia Foxx, who heads the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, is trying to make it more difficult for middle-class families to afford to send their children to top institutions. For instance, about 3,400 students at Duke University would lose access to federal student loans under a provision in a proposed law, according to The Atlantic.
It’s not coincidence that this is happening in the aftermath of the atrocities committed by Hamas, which provided an opening for those who’ve long wanted to turn back the clock on American education to when its upper ranks and student populations were less diverse. They are using a legit concern about a rise in antisemitism (and Islamophobia) in colleges and beyond as a Trojan horse to undermine important programs that have only begun to level the playing field for minorities, women and other students, faculty and staff who have long been silenced in such spaces.
We must not fall prey to that fearmongering. We must not allow progress to be rolled back to a time when an appointment like UNC’s interim chancellor was routine and hardly subject to challenge.
Despite what you might have heard, our primary goal at these institutions hasn’t changed: academic excellence. It’s just that we all don’t agree on how to get there. That’s fine, healthy even. But the next time someone advances the erroneous argument that we are dumbing down education for the sake of an ill-defined “social justice,” ask them why they are content with men like Roberts being appointed to positions they haven’t earned.
Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer in North and South Carolina.
