The University of North Carolina board of governors voted unanimously today to close three liberal-leaning academic centers that study poverty, “biodiversity” and “social change,” WUNC reports:
Dozens of students and others attended the Board meeting and protested the decision. Several spoke out during the discussion and were removed from the meeting. Board Chair John Fennebresque eventually had to recess and move the meeting to another room as protestors shouted and chanted outside the door. …
The full Board vote followed a review by a Board committee that investigated all 247 academic centers and institutes. That probe began after the General Assembly, in its budget passed last year, called for the review in an attempt to save $15 million.
“State funding was a component of review,” said Jim Holmes, who chaired the committee that reviewed the centers. “But it was not the only consideration.”
The three academic centers set to close receive a total of $6,000 in direct state funding.
The proposed move drew outrage in some quarters, with critics claiming the Republican-led Legislature was targeting ideological enemies, but it was the right move, according to Jay Schalin, director of policy analysis for the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.
Writing in the Herald-Sun, Schalin says these centers serve more as “advocacy agencies with political agendas rather than centers of objective scholarship,” violating the American Association of University Professors’ 1915 Declaration of Principles on “intemperate partisanship”:
The right to free speech guarantees that individuals can say pretty much whatever they choose, but not that individuals have the right to state funding or state imprimatur to do so. And there has been no denial of academic freedom: No professors have lost their jobs or suffered censure.
The poverty center in particular was “born of partisanship as a thinly veiled political springboard for John Edwards to mount his 2008 presidential campaign and has maintained a one-sided stance ever since,” Schalin says:
By ignoring outraged criticism by a vocal and self-interested few, the legislature and [board of governors] exhibited the leadership needed to maintain UNC as a system of excellence. Rather than attacking them, North Carolina should thank them for upholding the spirit of free and open inquiry and not letting the university system become a playground for partisans.
Read the WUNC report and Schalin’s op-ed.
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