Welcome to the Nanny State of the UNC Board of Governors

When the helicopter parents of millennials began meddling in college admissions and academics back in the early 2000s, faculty and staff often responded by holding firm on principles of student responsibility, equity in academic achievement, and commitment to the public good.

Having now reached the age of political leadership, many helicopter paternalists seem to have morphed into helicopter authoritarians. Fearful for their progeny in the rough and tumble marketplace of ideas, these paternalists-turned-politicos have seized on the power of the state to roll back decades of needed change, thwart meritocratic progress, and undermine time-honored conservative principles of higher education governance.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the last half decade of policy making in the UNC system. In a telling aside at a recent meeting, Board of Governors vice chair (and now chair-apparent) Harry Smith lamented that friends and acquaintances are requesting favored admissions consideration for their children. That should come as no surprise; Smith’s friends aren’t the only ones who have noticed that undermining university management by misgovernance has become standard operating procedure for the board and its patrons in the legislature.

Welcome to the UNC Governance Nanny State, where the private purposes and fears of political paternalists repeatedly flout the informed counsel of university administrators, staff, and faculty.

From the anxious speechifying emanating from Jones Street and the BOG, one might think that UNC schools are little more than political re-education camps where armies of brainwashing "leftist" professors are indoctrinating North Carolina children with the tenets of totalitarian liberalism. That’s just a load of claptrap, and the stellar reputation of the university system and its schools prove the point.

To hammer down on university administration, one university president was removed and his successor has been under siege because both resisted the diktat of misgovernance; legislators interfered in the UNC president search process when they didn’t get what they wanted; and for its part the board inserted itself in search committees for campus leaders while also meddling in administrators’ efforts to manage their campus public spaces.

To squeeze the independence out of university governing boards, the legislature cut the size of the board, purging the members who participated in hiring Margaret Spellings and replacing them with a bevy of obsequious politicos, and stripped the governor of campus trustee appointment authority.

To quash faculty expertise in teaching and research, the board undermined the process of faculty peer review despite the objection of every faculty governance body in the system; legislators proposed to usurp faculty oversight of the curriculum and scholarly inquiry; the board shut down centers of inquiry and service they didn’t like; lawmakers bankrolled a new center that was a sinecure for a patron; and then the board tried to play on the reputation of a respected conservative scholar who rebuffed their authoritarian plan to create an ‘academic’ safe-space for people they wanted to protect.

To discourage aspiring students from challenging circumstances, they targeted the UNC system in the discriminatory legislation of HB2, cut off financial aid resources, passed policies to push underprivileged students out of the universities and into community college, slashed tuition and threatened to rename historically minority institutions in order to change their demographics, and moved to cripple campus diversity initiatives.

And, finally, to regulate speech and behavior, the board created a so-called free speech policy that gave the board disciplinary powers beyond legal sanctions and campus regulations, interfered in the housing choices of students that the board didn’t like, and repeatedly tried to regulate the use of student fees that are approved by students to serve student needs and interests.

For many decades college faculty and staff have urged students to recognize that American higher education is the envy of the world because it is an indispensable institution of democratic progress, and to join in making it all it can be.

More recently, that counsel has encouraged students to reject authoritarian stratagems of ideological conformity, and to embrace the difficult but necessary dissonance and debate of intellectual – and democratic – progress.

It used to be that advice was directed primarily to students who felt threatened by the status quo. With any luck, students with conservative inclinations will also come to see that they, too, are ill-served by overbearing paternalists.

This story was originally published April 25, 2018 at 12:12 PM with the headline "Welcome to the Nanny State of the UNC Board of Governors."