Expression at UNC

When I came to Carolina nearly 30 years ago, I believed UNC-Chapel Hill was the greatest public university in the United States. Or, more specifically, I thought it was the best public university in America that actually wanted to be a public university. Places like Michigan and Virginia are great publics, to be sure. But they’d rather be private. More money in it.  

It’s hard to believe now, but long ago I was dean of the UNC law school. Back then, I did a program in Charlottesville with the UVA dean debating the Carolina vs. the Virginia way. He said he was dean of a law school that had a quasi-public relationship with a university that had a quasi-public relationship with the state of Virginia. And the quicker his place became completely private, the better he’d like it. I remember saying if Mr. Jefferson was alive today, he’d be a Tar Heel. 

I knew that we stand on some strong shoulders at Carolina. To our folks, being public meant something. President Edward Kidder Graham urged his colleagues to “escape the cloister and release the scholarly ideals of the university into channels of service” -- becoming an instrument of democracy to realize “the high and healthful aspirations of the state”. 

Political leaders haven’t always approved. Chancellor Bill Aycock, who fought the General Assembly’s notorious Speaker Ban, argued that when government tries to dilute the freedom of the University, it is “tantamount to trying to destroy it”. It would be “far better to close our doors than to let a cancer eat away at the spirit of inquiry and learning.” Quoting Pericles, Aycock said we should “die resisting rather than live submitting.” They don’t make chancellors like that anymore.

I’m a constitutional lawyer. I know rules of free expression, free assembly, and academic liberty can be complicated. UNC is debating them now. Here’s what’s not complicated. A university can’t have one set of expression rules for some groups and a different set for others, the more favored ones.       

A politicized Board of Trustees can’t have one set of tenure rules for a Pulitzer Prize winning Black journalism professor, and a different, more generous one, for everyone else.

A Board of Governors, when it crushed academic freedom by gutting a civil rights center representing black and brown people, can’t explain it would have felt differently if the Center had been representing gun rights or religious groups.  

The General Assembly and the Board of Trustees can’t, against all stated rules, start a new “civility” school at Carolina to hire more Republicans. Even if the provost says he was just trying to avoid something worse.

You can’t prosecute pro-Palestinian demonstrators on campus – judges and district attorneys have told UNC -- when there’s no evidence to support claims of danger and illegality. That’s true even if politicians are thrilled by the filings.    

The highest officers of the university can’t suddenly, on their own, start switching out the artwork at Hanes Hall – have it boarded up in the dark of night – making it inaccessible to the university community – as if they were, for the first time, doing housekeeping or art curating, rather than responding to pressure.

And the same folks can’t suspend a professor, without due process or exigency, because the claims against him come from high political quarters. 

Bill Aycock put it this way:  “Political tampering with the educational process can drastically lower the quality of higher education. Legislative censorship, once begun, carries an invidious threat of future proscriptions, and stirs fear in the minds of faculty and students that expression of unpopular sentiments may produce reprisals against them as well.”  

Aycock also issued a national call: “Generation after generation of students have gone forth from this campus to provide leadership throughout the length and breadth of this land. It is a pity so many have left us for other places. We need them now to defend the integrity and independence of the university”.   

Hark The Sound.