UNC has never been safe from political interference—but it’s worse than ever

The University of North Carolina is a magnet for conservative abuse. One generation after another, Chapel Hill attracts the ire of the state’s right-wing political elite. These critics tend to have sprouted in the reactionary garden of North Carolina traditionalism, and they reflect a strain of hostility to UNC that has persisted since the founding of the university.

The first notable scribblers to crusade against UNC wrote for the Southern Textile Bulletin. A trade journal with a surprisingly broad readership, the Bulletin gave voice to a hardline conservative worldview. The news sheet’s main editorialist identified UNC President Frank Porter Graham as an ally of left-wing labor unions, the bete noire of a textile industry that was obsessed with subjugating their labor force. Thirty years later, the prematurely balding TV celebrity Jesse Helms would grasp the Textile Bulletin’s baton and take its abuse to a vituperative new level. Helms delighted in giving UNC the vulgar nickname “University of Negroes and Communists.” And today, without the hateful flair of Helms but every bit as ardently, the house journal of a certain conservative think tank runs churlish pieces with titles like “Oh! The Humanities!”

UNC’s lengthy roster of right-wing critics represents more than the virulence that has traditionally suffused right-wing political rhetoric in the state. They are, in addition to that, the mouthpiece of a reactionary elite that has always seen the university as a traitor to the Southern way of life. As a UCLA law professor observed in the journal Democracy, the Southern elite has never tolerated political competition. Because Southern politics are racialized and white supremacy is foundational to the region, the White People’s Party must be allowed to rule unchallenged. Any institution that contradicts white solidarity must be dismantled or suppressed.

UNC critics began their campaign to stifle the university only a few years after the school’s founding. At the time, Chapel Hill’s ethos reflected the Federalist politics of the university’s founder William Davie. The Federalists were the more progressive (or at least less reactionary) party of the 1790s; the few-thousand Black men who were allowed to vote in the country voted uniformly for Federalists and against Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. But the men who ruled North Carolina were uniformly Jeffersonian, and they regarded UNC’s Federalist faculty as a threat to their project of protecting aristocracy with a minimal state. Thus, they shut UNC down—completely.

Later Carolinians would reopen the university, keep it operating through the Civil War, and eventually build it into one of the greatest public universities in the country. But this record of resilience and growth would always be dogged by conservative harassment. In the 1930s, Frank Porter Graham drew intense opprobrium for the transgression of having dinner with an African American at a Durham hotel. The old bulls in the legislature famously passed the Speak Ban Bill in the 1960s, flagrantly violating the First Amendment by banning communists from giving speeches on campus, and even the country-populist Democrat Bob Scott cracked down on campus protests with an iron fist. Just as most North Carolinians have cherished their state’s educational crown jewel, many others have resented it, distrusted it, and feared its allegedly subversive liberalism.

The fact that UNC is still open and thriving despite two centuries of attacks should comfort most North Carolinians. But today the university faces challenges more existential than at any time since Jeffersonian slaveholders shut the university down during the Early Republic. North Carolina, in 2023, is under the control of a far-right legislature that absolutely despises the University of North Carolina. The same slaveholders who shuttered UNC out of pique at the faculty’s Federalist leanings wrote a state constitution that gives nearly all the power in state government to this legislature. As a result, people like Senate chieftain Phil Berger have the power to torment Carolina with impunity. The appointment as UNC Chancellor of a wealthy hack who served in the administration of one of the least successful North Carolina governors in history will hardly be the capstone of these hard times in Chapel Hill.