Before the recent flap over the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill denying tenure to one of America’s top journalists, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Nikole Hannah-Jones, and before state lawmakers in “red states” across America declared a broader war over whether students can learn about racism, there was the curious case of law professor Gene Nichol and his UNC project called the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.
In the early 2010s, Nichol traveled across the Tar Heel State with his students to get an up-close view of how poor people lived in a state with America’s 12th-highest rate of poverty, with a quarter of all children struggling with food insecurity. They proposed and debated solutions as North Carolina fell in thrall to a tea party revolt against governing.
The law professor was moved by what he saw and became a fiery advocate on the issue, writing a series of blistering columns criticizing the GOP-led state government in the Raleigh News and Observer.
But at the same time that Nichol was criticizing Republicans in the state Legislature, those lawmakers were using their newfound power to take control of the UNC System, gradually replacing its board of governors with a cadre of GOP politicians, lobbyists and big-money donors.
In 2015, those governors ordered the closure of the anti-poverty center. And they didn’t stop there, shuttering centers for civic engagement and biodiversity on two other UNC campuses.
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In a tone of academic understatement, the dean of the law school at Chapel Hill said at the time that closing the centers “contravenes core principles of academic free speech and inquiry.” But a right-wing war against freedom of thought in America was only heating up — and in 2021 things have gotten worse. A lot worse.
And Hannah-Jones is at the epicenter of this renewed fight. Her 2019 effort called the 1619 Project — which she directed and for which she wrote the lead essay, which won that Pulitzer — asked readers to think of the fight for true freedom and democracy in America as not beginning with shots at Lexington and Concord but with the first slave ship’s arrival 402 years ago. That radical rethinking of American history is like a dagger to the beating heart of white supremacy that undergirds the modern conservative movement.
Just hours after the Chapel Hill trustees (and it absolutely should be noted that 11 of the 13 are white men, blocking tenure for a Black woman in Hannah-Jones) made their move, lawmakers in Texas dramatized the much broader threat to freedom of speech inside America’s classrooms. Early Saturday morning, state senators in Austin approved a bill that critics say would all but ban teaching about racism in public and charter schools.
But I started this piece with 2015 and with the UNC governors (a broader group that has control over the entire state system and that currently has just one member who identifies as a Democrat) because it’s important to understand that the conservative war on knowledge started long before the 1619 Project.
The American thought leaders who emerged from the carnage of World War II in the late 1940s — and who saw an unexpected boost for the power and potential of higher education with the surprise success of the 1944 G.I. Bill that gave returning vets a free ride through college — understood that expanding liberal learning would be good for democracy.
The growth of college opportunity in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s reinvented the American Dream, but the nation’s establishment hadn’t counted on the blowback. A generation taught to venerate democracy protested segregation and the Vietnam War — and triggered a right-wing backlash.
But North Carolina has been at the vanguard of a second-wave movement that coincided with the tea party era. It sought to make Republican control of public universities much more explicit by naming party functionaries — often with no background in higher education or any interest in its traditions — to control the boards that run these institutions.
Over the past decade, these conservative trustees have been a weight on campus administrators — occasionally ousting those who seem too committed to “political correctness” or the ideas that today are lumped together by critics as “wokeness” — and sometimes veered into micromanagement by cutting departments or moving against professors deemed too liberal, as UNC did in the case of Nichol.
In 2021, college governance across America is a politicized mess, hardly a bastion of independent thought. As a New York Times report showed over the weekend, even the question of whether to require that returning students this fall are vaccinated against covid-19 largely hinges on whether a state is under the sway of Republican politicians, who’ve now managed to politicize even a simple matter of public health.
But the exploding battle over how a true history of American race relations can be taught is the existential war that decades of preliminary skirmishes have been leading up to. To a Republican establishment whose rule is increasingly based on defenses of traditional white supremacy and the patriarchy, the clear-eyed reality of free-thinking discussions about ideas like the 1619 Project isn’t just a threat to the long-standing social order of this country, but to their very being.
In fact, the survival of the American Experiment may depend on our ability to embrace an ideal that was discussed but never fully realized in the heyday of the democratizing G.I. Bill — that higher education must be a universal “public good” supported by all of us. But that won’t mean much if we don’t also fight to make American education a place where ideas can be exchanged freely. The move against Hannah-Jones has exposed the real “cancel culture” in America — and the forces behind it.
Will Bunch is national columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.