Both locally and nationally, there has been plenty of reaction, mostly from the left, to the UNC Board of Governors’ recommendation to close three academic centers. In particular, the American Association of University Professors has condemned the move to close Chapel Hill’s Center on Poverty, Work, and Community.
But, as Jay Schalin points out in a new piece in the Durham Herald-Sun, the closure of this center in particular is right in line with the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles of Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure. In fact, the AAUP should be enthusiastically cheering its closure. Schalin highlights the following passage:
If this profession should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of the incompetent and the unworthy, or to prevent the freedom which it claims in the name of science from being used as a shelter for inefficiency, for superficiality, or for uncritical and intemperate partisanship, it is certain that the task will be performed by others. [emphasis mine]
Schalin writes, “For too long, the UNC system has allowed ‘intemperate partisanship’ to creep into various sectors of its operation.” He adds that some centers are “advocacy agencies with political agendas rather than centers of objective scholarship.” So rather than being hyper-partisan, as alleged by the left, the BoG is finally doing its job, Schalin says.
Read the rest here.
