I’ll admit I found new UNCG chancellor Linda Brady’s experience in the State Department impressive enough to think that maybe she wasn’t your average higher educrat. But N&R editorials don’t fawn over people who don’t have lofty ideas.That’s always enough to raise doubt in my mind:
Brady’s skills have been honed in challenging arenas.
Asked about some tight spots she’d occupied during her time as an international negotiator, she mentioned secret talks in the Middle East and Persian Gulf regions when she worked in the State Department during the Reagan administration. Agreements were reached that turned out to be useful in building a coalition during the first gulf war.
What she learned most, Brady said, is “the importance of focusing on the problem, separating the people from the problem. Get the right people around the table … and understand other cultures and perspectives.”
She might be able to employ that approach beyond the UNCG campus. Greensboro could use a talented negotiator to help address some of its conflicts.
Surely someone who helped hammer out arms deals with Cold War-era Russians can find solutions to all sorts of problems.
Funny, the Pope Center’s Jay Schalin is more skeptical of Brady’s leadership, considering the fact that her former employer, the University of Oregon, is “a is a bastion of radical left-wing politics”:
Given Brady’s statement at the press conference that “diversity” will be a focus of her administration, it is likely that the Greensboro campus will see a similar promotion of the current trendy view that people are essentially members of aggrieved minority pressure groups, rather than as individuals responsible for their own failures and achievements.
And given her refusal to acknowledge the pervasiveness of the liberal mindset at the University of Oregon, it can be expected that UNC-Greensboro will also see a leftward drift. She might claim faith in a “clash of ideas” as a key element of education, as she did at the recent press conference, but when the imbalance is already 69 to 4, it is a bit disingenuous to suggest anything other than that the clash is one-sided, and that the victor is pre-ordained.
I have little doubt the majority of professors on the UNCG campus are liberals. They were most liberal when I was a student there, too. Even my mentor William Link’s liberlaism has been exposed with release of Righteous Warrior, his biography of Jesse Helms.
But Link admitted he was approaching Helms from a liberal perspective, and reviewers have praised his balanced view of Helms. As I’ve said quite a few time before, my professors did a good job of presenting a balanced view in the classroom and letting students decide for themselves exactly how it applies to the real world. They kept their politics out of it.
With that in mind, I’d hate to see UNCG become a university that wears its liberalism on its sleeve. We’ll see.
