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Korie Dean
The Assembly
A UNC System Board of Governors committee on Wednesday advanced a proposal to define “academic freedom” across the state’s public universities, despite pushback from a faculty group and their lawyers. The policy, which heads to the full board for consideration next month, includes the definition that the system’s Faculty Assembly approved in October.
In part, the explanation reads that “academic freedom is the foundational principle that protects the rights of all faculty to engage in teaching, research/creative activities, service, and scholarly inquiry without undue influence.” But the system added sections that would set the “parameters” of academic freedom for faculty and its “protections” for students, such as the freedom to “take reasoned exception” to ideas presented in their classes.
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Violating the First Amendment will cost you. Universities and other public institutions are learning this lesson the hard way as the dust settles on a series of lawsuits brought by university faculty and staff who were punished for their comments about Charlie Kirk’s murder last September.
If Johns Hopkins University wanted to signal its seriousness about creating an alternative to the left-leaning orthodoxy that permeates higher education, it couldn’t have done better than the recent hire of economist Peter Arcidiacono.
House Republicans have now formally backed President Donald Trump in fulfilling his campaign promise to dismantle the Department of Education, voting Wednesday to advance 10 bills that would codify the White House’s efforts to disperse numerous education programs and offices to other federal agencies.
