Beneath a veil of generosity, The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy made a backhanded offer earlier this month to help fund Larry Goldberg’s “Elements of Politics” course. Though generous on the surface with its proposed $2,000 donation, the letter amounted to little more than a conservative foundation’s swipe at a progressive university and the course offerings it deemed “frivolous.” The University turned down the offer per its policy of not accepting earmarked donations and invited the center to make an unspecified donation to the honors program. It’s now time for the Pope Center to put its money where its mouth is and contribute to the solution rather than complain about a problem.
Earlier this month, the Pope Center’s president, Jane Shaw, addressed a letter to Chancellor Holden Thorp, expressing her disappointment with the honors program’s decision to halve Goldberg’s popular “Elements of Politics” series. She got off to a good start, describing the course as “extremely valuable” and reflecting “the best in undergraduate education.” Only in the second paragraph did she address the crux of her letter: criticizing UNC for having “plenty of money for frivolous” courses but not serious ones.
Then came the media blitz.
In a Pope Center release to the media announcing the offer, Shaw showed her grudge against the University. “… The Pope Center brings speakers to North Carolina campuses to express ideas that are marginalized or disparaged in the classrooms,” she said. “In this case, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes and Locke are being marginalized and disparaged. That is tragic.”
Tragic though it may be, Goldberg’s classes have been trimmed down, not eliminated. The true tragedy would have been allowing the Pope Center to buy its way into those classrooms where its views are “marginalized and disparaged,” possibly at the cost of academic freedom.
Florida State University subjected itself to this invasion earlier this year, when it accepted a $1.5 million pledge from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation for positions in the economics department. Under the terms of the agreement, Koch’s representatives would have to approve hires for the program, which promotes the Libertarian beliefs in “political economy and free enterprise.”
That offer dwarfed the value of the Pope Center’s offer. But the threat Koch’s donation posed to FSU is no different that what Pope’s does to UNC. Though the honors program should have put more value in the Goldberg series, the University was right to draw the line in the sand in preserving academic freedom. If she truly has UNC education in her best interests, Shaw would see UNC’s offer to accept an unrestricted gift not as showing a lot of “chutzpah,” as she wrote in an email, but as an invitation to help return the honors program to good health.
