In a recent opinion piece, Rita Koganzon of the School of Civic Life and Leadership railed against coddled college students who, she claims, routinely get away with bad behavior. She gave as examples the failure of campus police to arrest students who drink, the willingness of professors to give A's even for incoherent assignments and students' ability to protest the destruction of Gaza with minimal consequences. Prestigious institutions like UNC are the worst, she wrote, because “the more elite the school, the more acute the problem.” Koganzon seems especially bothered by universities' desire to create a safe environment that promotes growth but limits the opportunities for damage. She cheers the recent curtailing of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
Koganzon's essay left me shaking my head. I don't give A's for incoherency, and I don't know of any colleagues in Pauli Murray Hall who do so. I am proud of UNC students who devote their time and energy to protesting egregious injustices, even to the point of disruption, and I am confident that in most cases time will prove the righteousness of their causes. I've never believed that students who drink before the age of twenty one, absent harm to others, should be handcuffed.
I was most struck, however, by the irony baked into this latest broadside against university practices. Professor Koganzon is one of 11 faculty members recently hired to help staff the SCiLL. Unlike the joint appointees with homes in other departments, the new faculty have no formal affiliation with existing departments. This school was created — via Board of Trustees fiat, in flagrant disregard for the will and expertise of UNC faculty — for the express purpose of creating a safe environment for conservative thinkers. Although they may be fine people and scholars, the core faculty of SCiLL, lacking departmental affiliations, escaped the rigors of normal academic hiring practices. The school to which they were recruited is unconstrained by traditions of disciplinary expertise. It measures academic merit not by disciplinary standards but by one's location on an ideological spectrum. We can only assume that tenure and promotion decisions in the SCiLL will reflect similar priorities.
Though they would never admit it, the faculty of SCiLL benefited from affirmative action, but of the unjustifiable kind that works in reverse. Their candidacies for positions at UNC were made possible not by pure merit, which they may or may not possess, but by their membership in or adjacency to a well-funded conservative ecosystem saturated by euphemisms like “viewpoint diversity,” “civility” and “balance.” That ecosystem thrives on other built-in advantages. SCiLL's mission, like that of other similarly inspired centers across the country, is supported by the generosity of rich donors working to defend and disguise capitalism's worst excesses, a gerrymandered GOP supermajority in our state and a university administration willing to accommodate the political goals of legislators and their minions on governing boards. SCiLL professors may well be the most protected people on our campus.
Yet Rita Koganzon resents the comfort of leniency and low standards to which students are allegedly habituated. Maybe she should look in the mirror.
- Jay M. Smith, Julia Cherry Spruill Professor of History
