UNC: Not Even Its Founders Would Be Proud

Davie County is approximately 34 miles west of the Kernersville News headquarters. It is a quiet-but-growing community of 41,000 residents. Davie is known for its small towns and for its majestic courthouse, adorned boldly with a message to the world: “IN GOD WE TRUST.” I am honored to share this message as Davie and Forsyth County’s voice in the North Carolina Senate.

Davie has always been a community of meaning, beginning with its name. It is named after William Richardson Davie, Revolutionary War hero, US Founding Father, and tenth Governor of North Carolina. In his spare time, Governor Davie also served as one of the chief founders of the first public university in the nation: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

As the Senator for District 31, I have no doubt that Davie County lives up to the the values of its namesake: values like heroism, vision, patriotism, and education. Governor Davie would be proud of the community that his life inspired. Would he feel the same way about the university? Recent events leave me feeling not so sure.

Let me be clear. I love Carolina. One of my daughters is a proud graduate. Another was a law school professor at the law school there for many years. We are huge Carolina fans. Lately there have been reasons to feel disappointment.

Readers may remember the open letter that I wrote to UNC’s administration in April. I wrote a simple article detailing the discussions I had with the university in 2019 when I filed Senate Bill 335 with the short title: “University Student-Athlete Protection Commission” to address systemic issues in university sports.

Do you know who finally did respond to student athlete concerns? The United States Supreme Court, who unanimously ruled in June that student athletes’ rights had been violated. Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained it best: “Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate.” UNC’s business model for sports would be illegal in any other industry.

Governor Davie was part of a generation that sacrificed everything to create our constitutional republic. Today’s university “leaders” do not have such high priorities. They proudly violated their students’ constitutional rights to make a buck.

Disclaimer: My argument with the University was not about paying athletes. My problem was with the treatment of athletes through injuries and not giving all students a fair hearing against accusations made against them.

Education has always been an important value of mine. As a mother I invested heavily in the educations of both of my daughters. A good education is one of the most important things in life to insure success. It ranks way up there behind family and God.

When I started in the Senate I will admit that I felt a little soft when university officials would come to my office, hat in hand, begging for just a little more money for what they called “education.” I would gladly give in if education was what they were doing. But another recent incident shows that this is not what campus administrators value.

See the recent fight over tenure at UNC for activist Nikole Hannah-Jones. Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the New York Times’ 1619 Project. This was a work of historical fiction filled with false or dubious claims. In an introductory essay, Hannah-Jones wrote that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Even historical scholars balked. Five historians wrote an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that the work was a “displacement of historical understanding by ideology”.

Misinformation is a major problem today. The biggest offenders are people pushing critical race theory in our schools. CRT does away with hallmarks of our education system like the scientific method and objective analysis in favor of “narratives” and pre-chosen conclusions. (I will have more on CRT another day.)

Hannah-Jones was offered a five year contract at UNC for her false teachings, and after that was not good enough, tenure as a full-fledged professor. After winning the fight for tenure, Hannah-Jones thankfully went elsewhere.

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ writings are less historically accurate than an episode of “Ancient Aliens.” She should not be allowed anywhere near an institution of higher learning.

And then there is the budget. I was surprised to see an article in the Daily Tar Heel in February that plainly stated that, “UNC has not had a balanced budget in nearly a decade.” Despite rapidly rising tuition and the student debt crisis, the campus has been spending $100 million more than it brings in every year. This includes very high spending on administrators’ salaries, who outnumber faculty two to one.

The current administration at UNC has had it too good for too long. They have no regard for the ideals of our Constitutional republic. They spend money with reckless abandon, often having no idea how much is going out or where it is going. And despite their claims and reputation, they seem to have more interest in recruiting controversial administrators, set on indoctrination, than in educating North Carolinians.

The time is coming for major changes on campus. It’s time for accountability. Let’s build a university that William Richardson Davie could be proud of.