UNC should be more than a trade school

UNC-Chapel Hill Interim Chancellor Lee Roberts delivers remarks May 11, 2024 during UNC-CH's Commencement. (Photo: UNC-CH video feed)

In a memo he sent introducing himself to the campus community, UNC-Chapel Hill interim chancellor Lee Roberts expressed a desire to move toward applied disciplines. He wanted steer more students into “high-demand fields” to satisfy “critical state needs.” This is corporate-speak, resonant of Roberts’s career in the financial sector, so insipid as to be almost meaningless. But Roberts’s pablum reflects a deep cynicism about the value of learning that has infected the thinking of the Republicans running UNC.

The University of North Carolina was founded to polish the manners of a plantation elite. Latin and Greek were the core of the curriculum, and President James K. Polk’s mastery of the classical disciplines represented perhaps the finest academic feat accomplished by a Carolina student before the Civil War. This model of education was frankly elitist—and deeply intertwined with the fundamental demons of Southern society. Later administrators like the great Edward Kidder Graham would expand and modernize the university, but through the 1930s the leading scholars of UNC (particularly the innovative Southern sociologist Howard Odum) focused upon the pure pursuit of knowledge over its practical implementation.

Other institutions of higher education in North Carolina were closer to the vocational ground. In the 20 th century, legislative leaders created teacher colleges (often called “Normal Schools”) to train educators in the major regions of the state. The school that was then called North Carolina Agricultural and Mechanical University was founded as a land-grant college in the 1880s. Like most of the land-grant schools, NC State originally focused more upon the “Mechanic” (engineering) part of its mission over the agricultural programs that became the school’s trademark. But as the university found its footing, agricultural education became an important staple of NC State’s education. Future governor Jim Hunt studied tobacco poundage controls while being elected State’s student-body president twice during his undergraduate career.

So, skill training is not foreign to the UNC system’s tradition. But the university system decided to take a different and more idealistic path in the mid-twentieth century. One of the greatest accomplishments of the World War II generation was to democratize access to liberal-arts education. The percentage of college students majoring in the humanities peaked in that era, as returning veterans sought to learn about the histories and literatures of the world they had just saved from fascism. North Carolina, in turn, followed suit. At the height of the post-war higher-education boom, the state converted a teachers’ college in the mountains into the University of North Carolina at Asheville. UNC-A was designated a public liberal arts college, one of the few in the country, and it is a lovely gem in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The Republicans running North Carolina today seek to jettison UNC’s finest inheritance. UNC long ago outgrew its origins as an elitist academy for the Southern aristocracy. As generations have now attested, the system’s flagship campus is “the University of the People,” and the smaller, lower-cost campuses across the state reflect this democratic promise even more profoundly. Republicans pay lip service to a right-wing and rather disingenuous conception of “citizenship,” but what they really intend to do is to abolish authentic education and leave a sort of nationalistic indoctrination curriculum as the only remnant of the liberal arts on campus. The primary mission will be to train workers to labor cheaply for large corporations, serving the business interests that fund the Republican majority.

UNC’s founding was not without sin, and UNC’s history is not without blemishes. But the 17 schools that shine across the state are too valuable to abandon to utilitarian education. They must not become right-wing trade schools. Unfortunately, Republicans ranging from the dimmest backbenchers on Jones Street to UNC-Chapel Hill trustees running for statewide office share this deplorable vision for higher learning. If we allow UNC to decline in this way, we will have failed our students, and the inspiration that drew more than 12 generations of North Carolinians to nourish and perfect an archipelago of academies that serve something greater than the corporate bottom line.