North Carolina's "Group of 71" Declares War on Western Civ
K.C. Johnson, Brooklyn College—CUNY

A troubling story has emerged from the University of North Carolina, where 71 professors signed a letter demanding that the university suspend negotiations with the John William Pope Foundation (which funds the John William Pope Center) about a sizable donation from the Foundation to establish a Western Cultures program at UNC. As sketched out, the foundation would contribute up to $700,000 annually to help fund the program, which would create a new minor in Western cultures, new honors courses, freshman seminars, undergraduate research awards, and study-abroad scholarships.

The Pope Foundation and its Center are clearly conservative, and the Center has been critical of UNC's "cultural diversity" requirement (which is, in fact, a peculiarly structured requirement eminently worthy of criticism). But there's no indication, based on the comments of UNC administrators, that the Foundation intends to influence the content of courses offered -- only to sponsor additional faculty lines and new courses in the subject. Indeed, in interviews, the administration has reiterated that the Pope Foundation would not dictate course content for the proposed program.

The faculty protesters, who represent around 2 percent of the professors at UNC, have offered two lines of criticism. First, they claim that they have not been consulted about the provisions of the grant. As it seems that few, if any, have expertise in the grant's subject matter, it's not clear why they would be consulted at this stage. (A letter from the undergraduate dean, moreover, suggests that information about the negotiations with the Pope Foundation was available to any of the Group of 71 at any point in the last several months, but that none of them asked.) Second, they object to the topic. According to the wire report on the controversy, Sue Estroff, a professor of Anthropology, Psychiatry, and Social Medicine, noted that there was "no need for more emphasis in Western studies" in UNC's curriculum, and termed the grant a threat to academic freedom. This seems to me to be a remarkably broad conception of academic freedom, but at least Estroff is candid. "The cohort of people who are [senior faculty members] now on most university campuses are people like me," she explained a couple of years ago, professors "who went to college in the '60s and were part of that upheaval, who cut their teeth on a different kind of political activism and some radicalism." In a remarkable assertion, Estroff claimed that in the last few years, "universities were probably the only places where differing views of what 9/11 meant and what our responsibilities should be were actively aired." Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall, among other things, a bipartisan government-sponsored commission that extensively looked into this very question.

Among the Group of 71's demands: that any program proceed only after the appointment of "an intellectually diverse faculty committee -- whose proceedings will be open to the College -- to clarify the definition of 'Western Civilization' and 'Western Cultures'."

This ringing endorsement of intellectual diversity heartened me. If I were a UNC administrator, I would immediately accept the group's demands -- contingent, of course, on a broader assurance that all search and curriculum committees, and not solely those regarding Western Civilization, were intellectually diverse.

Looking through the backgrounds of the signatories, I must admit I was a little surprised to see the Group of 71 hail intellectual diversity so resolutely, since it's hard to find even one of the 71 who had previously endorsed the principle. In 2002, for instance, UNC witnessed another high-profile controversy, when it required all incoming first-year and transfer students to read and then write an essay on Michael Sells's Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations. Conservatives attacked the book for deliberately downplaying the violent elements of Islamic writings; Sells, a sharp critic of the administration's Middle East policies, fired back by describing the philosophy of such Middle East scholars as Bernard Lewis as the " 'Let's be colonialists and do it right' faction." (In words that could have come from Columbia's Rashid Khalidi, Sells added that as American "Muslims are also now harassed in airports and encounter extreme prejudice," they "also feel that the United States is an aggressor power and that Western powers are still aggressor powers and occupiers in the Middle East.") In response to the selection of Sells, the North Carolina legislature threatened to defund the summer mandatory reading program.

Estroff, a leader of the Group of 71, didn't seem too concerned with upholding intellectual diversity during the Sells controversy: she said that UNC should mandate the Sells-only program "come hell or high water." Dismissing calls to couple Sells with an offering from the Lewis school of interpreting Islam, Estroff defended the selection as "a terrific choice," and described the controversy as " just bolster[ing] the case of why we have to do this. There is such a lack of knowledge about Islam." Estroff denied that the assignment could be construed as indoctrination, since the reading wasn't really "required" even though the university sent out letters to all incoming students saying that they had to read the book and submit a one-page paper in reaction to it. "I understand what 'required' means on campus," she reassured one reporter. "If we had said that it's required and if they don't do it we will take away their admission, that's a different matter. But it's not a law, it has a very different meaning on campus." Hmm.

The Group of 71's membership overlaps with that of a campus organization called the Progressive Faculty Network. PFN member and Group of 71 signatory elin o'Hara slavick (an art professor who capitalizes only the "H" in her name) has attracted controversy before. As part of a controversial "teach-in," six days after the 9/11 attack, that opposed retaliation against Afghanistan and seemed to blame the United States for the attacks, o'Hara slavick showed slides of her artwork, "Places the United States has Bombed." The sketches, which she claimed provided a "history lesson on U.S. foreign policy,"(!) depicted what she termed the devastation and destruction caused by past U.S. aerial raids.

o'Hara slavick is joined in the PFN and the Group of 71 by Anthropology professor Don Nonini, another strong critic of the administration's foreign policy. Shortly after 9/11, Nonini asserted, "To prevent further acts of terror, wherever they occur in the world, also requires confronting some unpalatable facts of the history of U.S. foreign policy and military intervention." This, of course, is one interpretation of the causes of terror, but I'm not sure it's the most compelling one. Nonini has articulated some strange views in the past. In what could be termed a parody of political correctness, he hailed the non-reporting of income for tax purposes by "the working class, poorer blacks, and other minorities" a "most effective means of tax evasion," indeed "another arena of resistance" against the "corporate economy." To deem such actions illegal, Nonini scoffed, is "the view of the IRS and of academics servicing the business community."

The Group of 71 includes not only the far left among the UNC faculty but also former Romance Languages chairman Frank Rodriguez, who seems to have more personal reasons for attacking the administration: he was removed from his chairmanship in the middle of the academic year after an external review committee reported that there was "bitter infighting" and "unprofessional behavior" in the department and that the faculty was "unproductive."

What sort of curricular initiatives have the Group of 71 supported in the past? Expanded ethnic and gender studies programs, of course. And during her tenure on the faculty senate, Estroff came out for expanded coverage of tourism, which she termed "a large, active, and multidisciplinary academic area" worthy of additional exploration. "Tourism yes, Western Civ no" is probably not the slogan that UNC wants as its curricular mantra. "It's not that we shouldn't be offering classes that deal with Western civilization, but we also need to be concerned about other perspectives and other cultures," explained Group of 71 member and Education professor Dwight Rogers. The Pope Foundation's "lens is very much a Euro-centric, Western civilization focus, and they don't seem to be open to other ways of knowing." Yet as there's nothing in the proposal that says UNC needs to eliminate offerings "about other perspectives and other cultures," Rogers's complaint makes little or no sense. Is this the approach that he carries to all curricular matters: that any offering that doesn't demonstrate sufficient concern "about other perspectives and other cultures" is not "open to other ways of knowing" and therefore should be rejected?

All of these professors, obviously, are entitled to articulate their viewpoints publicly on U.S. foreign policy as frequently as they desire. But their opinions about international affairs could also be described as shrill and reflexive-adjectives that characterize their response to an expanded Western cultures program at UNC. It's distressing that such faculty members regard the study of Western civilization as in-and-of-itself anti-"progressive," and seek to deny UNC students even the option of enrolling in additional courses about the topic, regardless of the quality of these offerings. And it's also distressing to consider what approaches such professors have taken to curricular issues at UNC that have not come to the public eye.

Legitimate concerns exist about this initiative, which appears to be in its preliminary stages, and clearly UNC would need to take steps to ensure that the curriculum would be one charted by the university and not the Pope Foundation or its Center. Yet, on the surface, the position of the Group of 71 is hard to defend, since they seem to be saying that the university would be better off with fewer courses in a subject matter that is clearly worthy of study.

NAS1:44 PM