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CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - The University of North Carolina's flagship campus is up to something good.
Quite good, actually.
According to the Wall Street Journal, UNC trustees have unanimously established a School of Civic Life and Leadership.
The trustees' vision is for the school to hire diverse professors - that is, professors from across the philosophical spectrum - to teach history, literature, philosophy, political science, and religion.
Among potential courses are "Democracy: Ancient and Modern," "Liberty and Equality in American Political Thought," "Race and the American Story," "Capitalism and its Critics," "Conservatism and its Critics," "Liberalism and Its Critics," "The Role of Science and Religion in Society," and "Leadership for Engineers," the newspaper reports.
Students at UNC, America's oldest public university, will be permitted to fulfill academic requirements by choosing from School of Civic Life and Leadership courses or existing courses. It will be students' call.
The trustees' goal in establishing the school is to put a stop to "political constraints on what can be taught in university classes," the trustees' chair and vice chair told the newspaper.
"I don't want to indoctrinate on the right any more than I want to indoctrinate on the left," the vice chair said.
Bravo.
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So what's the problem?
There is no problem.
At least not if you believe in diversity of thought and academic freedom.
But you see, history, literature, philosophy, political science, and religion "are among the most politicized disciplines" nowadays, the Wall Street Journal explains.
"Partisan affiliation isn't always a measure of intellectual conformity, but it is indicative," the newspaper correctly notes.
With that in mind, the newspaper cites one survey indicating that of 14 such departments at UNC, Democrat faculty outnumber Republican faculty by 16 fold. In the English department, it's 23 fold. In chemistry, it's 28 fold.
This isn't unusual for such departments.
Or for others. The head of a national organization with a goal of bringing diversity of thought and academic freedom to law schools once recalled that a law school had bragged that from one academic year to the next, it had tripled the number of conservatives on its 100 member faculty.
It turned out, though, that the number went not from 20 to 60, 15 to 45, 10 to 30, or even 5 to 15.
Instead, the number went from one to three. Out of 100. Big deal.
Sometimes one can't help laughing, not because such things are funny, but because they're ridiculous and absurd.
This law-school problem began in earnest, one veteran law professor has noted, with the confluence of two events: 1960s radicals becoming tenured law-school faculty, and the Reagan administration's appointing kindred spirits among law professors to the federal bench.
Do you think that, overall, 1960s radicals who believe in diversity of everything except thought replaced the new judges with professors who thought like the new judges? No, silly, they didn't.
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But back to Carolina.
Not surprisingly, some faculty are - shall we say - not thrilled to pieces with the School of Civic Life and Leadership.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the faculty chair in Chapel Hill told the UNC student newspaper of being "flabbergasted" at what the trustees had done and elsewhere said the university's alumni are "leading and civically engaged left, right, and center."
That's no doubt true of Carolina alumni. But that doesn't address, much less refute, the point that colleges and universities should promote diversity of thought and academic freedom, or that Carolina should do so with its new school.
Campus political bias, after all, is antithetical to diversity of thought.
Such bias is antithetical even to academic freedom when, for example, the bias in effect results - as it often does - in the establishment of what amounts to thought police.
The School of Civic Life and Leadership will aim to redress such bias in Chapel Hill.
That's what upsets some faculty who like the current bias just fine, thank you.
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Nevertheless, the proof, as the saying goes, will be in the pudding.
Here's hoping - let's say anticipating - the School of Civic Life and Leadership will live up to its billing.
So far, so good.
And good for Carolina.
Randy Elf may be among a minority of Duke University alumni who would write the first paragraph and the last paragraph of this column.
COPYRIGHT ç 2023 BY RANDY ELF