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Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed has the latest on the UNC/Pope Center grant controversy, with two new items that cast further doubt on the Group of 71's motives. The current president of the faculty senate and the former dean of the UNC Law School, Judith Wegner, termed the negotiations around the grant "pretty standard stuff," adding that she has "no reason to believe that there is anything nefarious going on." Wegner's comments are echoed by a public letter from the dean of arts and sciences, Bernadette Gray-Little.

These remarks call into question a central claim of the Group of 71, namely that the University has failed to exercise due diligence in protecting academic freedom while soliciting the grant.

Second, the Group of 71 continues to rely on some of its most extreme members, notably Sue Estroff and Don Nononi, to make its public case. After repeating his process argument, Nononi, an anthropology professor, informed Jaschik that UNC already has a sufficient number of courses in European history and Western Civ, and therefore doesn't need the Pope Center grant. "It's just that the courses that do emphasize diversity, or the sometimes oppressive past histories of American expansion, or colonialism -- these courses are distressing to the white bread form of history that the right wing is most comfortable with." Perhaps so. But as the Pope grant is calling for adding, not deleting, courses from the curriculum, it's hard to see the merit in Nonini's argument, unless he believes that if more Western Civ classes are offered, students will choose them rather than the kind of classes he would prefer to see UNC undergraduates take.

The president of the Pope Center, James Arthur Pope, dismissed the criticism, scoffing, "If a left-wing faculty member wants to get a left-wing foundation to support more diversity courses or more 'ism' courses, they are welcome to do that. Why can't we give money for Western civilization?" His remark was not phrased in a particularly politic way, but it's tough to argue with his basic point.

Posted on Monday, March 7, 2005 at 8:54 AM | Comments (8) | Return

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