Larry Chavis and the Decay of the Academy. UNC encouraged its secretly recorded prof's activism. Until it didn't.

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | July 8, 2024 | John Staddon

[karpov]

Larry Chavis is clinical professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC. He has taught there for 18 years on a renewable contract. He has now been told that his contract will not be renewed this year. The university has apparently acted in a totally legal way, but Chavis and his supporters are upset:

Because of his long service, which seemed to promise some job security.

Because a few of his lectures were apparently recorded, by built-in security camera. This arrangement is also apparently legal, though it seems tacky. As far as I know, the faculty have made no organized objection to the arrangement. Chavis says he did not give permission for the recordings.

Because the administration has not told Chavis of the reason for the ending of his employment, although he speculates that it was due to his “strong support of LGBTQ rights.”

Is Chavis’s termination unjust? In other words, is the problem Professor Chavis or the school administration? Or, perhaps, both?

First of all, obviously Chavis is an activist. Equally obviously, he has a right to promote “LGBTQ rights” outside the classroom. Turning his classroom lectures into activist propaganda, however, is definitely improper, but we don’t know if he did so. Chavis did say to a reporter, “We’re talking about issues of race and inequality and income and gender, and I think in a way that’s very inclusive … but we do talk about sensitive issues.”

So, many of the details of this case are unknown and likely to remain so. But the context is pretty clear. Chavis is a fan of a movement called stratification economics (SE), first proposed by Duke professor William “Sandy” Darity in 2005.

[Robert A Cook PE]

“MY” ideas and activism and freedom of speech are invigilate and must be preserved. Your ideas are bad and racist and hetero. And must be removed.

[Savage Beast]

The last thing Chapel Hill needs is “activists.”

[PeterPrinciple]

t the problem with the idea is obvious. SE proposes to study black-white wealth differentials while explicitly excluding anything to do with behavioral differences between the two groups

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Again, a complex system and they want to look at ONE data point.

[PeterPrinciple]

Above all, those in responsible positions at UNC, Duke, and many other major universities need to look carefully at the monsters they have created by encouraging a whole range of pseudo-disciplines, animated much more by rent seeking, in the form of social-justice activism, than by an honest commitment to truth.
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John Staddon is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Professor of Biology Emeritus at Duke University. He was profiled in the Wall Street Journal in January 2021 as a commentator on the current problems of science. His book Science in an Age of Unreason (Regnery) came out in 202

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Conclusion from article.

Note there are warriors standing up. Be one of them.

[dangus]

I’ll never understand how UNC didn’t lose its accreditation when it turned out that thousands of athletes graduated with a major for which there had never been a real course offered.

[PeterPrinciple]

https://www.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/about/history/

I would propose that behind the scenes the financiers are not happy.

Nothing changes till the money runs out. True all the time, every time.

[PeterPrinciple]

Nothing changes till the money runs out. True all the time, every time.

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Further clarification. The change is not always good. That is why liberals destroy things and don’t care about money.

It is our job to affect the change. MAGA

[moovova]

Carolina needed a sacrificial lamb to make it SEEM like Carolina is cleaning up it’s liberal act.

UNC is not cleaning up it’s liberal act.