Free Republic

Race has arguably become the single most important defining characteristic of a person in today’s society. Rather than concerning itself with scholarship, character, personality, or work ethic, today’s universities now treat students and faculty as if their race supersedes all of their other qualities. One example of this is UNC-Chapel Hill’s Race, Racism and Racial Equity (R3) Symposium. According to the UNC Office for Diversity and Inclusion, the symposium is “a series of virtual events that bring together scholars and researchers from across campus to share their work with Carolina and the broader community.” The events are co-hosted by the...

Alumni have been making their voices heard over the past few months. After seeing the alarming direction that their alma maters are taking, alumni at institutions such as Davidson College, the University of Virginia, and Washington & Lee have decided to unite around the principles of free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity. These alumni groups aren’t working in isolation, they are part of a national organization called the Alumni Free Speech Alliance (AFSA). UNC-Chapel Hill is the latest group to join AFSA. The UNC Free Speech Alliance is an alumni-led, independent organization dedicated to free speech, diversity of opinion,...

BREAKING: The Supreme Court agrees to hear a pair of cases that challenge the race-based affirmative action policies for admission at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. The cases likely will be argued next term.

In 2014, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) filed suit against the University of North Carolina. Its complaint argued that the university had engaged in intentional discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity to the detriment of SFFA members. The suit followed in a line of cases challenging the admissions policies of universities, where students from certain groups were given preferences over students who were not in those groups. In a pair of 2003 cases involving the University of Michigan, the Supreme Court ruled that universities were in violation of the law if they used a rigid quota system (Gratz...

In May, the UNC School of Medicine revised its Guidelines for Appointment, Reappointment, and Promotion. Now, faculty seeking promotion must tout their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. One sample DEI statement, posted on the School of Medicine website, shows what that requirement might entail, concluding with a nod to the concept of intersectionality. "As I move forward in my career, I intend to continue to include issues of equity and inclusion in my bedside teaching. I commit to annually attending a seminar offered by the University Office of Diversity and Inclusion to learn more about the intersectionality of race,...

Scientists have identified an antibody that can protect people from COVID-19, its variants and other types of coronaviruses.... It is effective at both preventing infection and at helping treat a person that has already contracted Covid. The research team at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill (UNC) and Duke University, in Durham, says it believes it has found a key piece that can help combat the current pandemic and future virus outbreaks.

A federal judge endorsed the University of North Carolina’s (UNC) use of race as a factor in screening applicants after ruling that the university did not discriminate against white and Asian American applicants.No discrimination: Judge Loretta Biggs ruled on Monday that the UNC’s undergraduate admissions process had not been discriminatory toward specific race groups, reported CNN.The group Students for Fair Admissions alleged in its 2014 lawsuit that UNC deliberately discriminated against certain members by including race in its admissions process.According to the suit, UNC allegedly used “racial preferences in undergraduate admissions where there are available race-neutral alternatives capable of achieving...

On September 29, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) announced that it is investigating what it calls “egregious violations of principles of academic governance and persistent structural racism in the University of North Carolina System.” To do so, it has launched a special committee and will release its findings in early 2022. According to the AAUP’s press release, the investigation was prompted by the “widely publicized mishandling of the tenure case of New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones.” But there has already been a significant—one might even say exhaustive—investigation of that incident. Local and national media outlets of all...

US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a new coronavirus before the pandemic erupted, leaked proposals show. Last month, a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) revealed that an international team of scientists had planned to mix genetic data of similar strains to create a new virus. The grant application was made in 2018 and leaked to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group. 'We will compile sequence/RNAseq data from a panel of closely related strains and compare full length genomes, scanning for unique SNPs representing sequencing errors. 'Consensus candidate genomes will be synthesised...

UNC-Chapel Hill officials canceled classes Tuesday after police investigated multiple reports of suicide since the start of classes this fall. “We are in the middle of a mental health crisis, both on our campus and across our nation, and we are aware that college-aged students carry an increased risk of suicide,” UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said in a statement. “This crisis has directly impacted members of our community – especially with the passing of two students on campus in the past month.”

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is canceling classes on Tuesday to "acknowledge and reflect on the seriousness of mental health illness" after two recent deaths on campus, officials announced Sunday. The move comes after UNC Police investigated two suicides over the weekend, WRAL-TV reported. "We are in the middle of a mental health crisis, both on our campus and across our nation, and we are aware that college-aged students carry an increased risk of suicide," Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz wrote to students in a letter Sunday. "This crisis has directly impacted members of our community - especially with...

In a recent article for the Martin Center, Duke professor Mike Munger asked an important question: should “a political board composed of nonacademics…be empowered to evaluate faculty proposals on hiring and curriculum in the first place?” He argued that, in practice, boards have already ceded that authority. For many years, shared governance, at least on the issue of hiring and tenure, has been reduced to faculty governance. Evidence of this is readily visible. During the recent controversy surrounding Nikole Hannah-Jones and the UNC Hussman School of Journalism, faculty voiced their belief in the faculty-dominance model. Deen Freelon, an associate professor...

A decade ago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was engulfed in a sports scandal that made national headlines, brought down a chancellor who seemed destined for a lustrous career, and caused the school huge expenses in litigation and for public relations experts. For the Carolina faithful, those events are now just a bitter but much faded memory. The university has made the needed changes to avoid any repetition so everything is all right. At least, that is the conventional wisdom. One UNC graduate who has his doubts, however, is Andy Thomason, author of a new book, Discredited:...

Leaked Confidentiality Agreement Shows Moderna, NIAID Filed Covid Vaccine Candidate in 2019 A blockbuster report form Dr. Joseph Mercola has remained under the radar from the press. Even conservative and ‘fringe” outlets have barely scratched the surface of what should be considered a major scandal in the world of Big Pharm. Apparently, certain people at Moderna and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had knowledge of the coronavirus long before the rest of the public. They even had enough time to file an application for a coronavirus mRNA vaccine candidate in December, 2019. ...STORY AT-A-GLANCEModerna, together with...

About two years ago, I spoke to a class of UNC-Chapel Hill students about free speech: what it is and why it is important. I covered some basic points such as the kinds of speech the First Amendment does and does not protect. I also talked about the importance of respecting dissenting opinions, and how shutting down ideas is not the most effective way to get people to change their minds. To my surprise, several students stated that they believed that it was their constitutional right to prevent someone else from speaking, if they disagreed with what was being said....

Trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have voted to grant tenure to New York Times writer and author of the divisive “1619 Project” Nikole Hannah-Jones, amid backlash over her “unfactual and biased” work. The board voted 9-4 in favor of granting tenure to Hannah-Jones after a lengthy closed-session meeting on Wednesday, according to a report by the Washington Post. The vote comes one day before Hannah-Jones had originally been set to start working as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina (UNC)’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The...

The University of North Carolina’s board of trustees voted on Wednesday to grant tenure to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, ending a dispute that stretched on for more than a month. Nine board members voted in favor of tenure for Ms. Hannah-Jones and four against during a special meeting on the campus in Chapel Hill, which some trustees attended via Zoom. The opening minutes were livestreamed on YouTube before the proceeding moved into a closed session. Ms. Hannah-Jones, a correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, had accepted a position as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism...

A dispute over whether a New York Times writer should get tenure at the University of North Carolina would seem to be of little national importance. On one side is Nikole Hannah-Jones...creator of the Times’ 1619 Project. She won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for an extended essay, but some of her claims were debunked by historians and her push for rewriting American history is cited as a reason why she should not get tenure. Her chief critic is Walter E. Hussman Jr... As an evangelist for impartial, fair journalism, he is the polar opposite of Hannah-Jones and says he wishes...

Last week, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees came under fire for “viewpoint discrimination” over its decision not to offer tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, who will join UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism in July. An anonymous source reported that the decision was “a very political thing.” But politics needn’t have come into it at all. For one thing, the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees has a long history of granting tenure to left-leaning faculty members—if the political make-up of the school is anything to go by. But more important is Hannah-Jones’ own record. Her history of shoddy...

Members of the media and faculty erupted into histrionics at the recent appointment of Darrell Allison to the chancellorship of Fayetteville State University. It is a great scandal, they claimed; Allison “cut in line” cried the left-wing think tank NC Policy Watch; the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and FSU faculty senate questioned not just the process, but Allison’s qualifications as well. But, as the Martin Center’s Shannon Watkins demonstrated, the scandal is more optical than factual. Once again, supporters of a Republican appointee, by acting secretively rather than with confidence, gave activists on the other side just enough...