Masters of division continue their assault on higher education in NC

Yahoo

09-04-2025

The North Carolina Legislative Building (Photo: Clayton Henkel)
In their latest act of breathtaking hypocrisy, right-wing Republicans in North Carolina's General Assembly have introduced Senate Bill 558, informally titled 'Eliminating 'DEI' in Public Higher Ed.' If the bill becomes law, public universities will be forbidden from compelling 'students, professors, administrators, or other employees to affirm or profess belief in divisive concepts.' Such a law could greatly damage higher education in North Carolina.
Which concepts are so threatening that they need to be banned? Some exist only in fevered imagination. For example, 'An individual's moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex.' Or, for another, 'Particular character traits, values, moral or ethical codes, privileges, or beliefs should be ascribed to a race or sex or to an individual because of the individual's race or sex.'
Not to be pedantic, but these aren't concepts; they are propositions. In any case, no one actually teaches such things. It's as urgent to legislate against these notions as it is to legislate against teaching that the earth is flat, the moon is made of green cheese, and forest fires are caused by Jewish space lasers. Perhaps legislators are confusing ideas that are taken seriously in universities with ideas that have traction on Truth Social.
But to return to hypocrisy: a political party whose members and Dear Leader have pursued electoral success by fomenting social division are now attacking those who advocate for inclusion—or even analyze and teach about it—for supposedly peddling divisive concepts. Even allowing for the usual gap between political rhetoric and reality, this is enough to make one's head spin.
But to return to hypocrisy: a political party whose members and Dear Leader have pursued electoral success by fomenting social division are now attacking those who advocate for inclusion—or even analyze and teach about it—for supposedly peddling divisive concepts.
Consider a few of the notions that have become standard items in the propaganda toolkit of right-wing Republicans in the last decade, starting with one of Donald Trump's favorites: undocumented immigrants are rapists, thieves, gangsters, and leeches on the body of America; they are, in Trump's words, 'poisoning the blood' of our country. Perhaps that's supposed to be a unifying idea. It did, after all, work with some audiences in 1930s Germany.
Demonizing immigrants is just a warm-up. Right-wing Republicans have targeted a host of other groups as enemies. Trump has called the press 'the enemy of the people.' His vice-president, J. D. Vance, has called universities and professors 'the enemy.' Trump has called protesters 'the enemy within,' threatening to use military force against them. During the height of the Covid pandemic, Trump accused medical researchers who found that hydroxychloroquine was ineffective against Covid of issuing a 'Trump enemy statement.'
If North Carolina Republicans haven't said precisely the same things, neither have they stood up to denounce the divisive statements of their party leader. They're not likely to, of course, because they employ similar strategies of vilifying LGBTQ people, 'woke elites,' doomsaying scientists, public employees, and anyone who has ever relied on our society's flimsy social safety net. If not for dividing and conquering, they'd have no strategy at all.
It's not hard to understand why right-wing Republicans see journalists, scientists, and professors as enemies. These groups are professionally and ethically committed to what is anathema to Trump and his acolytes everywhere: uncovering and telling the truth. When the truth does not accord with the self-serving myths of authoritarians, they try to stifle those who tell it. Taking over the institutions—the press, universities, government research agencies—that support truth-telling is part of the process. It's an old playbook.
With SB 558, Republican legislators are trying not only to dominate public universities from the outside—as they already do by appointing their backers to the UNC System Board of Governors and controlling the state's purse strings—but to reach into the classroom and quash academic freedom.
For example, one of SB 558's forbidden propositions is this: 'The rule of law does not exist but instead is a series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups.' Put in such simplistic terms, this is not a proposition any college-level instructor is likely to take seriously. But suppose it were rephrased, like so: 'The law is made, interpreted, and enforced in ways that reflect inequalities in wealth and power among groups in society, and is often used to reinforce those inequalities.' That's a proposition for which evidence abounds, and one that deserves serious consideration in a class that deals with such matters.
The problem, however, with SB 588 is that discussion of serious propositions—the rephrased version above—will be chilled and quite possibly never happen. Instructors might rightly fear that some students, disturbed by a challenging idea and emboldened by a foolish law, will bring complaints. Instructors might also fear administrators who are eager to over-comply and issue directives to avoid potentially troubling topics and course content. This isn't paranoid speculation; it's already happening in some places.
Another off-limits proposition is that 'a meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist.' Again, without nuance or qualification, this is not a proposition professors are likely to use to spark classroom discussion (presuming a course where such a proposition is germane). Yet there is an important idea here, one that would get lost under the corrosive force of SB 588.
The idea, rephrased as a question, is this: Can what look like meritocratic criteria to members of dominant groups mask biases that advantage members of those groups? Plenty of evidence can be brought to bear on this question, and no place that calls itself a university should be inhibited, to any degree, from tackling the question and examining the relevant evidence. But that's exactly what SB 558 will do. And it's not just an abstract notion of academic freedom that will suffer; the damage will be to students and the quality of their education.
Defenders of SB 558 might point to its third 'whereas,' which claims that the General Assembly is 'committed to ensuring that all North Carolina students enrolled in public institutions of higher education receive a meaningful education based on academic excellence, critical thinking, and the free exchange of ideas.' That would be nice if it were true. But it's impossible to have it both ways. To say, You can think critically and freely exchange ideas—but here's a list of ideas you can't freely exchange or use to think critically, is classic Orwellian doublespeak.
If North Carolina's Republican state legislators really wanted to take a stand against divisive ideas, there are, in addition to those I noted earlier, plenty to choose from. They could reject the idea, now embraced by the Trump administration, that the First Amendment doesn't apply to non-citizens legally present in the United States. They could reject the ideas that all Jews are Zionists and that criticism of Israel is antisemitic. They could reject the idea that we can't have, say, national health insurance because it would mean tax dollars going to undeserving others. These fallacious ideas are enormously divisive, far more so than any at which Republican legislators have taken aim.
I don't expect right-wing Republicans to look in the mirror and reform themselves any time soon. In a nation as fraught with inequalities as the United States, the divide-and-conquer strategy has proven too useful to abandon. But the rest of us don't have to keep falling for it. Everyone who hopes to see our public universities survive as institutions of truth-seeking based on evidence and rigorous analysis should resist. There is an urgent need to change the hands on the levers of power before more damage is done.