It’s college admissions season, and many high school seniors in my orbit are considering UNC system schools. As a faculty member for 12 years and a North Carolina resident for more than 20, this delights me. I always recommend my home institution, NC State, but I’m enthusiastic about our entire system, rightly known as one of the best in the country. Our sixteen public universities offer comparatively lower tuition than neighboring states, and our extraordinary faculty include Nobel Prize winners, MacArthur Genius grantees, Pulitzer Prize winners, and more.
But a college education is still expensive — for most families, it’s like buying a new car every year for the next four years. Ideally, the expense will be worth it, launching students into financially, intellectually and culturally rewarding lives and careers.
But parents and students, would you knowingly buy a new car (or four new cars) with a failing engine?
As the president of the North Carolina Conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), I fear that unless we work to protect the academic freedom of our public universities, we may be asking you to do just that.
More than anything that draws students to our campuses — more than winning sports teams and fancy dining halls, state-of-the-art labs and well-stocked libraries — academic freedom is what makes our universities work. It is the engine of knowledge creation, creativity, and excellence.
Yet this engine is under more strain than ever before — almost all of it unnecessary. For UNC system professors, Trump’s second term began with savage and censorious DOGE cuts to the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Last spring and summer, right-wing activists ambushed our UNC campuses, targeting faculty and staff with secret recordings, and then pressured administration to fire staffers. Also last summer, our flagship institution delayed tenure votes for 33 faculty members, most of them in the humanities and social sciences, for no reason other than an objection to tenure itself. Then in December, UNC System President Peter Hans hastily announced a plan to make all our syllabi public records. Not only that, but UNC schools will also be forced to create a publicly searchable database of all of our syllabi, inviting right-wingers to target faculty for doxxing and harassment.
AAUP NC objects to and fights back against all of these attacks on academic freedom, and so should you.
We define academic freedom as “the freedom of a researcher in higher education to investigate and discuss the issues in his or her academic field, and teach or publish findings without interference from political figures, boards of trustees, donors or other entities.” Simply put, academic freedom is the freedom of teachers and researchers at colleges and universities to do the work of educating students and advancing knowledge in their fields.
It’s strongly connected to academic tenure, the indefinite appointment of faculty that happens after a set period of time, usually six years of excellent research and teaching. Tenure, which in the UNC system comes with a modest raise, allows faculty to expand their research, without fear of reprisal or job loss, in ways that are important to their department and university.
But academic freedom is also more than tenure — it’s also the freedom to discuss, without censorship, relevant issues in the classroom, to research and publish creative and scholarly work, and the freedom from institutional censorship when critiquing their institution or system (as in this op-ed) or other things happening in society. Like all freedoms, academic freedom calls for responsible and ethical use. Faculty must be respectful of the views of students as they guide their thinking, and model its responsible and ethical use.
If you care about the reputation that backstops your child’s diploma, you should care about that institution’s commitment to academic freedom. North Carolina’s public universities have traditionally attracted some of the best professors and researchers in the world. Their work factors strongly into university rankings. These professors will not continue to come here — and, in fact, many will leave — if they can’t access a fair and transparent tenure system, a university system invested in their protection, and university leaders unwilling to bend to politically-motivated demands.
And finally, do you want your child to finish their degree and leave the state, or to choose among opportunities offered by a thriving North Carolina economy? That’s also connected to academic freedom. UNC System schools contribute billions of dollars to our state’s economy, create thousands of jobs and hundreds of patents, attract start-ups and established companies to our state, and serve all of our one hundred counties through extension work in agriculture and healthcare, and through research and cultural programming.
As parents and prospective UNC system families, your voices matter. You can write directly to your chosen university’s admissions office. You can share your support for academic freedom — and your concerns about cuts, firings and tenure delays — through social media and parent networks. You can encourage your students to speak up, too — their voices are even more powerful, because their education is our core work and mission.
I hope your students get into their dream schools, and I also hope they know what makes those schools dreamed-of destinations in the first place. Let’s work together to protect academic freedom and keep our state universities healthy and thriving environments for all our students.
Belle Boggs is president of the North Carolina Conference of the American Association of University Professors.
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