A mural in the Hanes Art Center lobby was recently boarded up raising questions about academic freedom and free speech. (Photo of Center: UNC.edu)
A common misconception is that academic freedom means professors can say or do anything they want. What it means, in fact, is that professors are supposed to be free to conduct research and teach in ways deemed professionally competent by their faculty peers, without being subject to outside political interference.
This freedom is not a job perk offered for the benefit of individual professors. It’s the institutional practice that distinguishes a university from a profit-focused business run by owners and managers. Without this freedom, science and scholarship are impossible. If we want to enjoy the fruits of honest truth-seeking, academic freedom is part of the package.
This is why it’s important to be on guard against political interference with academic freedom and the failures of university administrators to protect it. Even more concerning ought to be occasions when administrators, succumbing to outside pressures, take it upon themselves to quash academic freedom.
A recent example comes from UNC-Chapel Hill. As reported August 22nd in The Daily Tarheel, top-level university administrators at UNC-Chapel Hill ordered a mural in the Hanes Art Center lobby boarded up. That’s not a metaphor. The mural was literally covered with a board—with no prior notice, at night.
The mural was an outgrowth of a studio art course, Art as Social Action, taught by professor H?ng-An Tr??ng in the spring of 2024. Some students in the course joined the UNC Gaza Solidarity Encampment, where they taught other participants how to make carved block prints. Participants used this technique to create prints expressing their views about events in Palestine. In less than a week after police wrecked the encampment on April 30, 2024, these prints were assembled into a mural that was put on display in the Hanes Art Center lobby, in accord with procedures established by the department of art and art history.
It should be clear, given the mural’s origins and purpose, that boarding it up under cover of night is not like scrubbing protest graffiti off the wall of a campus building. Nor is this a case of overzealous activists flouting reasonable time, place, and manner limits on free speech.
The mural was a collective act of artistic creation, undertaken with serious intent by students, emerging from a course taught by a tenured faculty member with relevant disciplinary expertise, properly exhibited in a departmental art space. Covering the mural, making it inaccessible to members of the university community, is a violation of academic freedom akin to shutting down a lecture.
In trying to determine precisely who was responsible for the censorship, reporters for The Daily Tarheel sought comments from chancellor Lee Roberts, interim provost James Dean, vice chancellor for operations Nate Knuffman, interim associate vice chancellor for facilities services Howard Wertheimer, and vice provost for arts and culture and senior associate dean for the fine arts and humanities Elizabeth Engelhardt. None responded.
Jim White, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, did not speak with DTH reporters but issued a statement through UNC Media Relations. In the statement, White said, “The artwork was on display for a year, and the time had come for it to be taken down and for other artwork to go up. It was on my list of things to talk with the department about early this semester.”
White’s statement beggars belief if one understands what deans at large research universities usually concern themselves with. The idea that the dean of arts and sciences would be monitoring, as a matter of administrative routine, the schedule for displaying artwork in the lobby of the art building is nonsense.
“I’ve been teaching [at UNC] for fourteen years,” professor Tr??ng told a meeting of the UNC Faculty Executive Committee on August 25th, “and I’ve never seen the administration have a say in what we put on our wall, the art that goes up in our building, or any of the exhibitions that we’ve put into our space.” Annette Lawrence, chair of the art and art history department, added that the artwork previously displayed in the Hanes lobby was up for four years.
It has since become clear that the artwork was on dean White’s radar because of complaints from some Jewish students and alumni who “felt threatened” by the artwork, as reported to the Faculty Executive Committee by interim provost James Dean.
On the same day as the Faculty Executive Committee meeting, White issued a longer statement about the mural. The statement, titled “An Open Letter: The Art of Balance Through Interpretation,” attempts to justify the act of censorship as necessary to protect the vulnerable. The vulnerable here being those who felt intimidated by a work of art expressing opposition to genocide.
In the first sentence of his statement, White says that some people saw the mural’s support for the Palestinian people as antisemitic. No complainants are identified, but presumably they do not include the many Jewish students and faculty who participated in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. White then goes on to say that UNC “will not take an indifferent stance toward any form of antisemitism, whether intended or interpreted.”
That last clause is breathtaking in its implications. What it means, in effect, is that any time partisans of Israel feel that an expression of support for Palestinian rights, or criticism of Israel, is “antisemitic,” administrators are right to intervene and squelch the troublesome speech—or art, or teaching, or research. The Anti-Defamation League, a pro-Israel lobbying group that has for years masqueraded as a civil rights group, could not have said it better.
White’s statement further implies that university administrators, as self-proclaimed artful balancers, can decide, at their discretion, where academic freedom and free speech begin and end. “Okay, you folks had your mural on display for a year,” White’s statement says, if not in precisely those words. “We’ve decided that’s enough; now we’re taking it down.” That, it seems, is an autocrat’s idea of civil discourse.
Outsiders to the usual goings-on in public research universities might look at all this and see it as a tempest in an academic teapot. So one art exhibit in one corner of the university got covered up after being on view for a year. How is that a big deal?
Here’s how: censoring the exhibit—and first denying that outside pressure had anything to do with it—is another instance of how the intellectual freedom uniquely afforded by universities is being eroded with the aid of complicit administrators who take their jobs to be the assertion of managerial control in service to their right-wing political masters. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that this is not a Chapel Hill problem or a North Carolina problem. It’s a problem all over the country.
Academic freedom, like democracy, dies one step at a time. No single step seems large enough to warrant outrage. Yet each minor act of censorship or repression serves to form a larger picture of a changed society, one we can see taking shape now. When that picture is finally filled in, we may find nowhere in it what we knew as academic freedom or the universities where this principle was once most revered.
Michael Schwalbe is professor emeritus of sociology at North Carolina State University.
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