"Academic Freedom" In North Carolina

[Meta Blog]

Originally from The Charlotte Capitalist ™,

Here's a story:

The faculty at Meredith College in Raleigh struck a blow for academic freedom Friday, and in so doing, might've cost the college $420,000 from the BB&T Charitable Foundation.

At issue: A grant from BB&T--$60,000 a year for seven years--for an honors program featuring, apparently at the bank's insistence, such left-wing texts as Karl Marx' Das Kapital and The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes.

The faculty's position: We can't allow donors' money to dictate what we teach. The vote was 54-34.

The problem, according to documents circulated to faculty in advance of the Friday meeting by Beth Mulvaney, chair of Meredith's Faculty Council, was that specific texts for the program's core course were negotiated as a condition of the grant by Maureen Hartford, Meredith's president, and BB&T.

Okay, I...GOTCHA! In fact universities take millions, if not billions of dollars, every year to teach the destructive works of Marx and Keynes. Not to mention Kant, Hegel, and other nihilists.

Here is the real story:

The faculty at Meredith College in Raleigh struck a blow for academic freedom Friday, and in so doing, might've cost the college $420,000 from the BB&T Charitable Foundation. At issue: A grant from BB&T--$60,000 a year for seven years--for an honors program featuring, apparently at the bank's insistence, such right-wing texts as Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Frederick Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

The faculty's position: We can't allow donors' money to dictate what we teach. The vote was 54-34.

The problem, according to documents circulated to faculty in advance of the Friday meeting by Beth Mulvaney, chair of Meredith's Faculty Council, was that specific texts for the program's core course were negotiated as a condition of the grant by Maureen Hartford, Meredith's president, and BB&T.

Apparently there were "concerns about ethics course". Here are "contingencies the Meredith faculty decided it couldn't stomach":

Thus, the faculty declined to approve the course, called "Global Capitalism and Ethical Values," unless it was clear to BB&T that "the faculty teaching this course now and in the future are free to design [it] with no pre-conditions."

and another gastronomical disaster for PhDs...

Students would be given "a solid understanding of capitalism," Harford assured Allison in her "Dear John" letter, and would be required to do extensive reading, including Atlas Shrugged and The Road to Serfdom.

"Free enterprise" and "objectivism"--the latter Ayn Rand's pet theory--would both be central to the course, Hartford wrote.

Moreover, every student in the Honors program, whether in the colloquium or not, would receive a copy of Atlas Shrugged, which would serve to underscore its importance.

and..someone please get Professor Von Kantmarx his Maalox:

Hartford assured Allison that she would be personally involved in the colloquium and would use part of BB&T's money to lead trips to New York City, where students could visit the stock exchange and meet with business leaders that she'd help choose--with Allison's recommendations welcomed.

The stock exchange? Those poor students!!! The inhumanity!

And of course, there is this quote from AR which the writer of the article saw as a self-evident reason to stop the course:

"Man--every man--is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life," Rand wrote.

"The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit.

It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man's rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders."

Rand continued: "In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church."

The blow for "academic freedom" has been made -- students will not be exposed to pro-freedom, anti-slavery, pro-voluntary exchange, anti-physical force propaganda. They will continue to be taught the thuggery of Kant, Keynes, and Marx.

Of course, we all know that "academic freedom" means freedom from reason, reality, rational self-interest, and rights.

All things of which the students need more -- not less.