“Viewpoints” is a place on Chapelboro where local people are encouraged to share their unique perspectives on issues affecting our community. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work, reporting or approval of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com. If you’d like to contribute a column on an issue you’re concerned about, interesting happenings around town, reflections on local life — or anything else — send a submission to viewpoints@wchl.com.
Good Riddance to a Bad Actor at UNC-CH
A perspective from Alexander H. Jones
One of the distressing aspects of living under NCGOP rule is that the sword of Damocles is always hanging over your head. At any given time, Republicans could do something catastrophically embarrassing — a bathroom bill, a voter-suppression law, the denial of tenure to a respected Black intellectual. Things may seem momentarily quiet, as if the political battle had cooled into a truce. But the legislature and the UNC Board of Governors are nearly always considering something that could bring massive disgrace on the state, and N.C. political observers have to white knuckle it hoping they’ll show some restraint.
Enter John Preyer, who’s exiting the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees. Preyer was an aggressive political activist who did a lot of damage to the University. He was a key figure in hiring Bill Belichick and the septuagenarian’s ridiculous girlfriend. (Is it a coincidence that Belichick likes to hang out at Mar-a-Lago?). And late in his tenure, Preyer made threatening noises about professor tenure at a time when legislative Republicans were considering dynamiting higher education in North Carolina by abolishing tenure. The end of tenure would have resulted in the full-scale collapse of public higher education in our state. Preyer implicitly noted this risk, but still indicated his skepticism of this foundational component of American higher education.
Preyer’s activism did more than bring an embarrassing elderly millionaire to Kenan Stadium. Preyer was also chiefly responsible for creating the right-wing “School of Civic Life and Leadership” (to get me to surrender the scare quotes you will have pry my cold dead hands from my keyboard) at Chapel Hill. The “School,” better described as an unwanted intruder, would function like a safe space for conservative, mostly white students. Students would be allowed to opt into a curriculum taught by carefully selected conservative professors and avoid their parents’ traumatic encounters with ideas that challenged their cherished childhood beliefs. Marx? Freud? Be gone with them!
The “School of Civic Life and Leadership” was a provocative attack on the University’s political neutrality at the same time that Republicans (like Preyer) were demanding official expressions of “neutrality” from the institution. Preyer’s baby brought overt conservative ideology to campus with the express purpose of making the University more Republican. My understanding is that the “School” has descended into a snake pit of recriminations between Republican operatives, but that just shows how politicized the entire process was. Republicans from outside the faculty are feuding over a “School” the faculty had no role in creating and generally did not welcome. It’s like watching House Republicans tear down a Speaker.
Preyer was an irresponsible and destructive force on the Board of Trustees. He had exactly the combination of ideological extremism and reckless operating style that has done so much damage to our state. And he was in bad company: Conservative politicians have always been an enemy of free thought and political independence at UNC. Jeffersonian conservatives closed the University in the 1790s out of pique toward Federalist professors. An abolitionist professor was forced out of the state late in the Antebellum era. Jesse Helms called the institution “the University of Negroes and Communists.”
That is the strain of politics from which John Preyer sprang. While Preyer is not personally a racist, his Helms bona fides are present in his resume. As a young man, Preyer worked as a key aide to Lauch Faircloth, a racist US Senator elevated to his perch by the Helms machine. I suppose Preyer’s record at UNC should come as no surprise. He was a disgrace to the institution and a bad actor in the long history of our state’s flagship University.
“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
