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The End of DEI at UNC May Do Long-Term Damage to North Carolina
A perspective from Alexander H. Jones
After the US Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action, the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees swiftly dispensed with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The move allowed them to vindicate a long-time conservative pet rock, and it was heartily welcomed by conservative forces in the state. The University community, however, was justifiably upset about the decline of DEI, and North Carolinians writ large may feel the consequences of this loss for generations to come.
UNC was, like most public entities in the South, founded as a segregated institution. For much of the Antebellum era, UNC students largely came from the state’s elite planter class and learned genteel subjects like Latin and Greek. In the twentieth century, leaders like Edward Kidder Graham modernized the university without modifying its status as a white bastion. Frank Porter Graham nearly lost his job as University president when he attempted to remove the “Jewish quota” at the UNC School of Medicine, and state legislators fended off an attempt by two young African Americans to attend the University’s pharmacy school by begrudgingly creating a comparable institution at one of the state’s historically Black colleges.
Thus, the roots of segregation at Carolina run deep. But at least since the Edward Kidder Graham era, UNC has never been the sort of insular provincial academy that predominated in the darker and more benighted reaches of the South. Frank Porter Graham ensured a sort of “Glasnost” at the University—a cultural opening akin to the loosening of repression that Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev introduced in the USSR in the 1980s. Under Graham’s leadership, UNC liberalized and began to welcome transgressive ideas like Bertrand Russell’s atheism and Langston Hughes’s searing condemnations of Southern racial violence. As a result, the state’s young leaders began to learn about the world beyond the segregated water fountain.
Many of these young people would eventually lead the state into the Sun Belt era of growth and modernization. Terry Sanford was a Graham protégé, and at UNC he learned truths about social injustice largely inaccessible to him in the isolated cotton fields of Laurinburg where he grew up. Sanford became governor in 1960 and took the extraordinary step of calling for equal employment opportunities for African Americans. Much later, Mike Easley left his Eastern North Carolina home for Chapel Hill and became immersed in a world of progress and searching inquiry. Easley would actually attend an historically Black law school before becoming governor in 2000 and enacting a broad array of initiatives to expand voting rights.
Today’s young people are at least as progressive in instinct as Sanford, Easley, and their many classmates and peers over the last century. But the end of DEI threatens to stunt Generation Z’s perspective and prevent the emergence of a cosmopolitan governing class in 21st-century North Carolina. That’s because the diverse student body that has so enriched UNC’s campus environment is becoming dramatically more homogenous. Since the politicized BoT ended diversity initiatives, Black and Latino enrollment has already begun to plummet. As anyone who has had contact with UNC already knows, Carolina was a privileged and largely white campus to begin with. Harvard economist Raj Chetty found that students from the top income quintile were sixteen-times more numerous at Chapel Hill than poor students. Now, these upper-income young people may never encounter peers from less-advantaged backgrounds.
This is a tragedy, because North Carolina’s endemic housing segregation makes diverse schools essential. Young people growing up in affluent suburbs are largely socialized in a context of economic and racial homogeneity. That’s the way it was when Sanford was growing up and it has only changed on the margins. If North Carolina’s brightest students go from homogenous suburbs to a lily-white university, they will never have any interface with the buzzing diversity of the state they are likely one day to lead—and perhaps a generation or two after the end of diversity, our state’s leaders won’t see the end of DEI as a tragedy at all.
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