All Education is Political: How Institutional Neutrality Obscures Right-Wing Politics at UNC
By Toby Posel, TransparUNCy Press
When the UNC Board of Governors voted this spring to repeal the university system’s DEI policy, they did so in pursuit of, in the words of system President Peter Hans, “principled neutrality.” The system’s DEI policy, in Hans’s view, was divisive. In trying to “decide all the complex and multidimensional questions of how to balance and interpret identity,” DEI programs had violated the appropriate boundaries of a public institution, making unreasonable ideological judgements on questions that were still the subject of contentious debate. Removing these programs, Hans reassured us in his characteristically diplomatic and friendly tone, would restore the university system to its rightful place: a neutral host for political discourse, but never a participant or arbiter. University officials, be they diversity officers or chancellors, should refrain from speaking on the “political issues of the day.” The DEI programs represent ideology; repealing them is neutrality.
You could hardly be blamed if this political theater didn’t immediately appear neutral. Hans delivered this address to an overwhelmingly white room whose political and financial connections to the North Carolina GOP are well documented. Outside the building, a group of multiracial students held a press conference in defiance of the rule change. The only two members to vote against the DEI ban were Black. Indeed, nothing about this process was neutral. Hans’s definition of neutrality shows a childlike understanding of how institutions engage in politics. But the new official policy of institutional neutrality is not merely naive: it is an insidious attempt to obfuscate the influence of a dangerous far-right movement that is threatening universities across North Carolina and the nation.
The Impossibility of Neutrality
Institutions, especially public universities, can never actually be neutral. This is partially because the politics of a university are not reducible to the rhetoric of their administrators. Universities are always responsible not just for what they say, but what they do. Which students should be admitted? What kinds of research should be pursued? What kind of relationship should the University have with its surrounding community? Where should the university endowment be invested, and who should have oversight over that process? Even though these questions are not litigated directly through partisan elections, they are still eminently political, constantly subject to contestation and struggle. Chancellor Lee Roberts does not need to make public statements supporting Israeli war crimes in Gaza or promoting the emission of CO2 for UNC’s study abroad program in Israel and our continued use of Chapel Hill’s illegal coal plant to be political. These actions materially advantage some while harming others, they communicate specific values, and they mobilize the university’s vast resources to perpetuate particular social and economic systems. This is not neutrality.
Yet even if we accept Hans’s narrow conception of institutional neutrality, the UNC administration still has not lived up to its own standard. Perhaps the most glaring example was the October 13th message from then Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz, condemning the “senseless acts of terror” on Israeli civilians by Hamas. In the nearly ten months since, the UNC administration has never once issued such a condemnation against Israel’s slaughter, starvation, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian civilians, a level of violence that even prominent Israeli scholars of the Holocaust have described as genocide. In the eyes of the UNC administration, only some victims are worthy of sympathy and moral outrage. Many others are not.
A subtler but no less important example comes from the introduction of the new School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL). First announced in January of 2023, the school has well-documented roots in conservative donor networks, both in and outside of UNC. In an official press release announcing the hiring of new SCiLL Dean Jed Atkins, university communications said that, “At a time of increasing polarization and declining public trust in our institutions…SCiLL represents a remarkable opportunity for America’s first public university to continue to lead our country in preparing ‘a rising generation’ for lives of thoughtful civic engagement required for a flourishing democracy.”
Perhaps it seems unobjectionable, but this statement is certainly not neutral. That the university felt compelled to create an entire school addressing a crisis of “polarization and declining public trust” rather than, say, a crisis of anthropogenic climate change or widening racial inequality, is a deeply political choice. By recognizing and prioritizing this crisis (and by framing it as a crisis in the first place), they implicitly reject the moral urgency of competing crises. The rhetorical affirmation and material commitment to fighting a certain set of problems over others always carries ideological weight.
Yet for many members of the university community, the politics of this press release are not immediately apparent. The rhetoric seems reasonable, measured, perhaps even responsible. This is exactly the perception official university communications aim for. While angry student protestors might have ideology, with their provocative chants and signs, experienced professional administrators speak prudently and rationally, their judgment unclouded by political commitments. When weaponized by university officials, their real definition of neutral is this: not apolitical (we have already demonstrated this is impossible), rather, just rhetorically moderate enough that you lose sight of the politics all together. University leaders like Lee Roberts and Peter Hans wield the consequential power to define a collective “common sense,” the range of political values that can, with some rhetorical sleight of hand, be described as “neutral.”
The Death of DEI and The Weaponization of Neutrality
Over the past two decades, in important sectors of American society—primary and higher education, media, private corporations, government bureaucracies—there have been broad changes to discourse around race. Largely spurred by the decade of Black Lives Matter protests during the 2010s and the political upheaval of 2020, many institutions implemented a patchwork of policies we might conveniently (and somewhat reductively) call DEI: bias, diversity, and cultural sensitivity trainings; professional, academic, and emotional support for marginalized groups; and increased rhetorical commitments to principles of diversity and equity.
There has been no shortage of critiques of these programs: some argue they are ineffective or superficial, that they co-opt and diffuse more radical social protest, that they provide corporations and other bad actors a way to avoid larger structural reforms. But broadly speaking, the rise of DEI was a recognition, however imperfect, that racial injustice and inequality still persist in modern society and that it is the responsibility of major institutions to address it. Until recently, UNC seemed to agree. When they created their Office of Diversity and Inclusion in 2019 (which will presumably be dismantled this year under new system policy), the university did so in part to “address the issues of our contemporary society and strive to position all students, faculty, and staff to reach their greatest potential.”
But in the years since 2020, there has been a powerful white backlash to this era of racial progressivism. Conservative activist and intellectual Christopher Rufo began sounding the alarm about the threats of what he called “Critical Race Theory” (CRT), an amalgamation of scary-sounding progressive boogeymen that he claimed explained the true totalitarian Marxist roots of DEI bureaucracy. Rufo became a megastar in conservative media and political circles, dominating Fox News segments and getting invitations to the Trump White House to advise on policy. The intellectual architecture of the modern right quickly identified CRT and DEI programs as their biggest enemies, whipping up a moral panic that has swept through state legislatures across the country. Rufo joined Florida governor Ron Desantis to lead a “war on wokeness” in his state’s public universities, flagrantly violating academic freedom and free speech in order to purge the academy of his ideological opponents.
Conservatives in North Carolina quickly followed suit. In 2022, the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (North Carolina Republicans’ favorite think tank) contracted Scott Yenor, a conservative intellectual and senior fellow at the far-right Claremont Institute, to write Critical Social Justice in the UNC System, a 56-page polemic warning against the threat that CRT and DEI posed to the “American way of life.” A year later, the North Carolina General Assembly, building off of Yenor’s work, requested all documents from the state’s universities that contained the words ‘diversity’, ‘equity’, ‘inclusion’, ‘accessibility’, ‘racism’, ‘anti-racism’, ‘anti-racist’, ‘oppression’, ‘internalized oppression’, ‘systemic racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘gender’, ‘LGBTQ+’, ‘white supremacy’, ‘unconscious bias’, ‘bias’, ‘microaggressions’, ‘critical race theory’, ‘intersectionality’, or ‘social justice.' They made their targets clear—any language with the faintest connection to identity and inequality was suspect.
These are not measured critiques against the excesses of overzealous liberal administrators: the fight against wokeness, CRT, and DEI has metastasized into a dangerous and far-reaching right-wing movement. A New York Times investigation based on thousands of emails between the top ranks of the anti-DEI movement show that its leaders, including Yenor himself, are proud reactionary bigots who see themselves as waging war against “a leftist revolution… and swarms of anti-American zealots.” We need not rely on leaked emails to prove this point. In his anti-DEI manifesto “Why America’s ‘Anti-Discrimination’ Regime Needs to be Dismantled,” Yenor states that his principal targets are “modern feminism, the radical homosexual and transsexual rights movements,” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
So how did this racist, reactionary movement manage to infiltrate the UNC system? It found a friend on the inside. President Peter Hans—moderate, ecumenical, even-keeled—possesses that special institutional and moral authority to mark the boundaries of the Overton Window, to define which ideas are radical and which are reasonable, where ideology stops and neutrality begins. After the anti-DEI movement spent four years shouting from the rooftops that mandatory diversity trainings would lead to the collapse of Western Civilization, its most important ally in North Carolina was the man who could characterize this position as “neutral.”
This description would certainly come as a surprise to the leaders of the anti-DEI movement. “In support of ridding schools of C.R.T., the Right argues that we want nonpolitical education,” writes Thomas Klingenstein, Chairman of the Claremont Institute. “No we don’t. We want our politics. All education is political.” Klingenstein recognizes an essential truth that President Hans almost certainly understands as well, but refuses to admit. Repealing DEI is political, just as implementing it 5 years ago was political.
What is the reality of modern racial inequality? What are the moral obligations of an institution built off the backs of the enslaved? How should the nation’s oldest public university educate the next generation to participate in our modern, pluralistic society? These questions can never be neutral—how we choose to answer them defines at the most fundamental level what kind of society we want to be.
And what kind of society does the anti-DEI movement aim to create? What does Klingenstein mean when he says “our politics?” Anti-DEI partisans are devoted to a mythological version of our nation’s past, one that erases our grave historical sins and provides the psychological comfort of racial blamelessness. In an interview mere weeks before voting to overturn DEI, UNC Board of Governors member Woody White said “your average white person, your average Black person, your average Hispanic—up until the last eight or 10 years, I don’t think saw skin color.” Putting aside the patent absurdity of this statement, White’s comments are a remarkable view into the minds of the people who control our education. Their goal is to naturalize, invisiblize, or otherwise morally excuse the existence of racial inequality. The attacks on DEI are an attack on the very idea that our public institutions should pursue justice for historical misdeeds. It is dangerous and shameful that Peter Hans would sanitize this movement using the language of neutrality.
The next time the leaders of your university tell you they are acting in the name of “neutrality,” ask yourself: whose political values are so powerful that they get to avoid being political at all?