Thread by @Tyler_A_Harper

This is what we're witnessing – the dismantling of public higher ed in conservative states – and we've created the conditions for what's going on at UNC. How did anyone think we could get away with being nakedly ideological for years without any chickens coming home to roost? 1/

https://twitter.com/RebeccaSpang/status/1717887249679777940

Universities have always been tacitly left-leaning and faculty have always been openly so, but institutions have never been this transparently, officially political. Almost every single job ad in my field/related fields this year has some kind of brazenly politicized language. 2/

An example. Here's language from a current lit job ad: "We see this position as building on recent hiring in the English department in decolonial and anti-racist pedagogies and practices as well as a recent cluster hire in research related to diversity, equity, and inclusion." 3/

Imagine if a public university job ad instead read: "We see this position as building on recent hiring in the English department in traditionalist pedagogies and practices as well as a recent cluster hire in research related to pro-life ethics, nationalism, and family values." 4/

If you lived in a blue state and your public universities were advertising jobs seeking scholars who promote family values and nationalist pedagogies, you would *rightly* be having a meltdown and demanding representatives fix it! This isn't about conservative or liberal profs 5/

This isn't about the right of individual faculty to *be* political or teach political subject matter. That's the whole point of academic freedom! This is about universities shamelessly embracing, as their official institutional posture, an openly ideological framework/stance 6/

This isn't about the right of individual faculty to *be* political or teach political subject matter. That's the whole point of academic freedom! This is about universities shamelessly embracing, as their official institutional posture, an openly ideological framework/stance 6/

It's *because* I'm a leftist humanities professor that I think we need institutional neutrality. The survival of higher ed, the humanities, absolutely depends on universities being officially non-political so that faculty/students have the academic freedom *to be* political. 7/

I don't care if I'm a broken record. Our society desperately needs the humanities, and a functional public higher education system more broadly. And *at the very moment* we're under sustained assault, some of us are still pouring fuel on Chris Rufo's bonfire. UNC is the result.

What I find heartbreaking is that I really believe this was preventable. Or I at least believe that if defunding the humanities was inevitable, given the transformation of universities into Hedonist Experiential Luxury Resorts, it didn't have to happen this fast or in this way.