Pope Center Issues

Academic Freedom and Student Rights

Universities must be places where ideas can be exchanged and debated openly. Therefore, universities should defend the rights of faculty members to speak and write without fear of official sanction or retribution. In hiring and promotion, the criteria should be demonstrated capabilities in teaching and scholarship, not conformity to any particular ideology. Students have the right to expect that the courses they take will present the knowledge of the discipline fairly; where there are intellectual disagreements, professors should at least familiarize students with positions that differ from their own. Students should never be silenced or subjected to ridicule for questioning a professor’s ideas or voicing their own opinions.

Academic Standards

American higher education is often said to be the envy of the world, but when it comes to academic standards, it may be more of the laughingstock of the world. Rather than demanding work and thought that really makes students "stretch," many courses have been so watered down, with professors demanding so little of students, that they have little or no intellectual value. College credits should only be awarded for work and learning that merit them.

Admissions

At many colleges and universities, admission standards have fallen to the point where a large percentage of the students are not ready for or truly interested in higher education. The result is a great amount of remedial education that would better be handled elsewhere and a high dropout rate. Admission standards should be raised and the admission process simplified so that it relies less on subjective factors such as essays and recommendations and more on objective demonstrations of academic ability.

Alternative Institutions

A competitive market is the best way of discovering what approaches work best in any field, including education. Therefore, government policy should not create obstacles to the establishment of new kinds of higher education institutions and products.

Athletics

Athletics can be a valuable part of college life, but they are not part of any school’s mission. Concern for success in athletics should not be permitted to undermine academic standards. There should not be different standards for students who are on athletic teams and those who are not.

Community Colleges

Community colleges should not duplicate vocational training programs that are available on the free market; nor should they serve as subsidized job training programs for business and industry.

Curriculum

Colleges and universities should not dilute their general education requirements by allowing students to satisfy them by choosing from long lists of courses, many of which are too narrow to help give them a sound, broad-based education. The general education curriculum should ensure that each student will graduate with a basic familiarity with the great literature in English, with science and the scientific method, with higher mathematics, with logic and reasoning, with American history, with the social sciences, and with the fine arts.

Diversity

Diversity is not a value or a goal in and of itself. Decisions on student admittance, faculty and administrative hiring, and the curriculum should not be made on the basis that “diversity” is thereby enhanced. Members of the university community should be treated equally as individuals, not as members of groups where some groups are given preferential treatment.

Faculty Compensation

Are professors in the UNC system paid well enough? That question arises whenever a UNC professor is lured to another university by an offer of higher compensation. When that happens, we usually hear that it signifies a “crisis” that must be solved by raising pay to levels competitive with top private universities. The supposed crisis, however, is nonexistent as UNC has always been able to replace departing faculty members with others who are good teachers and scholars. The true concern here is not over the ability to hire capable professors, but over the perceived loss of university prestige when a highly-published professor decides to go elsewhere.

Faculty Productivity

The number of class hours taught by professors has been gradually declining for many years. Many now teach only two courses per semester. The light teaching load is supposed to allow them to engage in research and writing. Tenure decisions hinge upon the professor’s track record of publication far more than upon his teaching ability. An excellent teacher who publishes little probably will not get tenure whereas a mediocre teacher who publishes a lot, even if it is extremely esoteric and almost never read, has a good chance at tenure. Those incentives weaken the ability of colleges and universities to fulfill their central mission, which is the education of undergraduates.

State Appropriations and Tuition

The UNC system remains one of the most heavily subsidized of all state university systems. When government subsidizes anything, the result is excess demand. The more of the cost of anything that people have to bear themselves, the more careful they are to decide whether the benefits outweigh the costs. The state should continue to increase tuition so that more of the cost is borne by the students who directly benefit from the education, along with improved policies to encourage citizens to save for college expenses. Furthermore, the state should refrain from expansion of the UNC system. If and when the demand for higher education grows, there are many non-government options from which students can choose.

Student Fees

A wide assortment of organizations and activities are funded, in whole or in part, through mandatory student fees. That is another subsidy program, forcing all to pay for things that only a few desire. Funding through student fees should be reduced or eliminated with recipient groups informed that if they wish to continue, they will have to do so with money voluntarily raised. To the extent that student fees are still used to pay for visiting speakers, the university should make sure that the speakers are balanced among varying philosophies.

University Spending

The UNC system should attempt to minimize costs by contracting out as many functions and services as possible.