(Ezekiel Loseke, Headline USA) A shocking 637 faculty members at the University of North Carolina have signed a public letter protesting against a proposed requirement that every UNC student be required to take a course on the American founding.
The proposed law, North Carolina House Bill 96, would mandate undergraduates take three credit hours in the American Founding and American history.
The course would require students to read, the Declaration of Independence, the United Sates Constitution, five essays from The Federalist Papers, “the Emancipation Proclamation,” “the Gettysburg Address,” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”
The professors complained that this course, the bare minimum necessary to achieve a civics education, “violates core principles of academic freedom,” according to Fox News.
The academics argued that the bill “substitutes ideological force-feeding for the intellectual expertise of faculty.”
The professors continued to whine about a potential obligation to educate their students in American politics.
“Our leaders continue to disregard campus autonomy, attack the expertise and independence of world-class faculty, and seek to force students’ educations into pre-approved ideological containers,” the letter read. “We must protect the principles of academic freedom and shared governance which have long made UNC a leader in public education.”
More than whine, the letter produced a threat.
“If enacted, we believe that these measures will further damage the reputation of UNC and the state of North Carolina and will likely bring critical scrutiny from accrediting agencies that know undue interference in university affairs when they see it,” the letter read.
The bill in question has passed through the North Carolina House, and is now making its way through the Senate.
The state legislature has also proposed a bill that would end tenure at UNC, establish minimum class sizes and require the university to disclose “all non-instructional research performed by higher education personnel at the institution.” This bill, H.B. 715, is also whined about in the letter.
