BUBBLE: UNC Faculty Cringe At Program with ‘Conservative Origins’

CHAPEL HILL – College campuses have earned (deservedly) a reputation for a regulated homogeneity of thought and enforced social justice dogma that creates a bubble of approved leftist thought and discourse. It’s incredibly ironic within the context of a university’s purpose of exposing young minds to multiple schools of thought in pursuit of truth and individual betterment. Yet the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill, itself a hotbed of social justice activism (and vandalism), further prove the intolerant bubble they live in in their objections to anything resembling good, old-fashioned, conservative thought and civic engagement.

The faculty see such a threat in the existence of the Program for Civic Virtue and Civil Discourse (PCVCD), complaining that the program has a conservative agenda. Even assuming the program did indeed have a hidden conservative agenda, it would be drowned out entirely by the innumerable leftist-driven agenda implemented through the rest of the social science departments and Campus Ys in Chapel Hill.

In any case, this is what is scaring the faculty apparently: a program that will strive to prepare students for “civic and political engagement,” and for “rewarding relationships in spaces of intimacy and leisure.”

That’s according to Chris Clemens, one of the founders of the program, as reported by the Daily Tar Heel. Clemens said the program grew out of talks between leaders at the University and state levels, and Robert George, a conservative scholar from Princeton. George, a conservative who is extra scary to the Left at UNC because he is an unashamed Christian, is listed as the chairman of the new program’s advisory board.

But true to form, it’s not so much that the presence of a political agenda within a university program itself is what upsets the faculty, it is simply that it is not their agenda. The bubble of ‘woke’ postmodern leftism must be kept as pure as possible from the liberal professors. One such professor in the university’s sociology department, possibly the most left-leaning and infected with indoctrination departments on campus, admits that truth outright.

From the Daily Tar Heel:

“This comes from certain politics, it comes from people who have certain agendas,” said Sherryl Kleinman, professor emeritus in the sociology department. […]

“Is it the fact that there’s an agenda, or that there’s an agenda you don’t like?” Someone in the room asked Kleinman. 

“It’s that it was an agenda that was not faculty generated,” Kleinman responded. […]”

“Faculty generated,” essentially means approved by the faculty’s social justice order. What upsets these faculty members so much is that a school of thought and discourse outside of their narrowly accepted ideologies is even given a chance to exist.

Continue reading about progressive professors’ (and the DTH too) attempts to badmouth and fear monger about a civic engagement program that doesn’t follow their rigid social justice rules here.