A Martyr To Applause | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: This article appeared on John Hood's daily column in the Carolina Journal, which, because of Author / Publisher Hood, is linked to the John Locke Foundation.

    RALEIGH     If the recent review of campus-based centers by the University of North Carolina Board of Governors was all an elaborate ruse to silence a critic of state Republicans, it would probably qualify as the most improbable, elaborate, and ineffective conspiracy in North Carolina history.

    Naturally the supposed target, UNC-Chapel Hill law professor Gene Nichol, is a true believer in the conspiracy. On the Left, one earns status by being martyred for "speaking truth to power."

    The truth is that what Nichol has done in his media appearances on behalf of the law school's Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity is to speak propaganda to the dour — to tell surly liberal activists what they wanted to hear. His overwrought prose and absurd claims aren't designed to persuade the Republicans in power, or even to give them pause.

    Still, asserting that a panel of board members embarked on a months-long review of academic centers throughout the UNC system merely as a pretext for censoring Nichol by closing his poverty center was a useful accusation. It thrust him and other North Carolina liberals in the national limelight — or at least onto the stage of the small black-box theatre that is the viewership of MSNBC and the readership of left-wing blogs.

    Indeed, if Republican appointees on the UNC board had hoped to silence or harm Nichol, they grossly miscalculated. As a political tactic, the entire endeavor was self-defeating. It gained them and GOP leaders far more adverse publicity than Nichol could ever have generated on his own. And his ability to write and speak his views remains fully intact.

    That's one of the many reasons I doubt the conspiracy theory. Another is that the timing doesn't work. Increased scrutiny of UNC centers long predates Nichol's scribbling. It actually began under Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue, when her budget aides and state lawmakers starved for cash during the Great Recession began questioning whether the burgeoning ranks of academic centers reflected an efficient use of university resources.

    The scrutiny continued after Pat McCrory took office. State funding for centers has undergone multiple reductions. Even privately funded centers drew attention from policymakers wondering if they fully covered their overhead costs or if donors might be willing to redirect their funds to higher priorities.

    That some of the programs, including the poverty center, also seemed more like political ax-grinding exercises than academic enterprises was certainly part of the conversation — as well it should have been. The poverty center originated in 2005 not as a scholarly project but as a political roost for former U.S. Sen. John Edwards to run for president. Indeed, Edwards announced the center's creation at a Democratic fundraiser in New Hampshire, of all places. In 2006, the Daily Tar Heel disclosed that Edwards had spent most of his time not at UNC but out campaigning. There was even a running gag about the fact that on the center's website, the "events" section stated for more than a year that "the [sic] are no events posted at this time."

    Since then, the poverty center hasn't exactly established itself as a bustling center of scholarship. I haven't talked to the UNC board members who conducted the recent review. (I can also confirm that Art Pope, who chairs the board of the foundation I now run, had no involvement with it.) But the other day I went on the poverty center's website. Most of the posted research appears to have been produced many years ago. Most of the listed events were showings of films, presentations by advocacy groups, or presentations on topics other than poverty.

    That private funds rather than taxes have been funding the center lately is certainly welcome news. But surely that can't be the end of the matter. If, say, the Pope Foundation sponsored something comparable, UNC professors and student activists would be outraged.

    It seems that UNC board members aren't similarly furious about the poverty center. They just think it never transcended its political origins and served no academic purpose, so they are willing to take the PR hit to make a change. What troglodytes.