Each fall, UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz co-teaches a seminar for graduate students – professors of the future – called ‘The American Professoriate.’ The class focuses on the role of public universities. This year, he teaches with Matt Springer and Buck Goldstein from the School of Education and Dean Suzanne Barbour of the Graduate School. Students and instructors write regular reflections on higher education’s role. We share some of those here.
By Kevin Guskiewicz
CHAPEL HILL (September 7, 2021) – Public universities are one of this country’s oldest and best ideas. The University of North Carolina was chartered in 1789, the same year our state ratified the US Constitution. There is no doubt the lawmakers of that era considered higher education to be an essential public good.
But in the very first session of my American Professoriate class, a student brought up a sharp point about what serving the public means for a state university. The word “public,” she pointed out, isn’t fixed — it has grown and changed over time. Our definition of who Carolina belongs to — and who belongs at Carolina — is far broader today than it was 200 years ago, just as the state itself welcomes a far larger and more diverse group of people into the civic fold. The latest figures from the US Census, released just a few weeks ago, show that North Carolina is among the fastest growing places in the country, with a great many of those new arrivals drawn by the promise of a world-class education and the opportunities that go with it.
That’s something to celebrate, and it means that our University needs to work harder than ever to speak to the whole state. Our growing and diversifying public is not of one mind about much of anything, which means that a University serving the people of North Carolina isn’t going to find much easy consensus, either.
That’s what The American Professoriate course is all about. It’s a seminar-style course with excellent co-instructors and more than two dozen graduate students representing a range of disciplines from literature to neuroscience. What all of them have in common is a desire to contribute not just to their individual fields, but to the life and health of the University. In today’s world, that means being prepared to show that the great American ideal of raucous and rowdy debate can happen without damaging the shared institutions of our society.
I always lead off the class with my favorite quote from Clark Kerr, who led the University of California through another great period of upheaval on American college campuses in the 1960s. “The university is so many things to so many different people that it must, of necessity, be partially at war with itself,” Kerr wrote. He understood that a quiet campus, a place with no loudly dissenting voices and no contentious debates, wouldn’t be doing its job.
The genius of America has always been its capacity to welcome strident voices without tearing itself apart, to provide the framework and the forum for working out real differences without breaking the bonds of affection that hold us all together. So long as our society is roiled by great questions, our public institutions must be, too.
Kerr didn’t last as long in the UC president’s office as he would have liked. He was dismissed in 1967 amid a shifting political landscape in California, joking that he arrived on the job “fired with enthusiasm” and departed the same way. But he’s remembered today for laying the foundation of a truly great public institution, and for speaking honestly about what higher education means in a democratic society. “A great university has a duty to the future as great as its duty to the present,” Kerr wrote. “Intellectually, it must be both more conservative of established values and more bold in trying innovations than may be fashionable at any given moment…. It must take the long view and may often have to defend the unpopular.”
That is not a recipe for quiet days. But I think we need more people, more institutions, that take a very long view. The students in this semester’s American Professoriate class are still in the early stages of their academic lives, still with decades of ideas and discoveries ahead of them. The public they’ll answer to will change across the arc of their careers, with new controversies animating the institutions where they work and the society they call home. And through it all, they will seek the right balance of conserving established values and trying bold innovations, searching for truth even when it’s costly.
I love imagining where all of these great minds might end up, long after they’ve left this class behind. But for now, I’m grateful to be learning with them.
Kevin Guskiewicz is the Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Kay Paul says
From classmate of 1958–wonderful changes since ’58 ,and still a grand school-esp. School of Education–and try to keep avoiding pot holes…the rides are tough but Tar Heels are too!
Raquel Strauss says
Dear Chancellor,
I am unhappy about what I see as cowardice and a lack of leadership. Clark Kent? Who cares? The California university and college system was patterned after the University of North Carolina’s system, not the other way around. In fact California should be quoting and following our Chancellor’s lead in standing up to a biased BOG in hiring African American qualified faculty. California should be admiring our Chancellor’s stance on confronting antisemitism spouted by our faculty. Oh dear, that is my fantasy Chancellor, not yours. California can just take UNC to task as a weak Southern school with 19th century values of racism and antisemitism led by a cowardly Chancellor.
Tom Lamberh says
Excellent. Kevin is generous if he is describing some of his critics as raucous. His demeanor in difficult situations is itself an eloquent statement.
Richard Tedder says
I do not see much energy being given towards the values that have built this country and university over the last 200 years. The energy is more in efforts to refute and dismantle. Silent Sam is a great example of allowing a bastardized myopic reshapung of history destroy a noble effort by our state, the university and it citizens.
James Smalley says
Sounds like a great class! Happy to have Dr. Guskiewicz as our Chancellor with his thoughtful and balanced view of the university and higher education. I wish him all the best in his work at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
James Smalley, B.A. 1961
Edward Kick says
What a fine set of statements from the Chancellor. It reminds me of the academic attmosphere I felt at the University of Wiscnsin decades ago. I wonder, is this way of seeing the world and the role of higher education “definitional” for top 20 universities only? I wish it would travel south.