RALEIGH (November 29, 2023) – We’re glad John Preyer doesn’t dispute the many ways public education has been damaged in North Carolina.

Higher Ed Works Chair Paul Fulton authored a column last week that said it’s no wonder UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz is considering a job as president of Michigan State University, given the many ways state legislators, the UNC Board of Governors and the UNC-CH Board of Trustees have undermined public education from pre-school to grad school in our state.

In a response, Preyer – Chair of the UNC-CH Board of Trustees – questions whether the trustees blindsided faculty and administrators with their resolution in January calling for the university to “accelerate” development of the School of Civic Life and Leadership.

But he doesn’t take issue with the multiple other instances of overreach and underfunding Fulton pointed out.

There’s little doubt the resolution at the board’s Jan. 26 meeting was an orchestrated bombshell, though: The resolution wasn’t listed on the meeting’s agenda. The Chair of the Faculty at the time said she was “flabbergasted.”

“I was surprised,” said Provost Chris Clemens, a recognized conservative.

We’ve never taken issue with the idea of the school itself – only with the demeaning process with which the Board of Trustees sprung its resolution on administrators and faculty, and with media assertions that the trustees “created” a new school, when in fact that is clearly the role of the faculty.

• If the School of Civic Life has been in development so long, why wasn’t it listed on the board’s meeting agenda in January?
  
  
• Why did board members find it necessary to hire an outside PR agency and arrange interviews with The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board and Fox News in advance?
  
  
• And why did the Board Chair at the time tell Fox & Friends: “We … have no shortage of left-of-center progressive views on our campus, like so many campuses across the nation. The same can’t really be said about right-of-center views. So this is an effort to try to remedy that with the School of Civic Life and Leadership”?

WE AGREE that Guskiewicz and his team have done a tremendous job starting to shape the new school.

In fact, in a post for Higher Ed Works last month called “Lemons to lemonade,” Buck Goldstein described the same faculty meeting Preyer references, outlining the broad range of nine distinguished professors whom Jim White, Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, has already named to begin teaching classes in the new school next spring.

Guskiewicz and his team made “a good-faith effort to embrace what began as a declaration of war with the faculty – and turn it into something worthy of the nation’s first public university,” Goldstein wrote.

And that’s a perfect example of why we need Kevin Guskiewicz to remain Chancellor at UNC Chapel Hill. We stand by our facts.