Another UNC administrator is forced to choose between GOP mandates and personal integrity | Opinion
This week will be the last in the deanship of Dr. Van Dempsey of UNC-Wilmington’s school of education. That’s tough news for UNC-Wilmington and the UNC System.
Once again, an important administrator was forced to choose between the truth and the commands of ideologically driven superiors. Dempsey did something that is, by now, exceeding rare. He told the truth, knowing he’d likely be fired for it. He should receive a medal rather than being shown the door.
Dempsey’s departure stems from the decision to give Sen. Mike Lee a 2023 Razor Walker Award. The move came with controversy, and four weeks ago Dempsey admitted to The Assembly that UNC-Wilmington Chancellor Aswani Volety had instructed him to make sure a political conservative received one of the honors. Dempsey asked Volety what would happen if they went through the standard committee process and Lee wasn’t chosen. “I would make sure you land in a good place,” Volety replied.
Dempsey also told The Assembly he knew that admitting to the press he’d received the directive from the chancellor could cost him. Last week, it did. UNC-Wilmington issued a statement indicating “Dr. Dempsey is leaving his position as dean, effective July 14.”
Keeping to form, the statement itself was deceptive. Dempsey explained, “it implies I chose to leave the position. That is not true.” A Port City Daily public records request also revealed the selection committee had not recommended honoring Lee.
Choosing between Republican political mandate and one’s personal integrity is part of the essential job description for high administrators in the UNC System in these dark days.
Our chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill has been required to do it regularly. When our Board of Trustees denied tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, in one of the most high-visibility acts of racial discrimination in recent history, Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz did not utter a word against it. He seemed to fear that if he did, he’d lose his job.
Hannah-Jones later refused to accept any appointment at Carolina, explaining she couldn’t work at “a university whose leadership permitted such conduct and has done nothing to disavow it.”
More recently, the same Board of Trustees moved — contrary to all theories of academic governance — to create a new School of Civic Life and Leadership. Again, Guskiewicz did not use his authority or his voice to oppose it. No tradition of higher education is more deeply rooted than the dictate that faculty controls the curriculum. But not at UNC-Chapel Hill. I’m sure our chancellor thinks he’s keeping his powder dry for something more important than racial equality and academic freedom. But I can’t, for the life of me, think of what that might be. Chancellor Volety shows Guskiewicz isn’t alone.
It all reminds me of the various Trump officials who helped him trash the Constitution, saying if they didn’t aid and abet the destruction, Trump would fire them and appoint someone even worse. Maybe so, but that’s the excuse that forgives all sins. Every single one.
It was one of the high honors of my life to know the late Chancellor Bill Aycock — who displayed such bravery in the 1960s fighting North Carolina’s Speaker Ban Law.
Aycock was a storied law teacher. When I asked him how he managed the courage to resist, he explained that in accepting the job he told then-UNC System President Bill Friday: “I don’t know if I’ll last a week or 10 years, but I’m going to do what I think is right and, if they fire me, I’ll happily go back and teach my classes.”
Those were the days.
Contributing columnist Gene Nichol is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
