The latest thing to get the campus left all hot and bothered is the UNC Board of Governors’ decision to close the Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at Chapel Hill. Far from doing anything resembling academic study, the Center was always a party organ for those who espouse the usual “progressive” ideas that poverty can only be cured by government programs. The director of the Center is the voluble Gene Nichol, a professor at UNC’s law school and he’s an iconic figure to leftists. Disagree with him and you’ll face an artillery barrage.

Writing for the John Locke Foundation, my old Pope Center colleague Jon Sanders recounts the history of the Center, which began as a way of keeping the disgraced 2004 Democratic VP nominee John Edwards in the public eye. Then-chancellor James Moeser said that it would be on “an academic footing” but the Center was about as academic as a conference on Marxism in the old Soviet Union.

The last thing that Nichol or anyone else associated with the Center would consider is that the only real means of reducing the incidence of poverty is through jobs in the free market. Government mandates such as minimum wage diktats and efforts at job creation have scant benefit in the short run and do serious harm in the long run by luring people into the trap of dependence on government. But casting doubt upon the self-proclaimed benevolence of leftist politicians who advance the anti-capitalist agenda is intolerable for leftist academics. They don’t want to debate; they want to demonize.

Throwing a tantrum over this will make the left feel good for a while. The long-run effect, however, will be to cause more Americans to see how our universities have been led away from teaching and scholarship and into advocacy of a collectivist/statist ideology.