The AAUP is all in a tizzy over the proposed closing of three academic centers in the University of North Carolina system. There has also been a very loud local outcry by UNC faculty members and supporters. It would appear, from all the rhetoric, that Big Brother’s bigger brother had shut down academic freedom and condemned the entire university system to submission to conservative politics.

The AAUP and the locals are confusing academic freedom with some imaginary right to do whatever some professor feels is worth doing. The Governors could have easily closed down 20 or more with proper justification—three was a minimum. Last year, the Board of Governors was ordered by the state legislature to review the system’s 237 academic centers. The Governor’s—the governing body of the UNC system—found that three were so overtly politicized that they needed to be closed. The three include the infamous Center for Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at UNC-Chapel Hill’s law school that was created to give John Edwards a launching pad for his intended 2008 presidential campaign, and has since been a launching pad for director Gene Nichol’s highly political missives against the Republican state government.

In this op-ed piece in the Durham Herald-Sun, I explain how the board acted as they are supposed to according to North Carolina law and how they followed the AAUP’s own original assessment of how faculties should conduct themselves. Well done, Governors.