By Michael Schwalbe
The latest case of right-wing Republican meddling in the curriculum of North Carolina’s public universities comes in the form of a proposed requirement, engineered by the political appointees who constitute the UNC system’s Board of Governors, that all students be exposed to a standard set of historical texts.
These texts, which students will read in one or more courses before they graduate, are the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers (at least five essays), the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and the North Carolina State Constitution. Backers of the requirement claim that familiarity with these texts will prepare students to be better citizens of democracy.
UNC System president Peter Hans is all on board. “Educating for democracy,” he told the UNC System Board of Governors (BOG) at a recent meeting where the proposal was discussed, “is at the heart of the university’s mission. That’s been true from the very beginning—from the moment our state legislature chartered the nation’s first public university [UNC] in 1789, the same period when those lawmakers were ratifying the United States Constitution.”
Of course, it wasn’t education for everyone or universal democracy that North Carolina lawmakers of that period had in mind. It wasn’t until 1951—over 160 years beyond its “very beginning” and 86 years after the Civil War—that UNC admitted its first Black students. Perhaps this information isn’t covered in the readings required to become a BOG member.
In any case, it’s hard to object to the goal of deepening college students’ knowledge of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the other texts specified by the impending requirement. College graduates ought to know this stuff. Such knowledge might even inspire a few to get more involved in civic life, as advocates of the requirement claim to want.
But it’s naïve, or disingenuous, to propose that teaching what amounts to high-school civics will produce engaged citizens. Knowledge of texts that express ideals is fine, but young people need to know how the political world works in practice, not just in principle. Here, then, are a few suggestions about what students need to learn to be effective political actors in the U.S. today.
First thing: U.S. labor history. By studying labor history students would learn that social change comes not through heroic individual action but through organized collective action. They would learn that unions brought us benefits that bosses once rejected as impossible: the eight-hour workday, the weekend, unemployment insurance, paid vacations, retirement programs, and health and safety laws. Labor history also holds important lessons about how bosses have used racism to divide people and weaken efforts to pursue social change.
Another essential topic of study is corporate power. Students need to know how big corporations and the wealthy act in concert to exert dominant influence over government and other institutions in U.S. society. As part of this, students would learn how corporations distort public discourse to thwart or water-down regulation that might cut into profits. Students in North Carolina might be especially interested in looking at how tobacco companies conspired for decades to resist regulation by sowing doubt about the health effects of smoking.
Students also need to study the history of protest movements. This would teach the lesson that change is not achieved by making polite requests of the powerful but by raising the costs of business as usual—that is, by making the status quo ever more costly for the powerful to try to maintain. Students would also learn that many of the rights articulated in our nation’s founding documents were realized in practice only when dissenters fought for these rights. It was protesters, students would learn, who won our right to protest.
Studying the history of protest and dissent would create opportunities to learn about a host of matters relevant to practicing democratic citizenship. Students would learn about police spying on the legal political activities of U.S. citizens, spying sometimes aided by universities. Students would learn how politicians and other government officials once used red-baiting to intimidate dissenters and disrupt protest movements. Students would thus be more alert for current examples of similar tactics, such as accusing critics of Israel of being antisemitic.
Students could also learn important lessons about democracy by studying alternative political systems. In thirty-four years of teaching undergraduates in North Carolina, I met few who could critique the anti-democratic tendencies of single-representative, winner-take-all elections, and even fewer who could describe alternatives, such as proportional representation. Studying how other countries do democracy would expose students to modest reform possibilities here at home —ranked-choice voting, universal voter registration, election days as holidays, public financing of elections—that might otherwise never occur to them.
Learning about alternative political systems might spark student interest in how democracy could be extended to the workplace. There is a vast body of knowledge about worker ownership and workplace democracy that students could be exposed to (but aren’t). This knowledge would equip students to see that democracy need not begin and end at the polling booth. The risk, of course, is that this sort of awareness could lead students to think it might be a good idea to extend democracy to the economy as a whole.
What else should students learn about to be more effective citizens of democracy? It might help if students studied the history of U.S. imperialism and how politicians have lied to the American people—from the Gulf of Tonkin to the Kuwaiti incubator hoax to Iraq’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction—to drag the country into wars. Knowledge along these lines might make graduates less susceptible to nationalist fevers that can lead to suspensions of democracy.
It would also be good to devote some time to studying how culture-war battles, such as the manufactured controversy over critical race theory, are used to deflect attention from the economic policies—tax cuts for corporations and the rich, deregulation, privatization of public services, monstrous military spending—that erode democracy by further concentrating wealth and political power in the hands of a few.
Despite claims by Peter Hans and members of the BOG that higher education in North Carolina is all about “educating for democracy,” don’t expect to see study of the matters noted above mandated any time soon. It would be nonsensical to expect such seriousness about democracy from minions of a Republican party infamous for its gerrymandering and voter-suppression efforts. So if the new requirement that students read a standard set of historical texts isn’t really about promoting democracy, what is the requirement about?
Its ideological purpose, it seems to me, is to implicitly rebuke critics who have in recent years highlighted racism and enduring inequalities in U.S. society. The point of the requirement, in other words, is to replace criticism—think Black Lives Matter, the 1619 Project—with celebration. With the token exception of King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the required texts can also be seen as celebrating not just a set of founding ideals but also the wisdom and vision of an earlier generation of dominant white men, perhaps suggesting that such dominance is not a bad thing today, either.
I suspect that the new requirement is also about displacing courses in which students might encounter more critical perspectives. There is only so much flexibility in any degree program, which means that a new history requirement could force students to drop a course in another social science or humanities field. We’ve seen this happen in Florida, where right-wing legislators have swapped sociology as a general education course for a history course. I wouldn’t be surprised if similar thinking lies behind local BOG intrusions into the curriculum.
The new requirement may also be about accustoming faculty to a reduced role in shaping the curriculum. As with the process of creating UNC’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, faculty have been sidelined (though a pliable few can always be recruited to create a veneer of faculty assent). It is now common for administrators to say to faculty, “We might not have wanted this, but it’s going to happen, so let’s make the best of it.” As faculty are repeatedly urged to accept outside intrusions on the curriculum, outside control becomes the norm.
If we really wanted to educate students for democracy, we would equip them with knowledge useful for navigating today’s political world. This would mean teaching them about labor organizing, protest movements, how social change occurs, corporate power, the repressive tactics of powerful groups, and better ways of doing democracy. The idea that teaching remedial high-school civics at the university level will turn students into effective democratic actors is a sham, a bit of damaging political theater.
The good news is that our public universities remain the best sources we have of knowledge about democracy. Students who acquire this knowledge are often inspired to try to remake the world in accord with justice ideals of their own. This is perhaps the real threat that right-wing conservatives want to curtail by rigging the curriculum. The usurpers are happy to celebrate historic expressions of democratic ideals, as long as democracy in practice, here and now, is not allowed to get out of hand.
Michael Schwalbe is professor emeritus of sociology at North Carolina State University. He is the author of Rigging the Game: How Inequality Is Reproduced in Everyday Life.
Source: ncnewsline.com, February 6, 2024