Critical Social Justice in the UNC System

Critical Social Justice (CSJ) poses a threat to higher education and to the American way of life. This ideology divides the world into aggrieved minorities and oppressive majorities, reducing people to a group identity grounded in immutable characteristics such as race and sex. It is based on a distorted view of what a human being is, compromising the pursuit of truth and diverting institutions that adopt it away from excellence and merit and toward factionalism. It cultivates resentment and anger among the supposedly aggrieved while undermining the stability, equal treatment, and mutual toleration that contributes to individual happiness and good citizenship. Universities promote CSJ policies under the seemingly innocuous rubric of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Most schools in the University of North Carolina (UNC) System have adopted CSJ in their strategic plans, and things are accelerating across the system. A system-wide Racial Equity Task Force, which the Board of Governors seemingly empowered, released a report in 2020 to accelerate the push to extend DEI programming into all facets of all the universities. It called for more administrative DEI hiring throughout the system and establishing more new programming aimed supposedly at aggrieved minorities, including curricular changes and more developed retention programs. Scott Yenor and Anna K. Miller argue that in order to decrease the influence of critical social justice across the UNC System, policy reform is necessary. In this report, they recommend what is necessary for policy reform and provide a DEI scorecard for the 16 universities in the UNC system.