UNC Trustees Were Right to Block Hiring of Activist Scholar
Kiran Asher’s rejected appointment shows that trustees can—and should—intervene when universities confuse political activism with scholarship.
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About the Author
Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, The Washington Examiner, and other major news outlets and scientific journals.
The moral panic that swept through higher education after 2020 caused tremendous damage. In the name of diversity, equity, inclusion, antiracism, decolonization, and “social justice,” universities scrambled to avoid accusations of racism by building new offices, making DEI a central factor in hiring and promotion, and going on a hiring spree for “diverse” candidates to artificially augment the non-white racial makeup of faculty.
All of this took place at a time when public confidence in higher education was already in the gutter. At the exact moment universities needed to show the public that they were still committed to truth-seeking and academic rigor, many just doubled down on the ideological rhetoric and actions that caused so many Americans write them off in the first place.
The University of North Carolina (UNC), however, has been one of the few major public universities where trustees have shown some willingness to resist this ideological takeover. In 2021, they refused to approve a tenured appointment for Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist behind the New York Times’ overtly political “1619 Project,” correctly perceiving that Hannah-Jones wasn’t being recruited for having strong credentials, but rather as the face of a controversial political project that rewrote America’s founding through a highly contested racial narrative.
The trustees’ instincts were sound. Unfortunately, their resolve was not. After protests and national backlash, the board ultimately approved Hannah-Jones for the tenured position. But this backfired in humiliating fashion when she subsequently declined the offer and took a position at Howard University.
Now the board faces a similar test. This time the candidate is Kiran Asher, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who last month was proposed for a distinguished professorship at UNC with tenure. According to reports, Asher’s hire had already been approved by the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, the College of Arts and Sciences, the university-wide appointment, promotion, and tenure committee, and UNC’s new provost, Magnus Egerstedt. By the time her case reached the Board of Trustees, many faculty viewed final approval as a mere formality.
But the trustees exercised their veto power, and voted to reject Asher’s appointment. The backlash has begun.
UNC is a public university created to serve North Carolina and advance its stated mission: “to serve as a center for research, scholarship, and creativity” and to educate the next generation of leaders. Trustees exist to protect that mission over the long term. While they’re not supposed or expected to micromanage every faculty search, when a proposed lifetime appointment raises serious questions about whether scholarship has been subordinated to ideology, they have not only the right but the duty to intervene.
Asher’s work sits squarely inside the activist academic world exposed by the 2018 “Grievance Studies” affair, where skeptics managed to get a half-dozen nonsense papers published in popular, peer reviewed feminist journals. One absurd paper was even chosen as one of twelve “lead pieces” in celebration of the journal’s 25th year in production. Decolonial feminism, postcolonial theory, anticapitalist critique, Queer Theory, and notions of “embodied” and “situated knowledges” run through Asher’s scholarship, as well as allusions to her “postcolonial feminist rage and research” and her insistence that research must be joined to activism.
In one co-authored paper, Asher and Priti Ramamurthy explain that anticolonial scholarship foregrounds how colonial practices create “Eurocentric” forms of knowledge-production that marginalize “other forms of knowing and being in the world.” They write that postcolonial and decolonial approaches agree that “the political task of working toward liberation, decolonization, and social justice must accompany scholarly and academic tasks of analysis.”
These are not one-off papers. Such ideas form the foundation of her scholarship. To win back the public’s trust, we need fewer scholars motivated by politics and “rage,” and more who are committed to cool-headed analyses to uncover truth.
Decolonial scholarship treats the university system and modern science as instruments of oppression that must be destabilized, dismantled, or replaced by alternative “ways of knowing.” In plain English, this means that the standards that made universities useful in the first place—evidence, logic, falsifiability, replicability, disciplined argument, and openness to criticism—are portrayed as forms of oppression rather than tools for discovering what’s objectively true.
A university is an institution built around the production and transmission of reliable knowledge. That requires methods capable of separating what is true from what is merely felt, asserted, or politically useful. The scientific method may have been primarily formalized by white Westerners, but it is not owned by the West. It can be used, checked, and replicated by anyone, anywhere. Its universality is precisely what makes it such a powerful tool. Any ideology that rejects it as a form of Western oppression has no place in institutions committed to rigorous scholarship and the pursuit of truth.
How could Asher’s hiring advance the mission of the university when her personal and professional mission as an activist is to undermine its very legitimacy? If a field or candidate is devoted to replacing disciplined inquiry with identity-based epistemology or activist “praxis,” trustees are allowed to—and should—say no.
They are also allowed to question the judgment of administrators who send such appointments forward. Provost Magnus Egerstedt supported Asher’s appointment and advanced it to the board for final approval. That’s unsurprising, given that Egerstedt was part of UC Irvine’s Samueli School of Engineering Anti-Racism Task Force, an initiative created in the wake of the post-Floyd moral panic.
While that alone should not disqualify his recommendation, it does show that he comes from the same activist culture UNC’s trustees have been trying to resist, and that they were right to not simply defer to his judgment.
Asher’s own comments after her rejection reveal the bullet that was dodged. She suggested that the board’s decision was part of a broader pattern affecting “women and people of color,” especially those doing “gender work, race work, social justice work, non-Christian work, Islamic studies,” and said, “I don’t see this as an individual thing—it’s all systematic.” She also said someone told her “the BOT has gone rogue,” adding that “rogue doesn’t just happen” and that certain things “facilitate a certain kind of rogueness.”
But the board did not “go rogue.” They are not obligated to grant tenured appointments to scholars whose work treats the university’s foundations and mere existence as oppressive structures to be dismantled.
The UNC Board of Trustees made the right call in blocking Asher’s appointment, and other university trustees should use them as a model for what real oversight looks like. Faculty and administrators will complain. Activists will accuse them of political interference. National media may frame the decision as an attack on academic freedom. But academic freedom does not require public universities to grant lifetime appointments to every scholar approved by a process that’s been ideologically captured.
Trustees should expect backlash, and they should ignore it. The pressure to fold is strongest precisely when their resolve matters most.
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Cultural appropriation. The university is part of white/western culture. People from stone age, illiterate cultures had no concept of formal education of any sort, let alone a university. They should stay in their lanes and stop trying to appropriate whitey's institutions. If they want to advance 'different ways of knowing' they are free to do so in their own institutions, but our universities are dedicated the western 'way of knowing' and that should be stated out loud.
Maybe she could be appointed to a new Department of Political Rhetoric, which honestly disclaims any research requirements. Mr Trump could join her there in 2028.