By Brandon Hartness

The University of North Carolina system is one of the very best public educational institutions in the world. The flagship of this system is Chapel Hill, where students can receive a world-class education without taking on an overwhelming amount of debt. Unlike many public university systems around the country, which Kiplinger writer Jane Clark says are “coping with shrunken tax revenues and an overwhelming demand for services, [and] have cut funding for higher education,” the schools that are a part of the UNC system have continued to offer surprisingly affordable education.

The University system accounts for roughly thirteen percent of the State of North Carolina’s entire budget.  “One big advantage over other public schools” that UNC possesses is continuing “strong state support for financial aid,” reports Kiplinger. However, this money is not free; rather, is an investment made by the taxpayers of North Carolina. The wealth that enables this investment is a result of the free-market principles of capitalism and competition practiced here in North Carolina and the United States.

Unfortunately, many of the faculty and students here at Carolina have ridiculed the principles of free markets and individual liberty that have led to the surplus of wealth needed to pay the faculty and staff and subsidize tuition. Many professors use the classroom in order to push an agenda of ‘social justice,’ which the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy explains “has come to mean a way of thinking and teaching intended to undermine both authority and objective reasoning and bring about an underclass-inspired political upheaval.”  ‘Social justice’ is code for an idea that asks us to redistribute wealth and opportunity, and alleviate past wrongs via substantial government intervention. The “justice” that is sought in this ideology can only occur when the system itself is changed completely. However, this system that so many love to loathe here at UNC is the same system that has produced more wealth, opportunity, and prosperity than any other economic system in the world.

The UNC School of Education blatantly promotes this negative change. The website for the Doctorate of Education in Curriculum and Instruction explains that the program’s main goal “is to inspire and support the development of transformative, educational leaders…[and] produce graduates who will not only be ready for, and embrace, these transformations, but can foster them as well.” Within this code, there lies a very disturbing, sobering truth. The “transformations” are goals of a vast redistribution of wealth and opportunity. In order for this to succeed, future leaders have to be trained to accept and cherish these ideas as enlightenment, and to agitate for them in and outside the classroom. This should be an outrage to the working people in North Carolina who pay for this University’s staff and accommodations. Their money is being used to indoctrinate young minds into joining the movement to tear down our free-enterprise system, and replace it with a Marx-inspired utopia—a poorly-constructed concept that has proven time and time again to bring about misery, oppression, and waste.

Many on the faculty here at UNC believe that the institutions that have brought us thus far as a civilization have failed. A common complaint from this far-left leaning group of instructors is that economic freedom prevents arbitrary equality of outcome in the United States and around the world. Whether on university websites, in the classroom or even on the syllabi provided by professors, the “consequences of our current system of inequalities” are force-fed to young, vulnerable minds, only focusing on “get[ing] a sense of how our society has come to be so unequal,” as stated on the Sociology 412 syllabus. The main focus of SOCI 412, “Sociology of Education,” is “education and schooling, with an emphasis on inequalities” as a result of capitalism, without a mention of the abundance of wealth created by American economic and political institutions that make quality and affordable education possible.

It is unfortunate that a large number of the faculty and student body here at UNC are openly hostile toward the ideas of free markets and capitalism, when it is these ideas that continue to provide faculty jobs and opportunities for students in North Carolina and around the country. There is a clear difference between discussion of ideas and pure indoctrination. North Carolina taxpayers should become more aware of the one-sided, dogmatic approach to the important ideas of capitalism that is forced upon students in the classroom on a daily basis. After all, their hard-earned money is paying for it.