University Day 1981

Monday, October 12, was university day at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The convocation commemorated the 188th anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone of Old East, the oldest building on campus. The Christopher Fordon presided and President William Filey extended greetings. I'm Faye Mitchell Henderson, Raymond Dawson, Vice President of the University, was a negotiate of the UNC Disaggregation Settlement with the Federal Government and delivered the address. It's a great privilege to be asked to be here and to share the platform today with these distinguished alumni and to have an opportunity to share some thoughts and observations with you on such a great occasion.

I thought long and hard about the preparation for this, and I was sobered somewhat by the remark I heard a colleague made at a recent board meeting when he told the story of a friend of his who had been asked to make an address on an occasion similar to this and had worked long and hard on it, and it was all over. Someone in the audience came up to him and said, thank you so much, that speech was simply superfluous. The speaker recovered his wit just a moment and said, well that's very kind of you, I was thinking of having it published posthumously. To which the member of the audience replied, that is wonderful news, please hurry. I hope that I will not receive that accolade today, but I do recognize that no words of mine can really do justice to this occasion, but I hope that what I say will raise some

issues and perhaps put before you some thoughts that are worthy of your consideration and will be appropriate to the celebration of the founding of a great university. There was a time, a few years back, when I taught East semester political science, 41, American government, and I remember discussions in those polycyphal 41 classes about a landmark case in American constitutional law. It was a case decided by the US Supreme Court during World War II when patriotic fervor was at its height and when Americans were united perhaps as never before in a great and common cause. In that setting a state board of education passed an ordinance requiring that all students of the public schools under its jurisdiction salute the national flag on certain occasions.

A group of families whose religious beliefs said to them that this was a form of idolatry refused to allow their children to participate in that flag salute. They declared their law for and their loyalty to their country, but they believed that they could not in good conscience allow their children to join in the flag salute. The Supreme Court, even in the midst of war, agreed with those parents and writing for the court the late Associate Justice Robert Jackson made this memorable declaration. If he said there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what is orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.

Over the years I have thought often of those powerful and eloquent words spoken by Justice Jackson as a testament to our constitutional pre. Those words were perhaps a kind of a warning to the nation of what was to come because they shone so brightly even as they were dishonored during the dark times of the 1950s when the nation was gripped in the malady called McCarthyism. It was a time when Americans were told what was orthodox in politics by a band of people who were convinced or at least reported to be convinced that they were the bearers of truth and right in matters of national loyalty and patriotism and who would tolerate no dissent. If one defied them, one ran the risk of being pilloried as disloyal as un-American as subversive. There were those who found themselves blacklisted, their reputations and characters publicly

besmirched and sometimes even thrown out of their jobs, not because they were subversive or unpatriotic and certainly not because they were guilty of violating any law. It was instead because they would not bend to a priesthood which claimed the right to determine what constituted true loyalty and true patriotism. There are always those individuals and groups pressing upon us to be orthodox. That is to accept is right and true, their ideas and their doctrines and to hold to some common body of belief general or specific. They always established some institution, some group, some official hierarchy, someone to define for us what is orthodox in the various applications in our daily lives.

All of us of course live by some orthodoxies, but orthodoxies become dangerous when their guardians begin to become prescriptive and intolerant of any deviation from the proclaimed truth. And when dissent is disallowed by those guardians of very perilous threshold has been crossed. In recent years, although not involved, unfortunately for me in teaching Polly Psy 41, I have at times thought of those words of Mr. Justice Jackson as I've lived with and occasionally even reflected upon the trials of the University of North Carolina in its dispute with the Federal Government. And I would suggest for your consideration today the proposition that in the long dispute

over desegregation as that dispute has been characterized, many of our tribulations are the result of our refusal as a university to bend to an intolerant orthodoxy. Note carefully, it is not a case of our refusing to obey the law for which we would deserve tribulations, or of our maintaining a segregated system of our education for that would be intolerable. It is instead our refusing to do what particular establishment has prescribed as the orthodox application of the letter and the spirit of the law. We need to distinguish between two things. There is a civil rights movement that embodies the hopes and aspirations of all Americans who believe in equal justice under law.

There is also a civil rights establishment, an establishment that wills tremendous influence over the national media and other opinion leaders, reinforced by what the anti-trust laws call interlocking directors. Take an issue such as the University's dispute with H.E. W. or the Department of Education. And note how it is treated over time by a network of organizations, institutions, associations and individuals. One can only be struck by the commonality even the repetitiveness of their views and their comments. The recent report on higher education of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, which just happened to be released just as the hearings in our case were coming to an end. Why the testimony offered by a succession of government witnesses in that trial, why

the charges filed for the government, or by the interveners in the lawsuit, all are astonishingly like a collection of interchangeable parts. Time and again, from whatever source or office or organization the pronouncements come, the same individuals will be found associated with them. Read one and you have read most of the substance of them all. There is a discernible axis of orthodoxy around which all of them revolve with predictable regularity. And whatever they may lack in clarity of substance, they more than compensate for in the uniformity of their rhetoric. Consider this example. The United States Civil Rights Commission issues an evaluation of the settlement of the litigation reached between the University of North Carolina and the U.S. Department of Education.

The settlement, let it be remembered, has been challenged by the interveners, the legal defense fund, and two United States District courts, one in North Carolina and one in the District of Columbia. Each court, let it be remembered, has dismissed the challenge. Yet, the United States Civil Rights Commission, dutifully ascertains the views of the interveners, the LVF, on the terms and the implications of our settlement. It does not even contact the University of North Carolina or its legal counsel or for that manner, the U.S. Department of Justice. And yet, the Commission's evaluation based on consulting only one interested party excoriates the settlement and excoriates this University.

I submit that these are rules of procedure that can only discredit a public body that was created to serve as a voice to the nation's conscience in the protection of human rights. Or consider this example. The President and the Board of Governors commit themselves in that settlement to assume greater responsibility for working toward improvements in the level of degree credentials of the faculties of our five predominantly black institutions. A major national newspaper reports this by suggesting that scholars of faculty members are being prerimperally dismissed from their positions as a result of the settlement. Its reporter fails even to mention that part of the government's indictment of the University was a charge that the President and the Board of Governors were guilty of, quote, permitting the employment of less qualified faculty in these institutions and thus providing to

their students, quote, an inferior education, a serious charge. The reporter fails to mention that a government expert witnessed the principal expert proposed as a remedy for these and other alleged misdeeds that the President and the Board impose a white only hiring policy as a means of swiftly doing away with the past segregation in the faculties of those institutions. But neither to the charge nor to this particular remedy, to the interveners ever indicate any astonishment, disagreement, or dismay. This national newspaper's correspondent does not discuss the matter with the President or any person in his office, but he is able to interview Council for the Legal Defense Fund and thus this great national newspaper becomes the vehicle to carry across the land a die tribe against this University and personal abuse of its President.

When I read that abusive attack on the President of this University, I could not help but remember that time in the summer of 1954, when a United States Senator, speaking before television cameras in a hearing room in the Capitol, gratuitously and deliberately engaged in an unprincipled attack upon another individual, and a courageous attorney, President, that hearing, the late Mr. Joseph Welch, turned to that Senator and said, Sir, have you no sense of DCC? The custodians of orthodoxy whose influence over public policy rests on that custody are not likely to be disputed. The truth is that the power of that establishment to prescribe and control civil rights policy has always been a central issue in the history of the desegregation dispute involving this

University. Now I recognize that establishments and orthodoxies and even intolerance of dissent must be viewed in a historical perspective. There was a time, and it was a very long time, when segregation of the races and harsh and demeaning denial of equal rights to black Americans were the ruling orthodoxies in this state and in this nation. And that orthodoxy was rigorously enforced. What a great prelude, Justice Jackson's words written in 1943, were to the 1954 opinion of the Supreme Court in the Brown case when that cruel and debilitating orthodoxy of segregation was at last declared to be a violation of the United States Constitution.

For segregation has long permeated our society and to take leadership and fighting to overcome it has required perseverance, dedication, great courage, and even tragically, as in the case of men like Dr. Martin Luther King, the giving of life itself. To those who led in fighting those battles against that orthodoxy of segregation, all of us feel a debt that we can never repay. That is why the civil rights establishment, unlike so many powerful establishments who were custodians of orthodoxy in the past, justifiably possesses great moral prestige. The movement which it led and out of which it has come was a great moral crusade that

awakened the nation's conscience and have helped bring enduring changes in the cause of transforming our society into a more humane and decent place to live. The civil rights establishment thus gained its influence and its power by doing battle with intolerance and injustice, how ironic and how paradoxical when we reflect on that movement and that history that some of its present-day leadership has itself become so intolerant of dissent from its prescriptions. The paradox was brought home to me so clearly on September 13 in the way our situation was depicted on national television. The films of shameful and hateful and violent opposition to segregation in years past but not very long past and in other places but not far away places with the suggestion that

somehow they represented what was happening now in Durham and in Chapel Hill. And what it lacked in clarity in spelling out the remedies, that piece of so-called investigative reporting more than compensated for in its rhetoric. It was a reminder of a hateful past but it was a distorted and twisted account of the present and the entire presentation was a reminder to me of the perils of dissenting from a prevailing orthodoxy. It is important that we recognize the debt we owe to the leadership of the civil rights movement and the legal defense bond and other organizations and groups who comprise such a vital part of its leadership but candor and decency require an insistence also that past accomplishments and achievements do not confer in halibility on any of that leadership

or give it license for vindictiveness toward those who may hold honest but different views about how best to carry forward the goals of the civil rights movement in higher education. Moral prestige is not a warrant for intolerance toward dissenting views and such a spirit is utterly contrary to the ideals of the movement that it represents but this is a real problem that we have long faced. And it all began in the educational context of the public schools, the aim was so clear. There should be no black schools, there should be no white schools, there should be just schools. That is no less true in public higher education in the fundamental sense that all public colleges and universities should be open to all and welcome all students without regard

to race. That is what Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 meant and that I submit is the situation today in all of the institutions of the University of North Carolina. It is true that there is one set of institutions whose enrollment is predominantly black and another set of institutions whose enrollment is predominantly white but this is not because of any compulsion on the part of the state or certainly on the part of the University. It is true also that historically those predominantly black institutions were unfairly treated and insufficiently supported to the state and it is true that black citizens in North Carolina historically have not and still do not participate in public higher education in the same proportion as their white North Carolinians do.

But all these things are changing. When one compares the rate of change in fact in the evidence of progress in the University of North Carolina with other states and other public university systems, the record is a commendable one in which we can take pride. Of course we want it to be better. It is better and we are all committed to that end. But in honesty and in good conscience the Board of Governors and the President of the University of North Carolina believe that the means to further progress that are insisted upon by the Civil Rights establishment are destructive and that the evidence in fact points to the proposition that many of those prescribed remedies would run counter to the results toward which we all should be working.

For that dissent we have paid a price but it is always costly to counter an establishment that has moral prestige. One great foundation I noticed earlier this year made a grant that is expressly justified as helping the interveners the LDL in their efforts against the University of North Carolina. More recently another great foundation has granted hundreds of thousands of dollars among other things for the purpose of monitoring events in North Carolina and some other states. A grant made to a group on whose board sits former officials of the Office for Civil Rights and various individuals who were witnesses against this University in its trial. And then of course as I said the United States Civil Rights Commission issues what could at best be called a polimic against the University of North Carolina. That is part of the price.

In a recent study of the Office for Civil Rights written by Jeremy Radkin an observation by an unnamed congressional staff member is quoted which I think is particularly pertinent to our case. And that staff member said the older members of Congress remember the great civil rights struggles of the 1960s and even now can't bring themselves to vote with the other side. A lot of the issues are also very complicated. So if you don't want to be accused of being against civil rights you just stay out of it. But you say when you are pressed and ordered in the name of civil rights to invoke a course of action that actually runs counter to attaining the goals of the civil rights movement in higher education and to the protection of those values that are fundamental to a great university.

You can't just stay out of it. That is what happened to the University of North Carolina and that is why it is accused by me of being against civil rights. Let us all hope on this 188th birthday of the first state university that we can devote our energies and our talents more and more to the improvement of public higher education for all citizens in the years ahead. For the President and the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina for Chancellor Fordham and for all of the Chancellor's of our state university system. That is what our recent settlement is all about. It was not a signal of some kind of retreat on the part of the university. It rather was a signal for a renewal of a deep and an abiding commitment. One of the men in American public life for whom I always had special admiration is the

late Henry L. Stamps, Stampsman and Diplomat, Mr. Stampsman offered this advice just at the close of his distinguished career and I quote, he said, the chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him. And the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and to show your distrust. Like the words of Justice Jackson, those I believe are words which would serve well today, all of us who are committed to civil rights and to public higher education. Even those who would disagree with the content and the form of the settlement of our litigation should acknowledge that meeting its goals will constitute progressive and constructive

change. Trust, good faith, the tolerance of different views, all means and methods between all parties would serve well the good cause. To pursue equal rights and the advancement of public higher education. That would be a spirit entirely in keeping with a civil rights movement motivated by humane and noble purposes and it would be a spirit entirely in keeping with the history of the university whose founding we commemorate here today. All of us have a great privilege in being with a affiliated with an institution that literally each year in a long and distinguished history is renewed so that as it turns 188, as indeed when it turns 200, it is stronger, more vibrant, of greater strife, stature

and of greater wisdom. And I am deeply honored by your kind invitation to take part in this occasion today. Thank you. Dr. William Dawson, Vice President at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, speaking on the occasion of University Day. On that day, five distinguished alumni also were recognized. They are Richard Adler, Tony Award-winning composer, C. Knox Massey, retired at advertising executive, now special assistant to the chancellor, Adlin McCall, nationally known music educator, Henry William Scott, internationally acclaimed surgeon and scholar, and Colin Stokes, retired board chairman of RJ Reynolds Industries. I'm Famigil Henderson for WUNC, Chapel Hill.