This is the seventh year the Republicans in North Carolina have held control of the General Assembly. One obvious question is why they have made such little progress cleaning up the cultural and political mess in the UNC system.

Yes, they have, for the most part, appointed large campaign contributors to the Board of Governors-- and, I seem to recall, even some Democrats. And they installed a Bush-style establishment Republican-- Margaret Spellings-- to serve as President of the system.

A writer for Chronicles, Jon Cassidy, asked a similar question regarding the University of Texas system. He concluded that Texas Republicans did not even attempt to reform the state universities there because they received certain benefits and privileges from the system as did their wealthy allies:

Why don’t Texas Republicans simply ban racial considerations in admissions at public universities? Why don’t they go further, and clear out some of the rot? Why don’t they stand up for the Permanent Things? This is the essence of conservatism, yet these state Republicans distribute vast sums to nihilists who reject truth and beauty, who reduce all human experience to the same few clichés, who see the arc of history bending toward a unisex bathroom.

The problem is that the lawmakers themselves are complicit in the scheme, because the rich and powerful have been the primary beneficiaries of the system. On the basis of admissions preferences, politicians have been getting their kids and their wealthy supporters’ kids into UT despite their awful grades. If the advocates of affirmative action ever stopped to examine the results of the policy, they would find that vague “holistic” admissions standards meant to help the disadvantaged have actually created and obscured new advantages for rich white people...

(L)awmakers have been profiting from a back-door admissions system for their children and the children of their friends and donors...

Fairness would require transparent admissions based on actual standards. Instead, the privileged have reasserted their privilege. The puzzling thing is why it’s tolerated...

In the last decade, there have been three separate efforts by Texas conservatives to restore to the university some of its proper function. None was ideological. Yet with few exceptions, Republican lawmakers sat on their hands or openly opposed reform, while leftist ideologues attacked the motives of the reformers and invented stories. Meanwhile, most departments in the humanities have been entirely conquered by critical theorists...

Daniel Golden won the Pulitzer Prize a decade ago by exposing how elite private universities lowered their admissions standards for the wealthy. But Golden found a lot of winks and nods, a lot of B students getting a bump...

The very process by which the poor and disadvantaged are supposedly being offered opportunity is in fact a mechanism for the wealthy and well connected to maintain their positions. Something similar may well be taking place at other big state universities. In this light, I don’t think anyone can continue to oppose affirmative action without insisting for an end to admissions preferences in general. Admissions could be made completely transparent and based on actual standards, not holistic smokescreens.

I wouldn’t expect the UT faculty to join in this call. As Robert Jensen, a well-known UT radical, has written, the reason people condone privilege is that there are “rewards available to us when we are willing to subordinate our stated principles in service of oppressive systems.”

I think it is reasonable to ask why North Carolina Republicans have, for the most part, refused to touch the state university system. It is bad enough that Christian and conservative faculty and students are marginalized. There is doubtless the usual fear of the corrupt media on the part of Republicans. And some are surely partial to the schools from which they graduated, and choose to see no evil.

One would think, however, they would be acutely interested in cleaning out all the cultural Marxism, and restoring a more legitimate basis for education.

In view of the heavily documented, corrupt use of the state university system in Texas, it seems more questions need to be asked here in North Carolina.