The board of trustees of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill made the right decision when it voted Monday to shift all of its funding to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to campus police.
This divestment from DEI is one of many that public universities in Republican-controlled states have done and is a major step forward in addressing the ideological monolith that is higher education while also reining in administrative bloat.
But eliminating DEI is not enough. The purpose of the DEI initiative is to institutionalize a sort of ethical and moral framework through which the college or university will operate. Students are expected to behave in a DEI-friendly way, and prospective professors and employees must submit statements affirming their commitment to DEI. Effectively, it is a sort of religious litmus test to ensure that the institution is fully aligned with its vision.
When DEI is eliminated, a void is created. No longer does an institution have a moral and ethical framework to inform its operational and institutional mission. This is the case with UNC, which needs a new ethical framework to replace the immoral and flawed ideals of DEI. And the answer can be found in classical virtue ethics, which has its roots in the ancient world.
It was commonly understood, until recent history, that education was not and could not be value-neutral. Education has always been about the formation of character and students as much as it is about the accumulation of knowledge. This model of education can be found as far back as ancient Athens, where Greek philosophers such as Aristotle explained an ethical framework that became the basis for character formation.
This tradition expanded to Rome and was later adapted to Christianity, becoming the moral foundation of Western civilization. But it was later cast aside in the 20th century as the purpose of education shifted from character formation to workforce development. Later, the DEI regime filled the void that was left behind by this virtue-less education.
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If UNC wants to eliminate DEI and not just create a new void that will be filled by a similarly sinister ideology, it should look to classical virtue ethics, which formed the foundation of so many great educational institutions from the Athenian school of ancient Greece to the medieval University of Paris and Oxford.
Instead of listening to lectures about how to navigate privilege, race, and sexuality, students will learn the basic virtues of courage, prudence, temperance, and justice and how, as Aristotle explained, each of these lies at the mean between two vices. Virtuous people do not need to be lectured about how to treat others and behave toward others because they already know what is expected of them and because they know what is right and what is wrong. To truly eliminate DEI, UNC and other schools must return to these ancient lessons, lest another immoral and unethical framework creeps in to fill the DEI void.
