By Ed Samulski
Cary Boshamer Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

CHAPEL HILL (August 6, 2025) – As a teenager in South Carolina applying to college in the late 1950s, I saw the qualitative difference between the economies of the Carolinas; everyone attributed North Carolina’s superiority in all areas to its educational system. 

Bill Friday had just started his three-decade long term at the helm of the UNC System, and its flagship, Carolina, was already highly ranked nationally. The UNC System thrived under the apolitical leadership of Friday and his successor C.D. Spangler. 

In the intervening decades, both the education and the economic gaps between the two Carolinas have closed due in part to North Carolina’s waning support for both lower and higher education. 

NC is ranked 48th in K-12 funding, whereas SC is ranked 29th. NC is ranked 4th highest in the nation for amount of money teachers spend annually on school supplies for their classrooms, while ranking 43rd in the nation for overall K-12 teacher pay. 

Higher education spending has fallen even more precipitously. State appropriations for universities on a tuition revenue basis have declined by a whopping 50% between 2001 and 2017. Concurrently, inflation-adjusted net tuition revenue nearly doubled, which in practical terms means that students in 2017 were paying about twice as much in real net tuition as students in 2001.

Currently, UNC System President Peter Hans is advocating to create a bespoke accrediting system for state education. Hans’ proposal comes at a time when an effort is underway to lower university admission standards so as to reinforce the decision to lower math requirements for graduation from NC high schools (HB 415). 

 It is baffling that math standards are being lowered at a time when AI, which is essentially applied math, is pervading all aspects of the work force. Without advanced math preparation, future North Carolinians will be excluded from the AI revolution.

Since it is unlikely that Hans wants to lower standards (although that will inevitably be the result of creating a non-independent accrediting agency), perhaps he wishes to change the standards on which the university is judged to reflect prevailing political interests.

His initiative seems to be following the lead of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who proposed to create a new accrediting agency for the red states Florida, Texas, Georgia, NC, SC and Tennessee. Such a move seems designed to politicize universities in order to rectify what Trump advisor Leo Terrell sees as the problem with higher education: “The academic system in this country has been hijacked by the left.”

Academe is known to be politically progressive because universities are where new knowledge is created, which requires thinking futuristically. The drive to make academe more conservative is based on the rationale that academe should be more politically “balanced.” 

But what would happen if we made political balance a requirement for every sector? The military is predominantly conservative, as are the public safety and the finance sectors. They are conservative because they conserve our homes, bodies, money, and way of life. Do we want to “balance” the military and the police force by filling their ranks with liberal pacifists? Do we want to integrate more Democrats into the Republican-dominated financial sector? 

Some 18-year-olds enter the military and some go to college. They are exposed to the political culture of each, and those cultures have supported this country for centuries with no untoward effects on the young adults who join them. 

Humans have evolved by creating a division of labor into different sectors. To coerce each sector to be politically balanced is not just impossible; the imposition of such criteria would mean the destruction of the expertise that built this country. 

We do not ask the politics of our surgeon, or our automobile mechanic, or the contractor building our house. We want the most experienced talent possible handling our money or defending our country. That should be even more the case for our universities, the source of America’s global leadership in innovation.  

Reduced accreditation and admission standards in the UNC System will discourage the most-promising student applicants—NC’s future workforce—and disincentivize new high-tech industries from locating here. It would be naïve to think that the erosion of standards and creeping politicization of higher education in North Carolina did not factor into Apple’s site-selection decision in 2024 to “pause” locating its $1 billion campus in Research Triangle Park. 

Ed Samulski attended Clemson University as an undergraduate and Princeton as a graduate student in chemistry. He has been an educator and researcher for more than half a century. He was recruited by UNC-CH in 1987 to create a polymer chemistry program, which achieved international ranking under his direction. He was Chair of Chemistry (1995-2000) and he designed and chaired an Applied Physical Sciences department (2014-2019), the first new science department at Carolina in 40 years. He has launched several start-up companies and is a donor to UNC. His extended family endowed a professorship in his name.