Students School UNC on 9-11

Fundamental law of physics: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

“At the start of the fall semester, a freshman student at UNC-Chapel Hill gave the syllabus for ENG 72:Literature of 9/11 a cursory look and, perceiving an anti-American bias, brought it to the attention of the College Fix, a conservative website,” Jay Schalin wrote in a column distributed by the Pope Center for Higher Education Reform on September 21, 2015. “It then received a considerable amount of national attention, primarily in the conservative press.”

“UNC-Chapel Hill responded as it has in other recent controversies: with damage control, wagon-circling, and finger-pointing at critics (including an 18-year-old freshman). It immediately came out with a ‘Fact Sheet’ that defended the course and purported to correct misinformation in the student’s report and subsequent conservative commentary. The fact sheet relied heavily on a very shaky ‘analysis’ performed by a left-wing attack tank, Media Matters.” (Full disclosure: Media Matters has frequently done very shaky analysis of our sister organization, Accuracy in Media.)

“That piece of propaganda was followed by another—a Raleigh News & Observer op-ed penned by none other than the course’s creator and teacher, Neel Ahuja.” Ahuja attacked the Pope Center, which had, at the request of one a UNC-Chapel Hill trustee, performed an analysis of this course. “The content of the course is one-sided. Just two of the readings are pro-American, three are merely factual, eight are vague with no clear viewpoint, and 19 are explicitly anti-American,” Schalin averred.

Meanwhile, on September 22, 2015, the College Republicans brought the “9/11 Never Forget Mobile Exhibit” to campus, with university approval. The exhibit contained actual steel and other artifacts from the World Trade Center and depicted the original attack on the Twin Towers in February of 1993.

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