By Lloyd Kramer

CHAPEL HILL (January 22, 2026) – The recent announcement that UNC-Chapel Hill plans to close its six thriving Global Studies Centers is the wrong response to current financial and political challenges. Although I retired from the History Department’s faculty in 2024, this plan for closing the Centers has provoked my Tar Heel anxieties because I remain committed to UNC’s exceptional public mission as a global research university.

I loved teaching courses on European and transatlantic history, yet my work as a teacher and international scholar was often enriched through collaborations with colleagues at the six Area Studies Centers* the University now wants to abolish.

I therefore strongly oppose this plan because it weakens UNC’s academic ambitions and intellectual vitality on at least three intersecting levels: (1) the alignment with the current federal government’s hostility for international collaborations; (2) the self-destructive threats to interdisciplinary creativity and public service for North Carolinians; and (3) the expanding assault on the faculty’s academic freedom and professional expertise.

Alignment with the National Administration’s Anti-Globalist Ideology and Policies

Our national government has become more hostile to international partnerships and agencies than any administration since the isolationist era of the 1920s. Rejecting the institutions and transnational partnerships that have greatly strengthened America’s global influence over the last eight decades, the United States has withdrawn from the World Health Organization, the UN Human Rights Council, UNESCO, and more than 60 other international groups that promote climate research, human rights and democratic institutions.

This hostility for international exchanges has generated new restrictions on foreign scholars and students and also eliminated federal grants for area studies centers at American universities.

UNC’s leaders argue that political pressures have not contributed to plans for abolishing the Global Centers, but the anti-globalist themes of the national administration’s Project 2025 call for a “winding down” of area studies programs; and UNC may be the first university to align itself with this destructive project or to use governmental defunding as a rationale for closing its Global Centers.

In this anti-globalist context, the international collaborations of public research universities have become even more essential. The University should thus be reaffirming its commitment to the transnational components of its teaching, research, and service missions by helping the Global Centers to find new funding from foundations and urging private donors to increase their generous support for international scholarships and essential public programs.

Finally, it should be noted that UNC’s decision to close the Global Centers replicates the worst features of the unilateral DOGE dismantling of important government agencies such as USAID and the Department of Education. Devaluing the expertise and global networks of long-developing Centers, an anonymous committee has recommended the termination of hard-to-create international programs without consulting the faculty, staff, or students who participate in each Center’s distinctive projects and aspirations.

The federal pattern of ignoring stakeholders, in short, has entered a distinguished university that should evolve through ongoing discussions with those who have carefully constructed the partnerships and public service that are now being destroyed.

Endangering Interdisciplinary Creativity and Public Service

I came to appreciate the academic qualities and public service of the Area Studies Centers over my decades as a UNC professor and Director of Carolina Public Humanities. University administrators suggest that global work can probably be “done better or more efficiently” in other academic departments, but this assumption overlooks the Centers’ exceptional interdisciplinarity.

No single department brings together faculty and students from all academic disciplines for creative discussions, international collaborations, and public programs. It is far more efficient to have interdisciplinary faculty and staff working together on public events and international projects than to expect that professors in scattered departments can develop such activities or readily build transnational networks.

The Centers also help UNC students live and study across the globe, and they enable foreign students to pursue interdisciplinary exchanges in cross-cultural projects such as the Transatlantic Master’s Program at the Center for European Studies. Specific departments cannot create or sustain these kinds of international academic communities.

Equally important, every Center has established dynamic outreach programs that include workshops for public school teachers, partnerships at community colleges, special events with international musicians, and public conversations with foreign writers, journalists, and scholars. 

The important public service to K-12 education provides assistance on classroom lesson plans and offers valuable resources to help students understand diverse cultures that shape other national societies around the world. Academic departments cannot give this wide-ranging support to public education or adequately encompass UNC’s mission to serve North Carolinians from the mountains to the sea.

Decline of Academic Freedom and Respect for Faculty Expertise

The plan to demolish UNC’s Area Studies Centers directly harms the talented faculty and staff who lead these global-focused organizations, but the top-down abolition of such programs exemplifies wider attacks on academic freedom and the intellectual autonomy of faculty expertise.

Each Center has evolved through creative, faculty-based initiatives that show how imaginative professors use their academic freedom to pursue new knowledge and enrich the educational experiences of their students. The abrupt dissolution of UNC’s Global Centers without consulting the affected faculty, staff, or students thus violates the core principle of faculty control over academic research and educational curricula.

This violation of usual university processes unfortunately repeats the top-down decision-making that established the School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) by skipping the faculty-led procedures and deliberations that typically construct new academic programs. A similar exclusion of faculty input and expertise has now reappeared in the destruction rather than the creation of academic units, but the assault on the faculty’s freedom to control their academic curriculum and professional priorities is eerily similar.

Meanwhile, the announced financial rationale for abolishing all six Centers (a projected saving of $7 million over several years) ignores the impressive funding that the Centers have collected from non-federal sources and becomes even more disturbing when compared to the much larger annual allocations for SCiLL or the annual salary of a single football coach.

The Global University

The former chair of UNC’s Board of Trustees, John Preyer, recently resigned from the Board with a personal message that he has “never felt better about the direction of the University.”  As a now-retired faculty member who deeply admires the history and achievements of our great public university, however, I fear that the abolition of the Global Centers has become a painful example of moving in exactly the wrong direction.

Our loyal alumni and others who support UNC’s global partnerships and public service should therefore join the University’s faculty, staff, and students to defend the University’s Area Studies Centers. These hubs of international exchange are urgently needed in these troubled times, but they also embody Carolina’s enduring academic values and public mission to serve the wider educational needs of our state.

*The six Area Studies Centers are the Carolina Asia Center; African Studies Center; Center for European Studies; Institute for the Study of the Americas; Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies; and Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies.

Lloyd Kramer is a professor emeritus of history and former chair of the Faculty Council at UNC, Chapel Hill.