AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
Gender studies professor Kiran Asher may have been denied a tenured position at UNC-Chapel Hill this spring. But that won’t stop her from connecting with Carolina students.
Read more What Duke basketball coach Jon Scheyer says about his roster, the UConn loss
On Tuesday evening, TransparUNCy, a student group that advocates for transparency in university governance, hosted a well-attended panel of “the professors UNC doesn’t want you to hear from” at the Campus Y.
That included Asher, who was set to be hired with tenure in UNC’s Women’s and Gender Studies department, a job offered to her back in the spring of 2025. Her appointment was all but set in stone when the university’s board of trustees denied its final approval in a closed-door deliberation.
Beside Asher at the event were two other professors: Ariana Vigil, chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies department, and Cemil Aydin, who directs what’s left of the university’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, now called INSITE Middle East. The school’s area study centers were gutted last school year due to budget cuts and federal funding pressure.
The panel answered questions from TransparUNCy and the audience about the direction of higher education and what can be done to stay informed and stand up for academic freedom.
“This was a treat because I was really looking forward to teaching UNC students,” Asher told The News & Observer after the event. “I really do believe that the board of trustees doesn’t represent the university. This academy is a big community. This is my community.
“This is the first time I’m back on campus [since the decision], and I’m here for a certain closure. But it’s also opening the door to other relationships.”
What happened to Asher is rare in academia, she said during the panel, and “one of the reasons I’m here is that we don’t want this to become usual. This is something that should remain unusual.” She condemned UNC’s leadership, saying the school is “not being transparent, not being democratic.”
It may be rare, but it has also happened at UNC before. In 2021, the board initially chose not to vote on awarding tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work on The New York Times’ 1619 Project. Then, in 2025, the board delayed tenure approvals for most of that year’s candidates.
“How does one make a pattern?” Vigil asked. “You just have to keep doing it. The first time it happens, there’s an outcry. Then the second time, there’s a little bit of an outcry. The third time, [people think] ‘Oh well, that’s just the way it’s done.’ … There’s increasing encroachment [by the board of trustees] and an attempt to establish a pattern.”
In emails obtained by The N&O in the wake of the board’s decision on Asher’s tenure, trustee Jim Blaine, former chief of staff for state Senate leader Phil Berger, wrote that he opposes “all tenure conferrals on the principle that they are an anachronistic relic of a different time that have tremendous potential to create long term financial challenges for the university.”
He hopes that the other trustees siding with him “is not a one off but the beginning of a trend toward trustees exercising the responsibility conveyed to them by the Board of Governors in the tenure process.”
Read more A restaurant and bar will close this month in Raleigh’s North Hills
The panelists on Tuesday night explored some of the underlying forces behind this line of thinking.
Some members of UNC’s board of trustees — most notably Blaine and the commercial real estate investor and developer Marty Kotis — are committed to applying business terms like “return on investment” to higher education. After UNC’s provost delivered a presentation in part on the merit of Carolina’s smaller degree programs in July, Kotis replied: “What stands out to me in this presentation is the lack of a single dollar sign.”
These financial terms were applied to Asher’s tenure reversal, with trustees questioning the financial value of hiring a gender studies professor. In the midst of the controversy, Kotis wrote in a letter to faculty: “There is no discussion of enrollment trends, credit-hour production, student outcomes, resource allocation, or return on investment. Instead, they assume faculty recommendations should prevail and that any disagreement must be political.”
Although UNC’s board of trustees hasn’t shied away from controversial decisions, a recent internal survey showed that some members of the board are reflecting on the use of their power. Three trustees who elected to answer the open-ended question at the end of the survey expressed concern that the board tends to get overly involved in matters beyond its purview.
At the event Tuesday night, Vigil delivered a rebuke of the financial terms the trustees used to assess the value of Women’s and Gender Studies and Asher’s hire.
“These are all presented as though they are ‘apolitical’ arguments leveraged against the ‘political’ programs,” Vigil told students. She and her students in Women’s and Gender Studies, she said, often discuss the value of what they study. Just not in corporate terms.
“We’re studying the human being,” Vigil said. “That includes history, literature, art, sexuality. We learn to interpret the world around us and our place in it to understand human motivation, conflict, and inspiration. There’s widespread agreement that a humanities education increases empathy, which is a quality that has been explicitly denigrated by contemporary politicians, but is largely assumed to be a pretty positive human trait and characteristic.”
Asher says that her field is primarily “interested in questioning how power functions.” That kind of language, however, is closely related to ideas that are now illegal for a university to endorse in North Carolina.
In June, North Carolina lawmakers passed a law in a veto override that prohibits colleges from compelling students and staff to affirm belief in a list of “divisive concepts,” including this one: “The rule of law does not exist but instead is a series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups.”
TransparUNCy flew Asher down from Massachusetts for the event, she said. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
“We teach critical thinking, and that is scary,” Asher said during the panel. “That is scary because somebody down the pipeline is going to say: ‘Accept this.’ And you will ask the question: ‘Why?’”
Read more You can be billed in NC years after your insurer paid a claim. Here’s why.