TO THE EDITOR:
On Sept. 2 The Daily Tar Heel published an editorial about Liberty University. The author of the editorial finished his article with a striking and unfounded statement, “The payment to Liberty’s football team amounts to a literal endorsement of a program that makes the school’s harmful dogma more visible.” There are many things wrong with this article — including this statement. But let me just point out a few of my favorites.
Number one: The author mentions Jerry Falwell Sr. He notes that Falwell was “an opponent of integration and Martin Luther King Jr.” OK, so this is probably the case. But are we really going to go down the road of equating a student body with its founders. If this is the case, then no one should invite UNC to play football either. After all, racists and slaveholders founded this university. Take a stroll through the quad and see Saunders Hall standing in memory of a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Number two: I would never pay money to be told what movies I can watch or what clothes I need to wear. But is it really okay to demean someone else’s education in a 200 word editorial? So what if they pay to learn creationism? A simple game of football doesn’t mean that our biology department is going to start teaching it too.
Number three: The author points out that UNC’s “own intellectual mission is undermined” because we had to dilute our scheduled to play a smaller institution who does not hold our same academic and social values. Does playing schools with our same social and academic values apply to larger universities as well? If so, I guess we should stop playing Brigham Young University and Notre Dame too.
We invited Liberty here so we could unleash the wrath of our football team on them. That we did. Go Heels.
Nathan Dove ’15
