Is UNC Chapel Hill serious about civil rights?
This is an open question considering who the university has in charge of faculty hiring, tenure and promotion decisions. Since 2022, Giselle Corbie has served as vice provost for faculty affairs at Carolina — a hugely influential role that shapes the direction of the university. Yet Corbie’s record should worry every North Carolinian who cares about equal treatment, ending racial discrimination and upholding civil rights laws.
So long as Corbie remains vice provost, UNC’s efforts to dismantle “diversity, equity and inclusion” aren’t just incomplete. They’re unreliable.
Here are the facts that North Carolinians need to know about Corbie. These facts should have led UNC leaders not to hire or promote her in the first place.
Since 2013, Corbie has run UNC’s Center for Health Equity Research. The center promotes “equity-centered” policies and race-based resources for “BIPOC wellness.” It harps on “medicine’s roots in colonialism” and promotes a language policing guide that forbids terms like “white paper” because of “white privilege.”
Shockingly, Corbie has pushed for illegal, race-based rationing of medical care. In a 2021 interview, she argued against treating all patients equally as individuals. She calls that the “fallacy of equality.” Instead, because the medical profession is a “white supremacist culture,” she favors “race-targeted interventions” in medical care. That means treating patients differently based on their race.
In her 2021 article in the JAMA Health Forum, she again pushed for racially discriminatory medical care. She wrote that “equality does not equal equity” and chided doctors who “prioritize equality over equity.” Due to “structural racism,” she claimed, “we need to use strategies that ensure those who are most in need in historically marginalized communities are given preference.”
Though dressed in academic jargon, the upshot of Corbie’s argument is clear: health care providers should distribute life-saving medical interventions (like pandemic vaccines) on the basis of skin color, not individual medical need. That’s not just immoral and un-American, it’s also plainly illegal under civil rights laws. That’s why other states ditched race-based policies at the first sign of lawsuits.
In another 2021 commentary published in the North Carolina Medical Journal, Corbie doubled down on discrimination. She pushed North Carolina to “center equity” and prioritize “antiracism” in its pandemic response. That’s academic-speak for doling out medicines and treatments to preferred racial groups based on race.
Her rejection of equal treatment under the law clearly parallels her understanding of how the university should hire faculty.
Corbie has laid out a racist vision of university hiring — making race the determining factor in virtually everything. She explicitly rejects the idea of individual merit, calling it the “fallacy of meritocracy.” In 2022, just months before UNC Chapel Hill promoted her, she wrote that universities must “align their own demographics with those of the communities they serve. In many places, especially academic training centers, that will mean aggressively recruiting and promoting diverse researchers.”
In other words, universities like UNC Chapel Hill should hire and promote based on race. She and her coauthors even declared that “institutions should place as much value on work to improve the health and health equity of diverse communities as they place on advancing fundamental biologic discoveries.” In Corbie’s vision, contributions to DEI should matter as much as contributions to curing cancer.
As vice provost for faculty affairs at Carolina, Corbie plays a decisive role in whom to hire and promote and who gets tenure. If she is willing to ration life-saving medical care on the basis of race and rejects the idea of meritocracy, it’s reasonable to ask whether Corbie is hiring and promoting people based on skin color, not merit. Why wouldn’t she?
Corbie’s record is worrisome. But what’s even more concerning is that UNC leaders saw no problem with her support for racial discrimination and her rejection of science as a researcher’s first priority. When he hired Corbie, UNC Chapel Hill Provost Chris Clemens praised her efforts to deliver “an integrated curriculum in leadership, equity, diversity and inclusion.” In other words, he knew. She got the job not in spite of her promotion of racialist policies but because of it.
North Carolinians deserve answers. To start, the UNC Board of Trustees should audit all hiring, promotion and tenure decisions in which Corbie participated. If she put her discriminatory worldview into practice, remediation should follow. The state legislature should also investigate. How genuine is UNC’s purported turn away from DEI?
The stakes are too high for state leaders — and federal civil rights investigators — to ignore. North Carolina’s flagship institution of higher education must uphold civil rights laws and fulfill its responsibilities to taxpayers, students, faculty and the future of the state.
Adam Kissel is former deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs at the U.S. Department of Education.
