UNC Announces Faculty for School of Civic Life and Leadership
The Carolina Inn, site of the Board of Trustees’ meetings. Photo by Matheiu Plourde.
On October 6, 2023, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced that it has appointed nine of its faculty members to the newly created School of Civic Life and Leadership. These faculty members, led by Interim Director Sarah Treul Roberts, will begin spending half their time working on setting up the School of Civic Life and Leadership, effective immediately. The School of Civic Life and Leadership itself, a part of the School of Arts and Sciences, had been proposed by the Board of Trustees in January. However, faculty members and others have expressed concerns that the School of Civic Life and Leadership will reflect the conservative bent of the Board of Trustees, a group appointed by the General Assembly and UNC System Board of Governors to handle high-level issues pertaining to the university.
These concerns have been heightened by statements made by board chair David Boliek to Fox and Friends, in which he described the school as an effort to provide more right-wing voices in response to a perceived dearth of right-wing perspectives on campus. Furthermore, Fox Business has described it as “a major step to combat woke ideology” in a story that also quotes Trustee Marty Kotis denying that it is “taking direct aim at wokism.” The new program has also been criticized for lacking non-white faculty and for circumventing faculty input in proposing new academic programs, although Trustee Perrin W. Jones has publicly disputed the latter. Some faculty argue that the board proposed the resolution without the customary faculty input, while Jones has argued that there was faculty input, albeit gathered when the school was considered an expansion of the preexisting Program for Public Discourse.
Because the School of Civic Life and Leadership has been recently created, part of the mission of its starting faculty is to figure out what exactly the School will be doing on campus. However, some parts of its mission have already been made clear. The School is expected to play some role in teaching courses that satisfy the Communication Beyond Carolina requirement in the new IDEAS in Action general-education curriculum. This program requires students to take one class that focuses on teaching students to speak and listen well.
Another clue to how the School will work in practice comes from who has been appointed to its faculty. The inaugural group includes New York Times opinion writer Molly Worthen, an associate professor of history whose work focuses on American religious history. Distinguished professor of music Mark Katz formerly led Next Level, an organization that sent American hip-hop musicians abroad in order to further cultural diplomacy. Interestingly, none of the faculty are registered Republicans, despite how the School has been described as a conservative perspective on campus. Although the appointed faculty includes two political scientists, other disciplines such as physics, psychology, and literature are also represented. This indicates a potential for the school to have programs in disciplines that are less traditionally associated with the idea of “civic life,” such as STEM.
The Program for Public Discourse, which is currently directed by the School’s Interim Dean Treul Roberts, will also become part of the school. Much like the School, the Program for Public Discourse also received criticism from faculty members that it was too linked to conservative thought for its position as part of a university. In a column for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, Trustee Perrin Jones even argues that the School is a planned outgrowth of the Program. The Program for Public Discourse has also been influenced by Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, which have also been lightning rods for controversy because of their conservative influences.
These factors have led the faculty reception to the School for Civic Life and Leadership to often turn skeptical. NC Newsline and INDY Week talked to “several current and former faculty members of color,” who said that, because they are not white, they decided not to take part in the process because of concerns about conservative political groups having influence over the School. Over 600 faculty members also signed an opinion column in the Daily Tar Heel condemning the proposal for the school, as well as bills that aim to eliminate tenure and add a specific American history graduation requirement. Noteworthy among the faculty signatories is Mark Katz, one of the School’s appointed faculty members.
However, the Board of Trustees has said that the School constitutes an attempt to encourage students to have open debate and hear from people of different political persuasions. Yet statements from Board of Trustees members to conservative outlets have also made it clear that they, at least, consider the University to currently have too many liberal perspectives in comparison to the number of conservative perspectives available on campus.
One report, “Free Expression and Constructive Dialogue in the University of North Carolina System,” has tried to measure how students feel about the atmosphere for discussing politics on their college campuses. This report, which was written by faculty members at UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC-Greensboro, finds that a majority of moderate and conservative students think that UNC-Chapel Hill offers too few opportunities to hear conservative speakers. Strikingly, more liberals think that UNC offers too few opportunities to hear conservative speakers than think that UNC offers too few opportunities to hear liberal speakers.
The report endorses concerns that there are too few conservative voices present on campus. However, it also points out that the vast majority of students are opposed to disruptive actions intended to suppress political opponents, such as graffiti-ing a political opponent’s office or preventing them from speaking. Furthermore, 11% of conservatives at UNC reported that they didn’t think that their instructor encouraged participation from people on both sides of the aisle, which is higher than the 2% of liberals that think the same, but still constitutes a minority of the student body.
On one hand, this report should be encouraging to the School for Civic Life and Leadership. Students want to hear diverse political perspectives and are willing to listen even to those with views that they vehemently disagree with. But there are also warning signs for the School, such as recruiting an all-white, non-Republican faculty. Furthermore, if the School wants to achieve its goals, it will have to deal with a lack of a clear mandate from the rest of the University. While the recent announcement of the first class of faculty certainly brings the School closer to full operations, there are significant hurdles for it to become what its backers would like it to be.