New school idea’s timeline confirmed

By Perrin W. Jones, M.D.

Trustee Jones is an anesthesiologist from Greenville.

After months of false charges that our Board of Trustees had sprung without warning the idea of launching a new School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC Chapel Hill, the record is now clear: we merely endorsed and urged the acceleration of a program years in the making, led by top campus administrators and with faculty involvement along the way.

The idea for the pro-democracy curriculum goes back to 2017 – and has involved faculty input from the beginning, contrary to the false narrative perpetuated by political partisans, ill-informed media critics, and other opponents of free and open learning and debate on campus.

A few important points merit further clarification for members of our University community:

SCiLL’s true origin

As confirmed publicly by Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and Provost Christopher Clemens, the administration’s proposal for SCiLL grew out of Carolina’s Program for Public Discourse and its IDEAs in Action curriculum, which themselves arose from campus discussions dating to 2017. Their aims are to promote open, civil debate on campus and to equip students for success in our diverse nation and world.

Twice, in September and October of 2019, the Faculty Council discussed PPD and rejected proposals to halt it, thereby allowing the program’s development to continue. The initiative was always envisioned ultimately to include curricular components for interested students.

More recently, top university administrators redefined the program’s long-anticipated expansion as a proposed school for which they planned to seek state funding. In January, our Board of Trustees adopted a resolution urging the administration and faculty to accelerate plans for the school. Contrary to erroneous news reports, mistaken media commentary, and baseless outside attacks, it wasn’t our idea – but it’s a good one we were happy to endorse.

Notably, Chancellor Guskiewicz confirmed this timeline in his March 17 response to an inquiry about it from the University’s current accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. The Chancellor’s response shows that the SCiLL timetable we trustees have outlined all along is correct.

“It is worth noting that, though we are still very much in the beginning of the process, the work regarding the curriculum expansion for the Program for Public Discourse derives from planning, conversations, discussions with faculty leaders, and site visits dating back to February 2018,” the Chancellor wrote in his letter to SACSCOC. “This planning included a site visit by senior leaders to the campus of Arizona State University in 2018 to learn about their School of Economic Thought and Leadership, among other objectives.”

In other words, the dominant media narrative about SCiLL has been wrong from the beginning. Critics who claim indignantly that the faculty hadn’t heard of the proposed school before January are disingenuous at best. The “school” label might have been new to some, but the concept has been discussed openly and thoroughly for years among the faculty, and twice allowed to proceed. The smokescreen from those pretending otherwise is flabbergasting.

Hostility from some

In recounting the history of the SCiLL proposal during our last University Affairs Committee meeting, Provost Clemens noted that several faculty members have remained involved in its development as an outgrowth of PPD, and that a larger group of professors will help shape it.

Press reports have overlooked the Provost’s straightforward explanation during the public UAC meeting for why more faculty haven’t been involved in the program’s expansion until now: because many of them are openly hostile to it.

“The Program for Public Discourse met with lots and lots of resistance,” Provost Clemens said. “Certain aspects of it were never moved forward because of an insane amount of pressure from some faculty who were very angry about the idea that we would have such a program.”

Roundtable faculty discussions about how to develop the program devolved into vicious personal attacks that left some professors who supported it in tears, Clemens told us. Understandably, that led him to proceed more cautiously as the concept evolved.

“There are faculty who are persecuted over this – and, make no mistake, that happens,” he said. “I have emails to that effect from faculty that I don’t share. And you saw some of it if you attended the Faculty Executive Committee meeting, where I attempted to speak about this, in the chat – which was not the kind of behavior I hope to see from faculty. It’s disappointing to me, and it does affect the way I proceed, because I’m trying to protect people from persecution.”

Accusations that SCiLL would be a political program run by outsiders are false, Clemens said.

“I see it as my job as chief academic officer to make sure that our academic programs are created, led, and run by faculty, and do not become political vehicles,” he said.

Fear of ostracization

At the request of Chancellor Guskiewicz, Provost Clemens has begun identifying a group of faculty members to serve on a working group to help develop SCiLL, which could take the form of a new department instead of a school. All but two contacted so far agreed to serve on the committee, Clemens reported. One professor declined for lack of time. And the other?

“The other one declined because they were worried about their career if they were associated with it,” Clemens told us.

That, not the evolution of a curricular plan six years in the making, is the problem our entire University community should confront. If faculty members are afraid to be associated with a program that promotes free and open discussion, imagine how some of our students must feel.

The fevered and disingenuous opposition to an initiative steeped in classically liberal traditions of free inquiry and civil debate – led by the administration and allowed to proceed by the faculty – proves convincingly the need for just such a program at UNC-Chapel Hill.