“Welcome to the School of Civic Life and Leadership,” reads the opening banner on the new UNC school’s website. The program's dean and director, Jed Atkins, claims it to be a home for free speech culture and civil discourse. But the website neglects to mention its real intentions: controlling and informing public discourse on campus.
The issue isn't a lack of civic discourse or engagement on UNC's campus — the issue that SCiLL is meant to address is that the civic discourse on campus tends to disagree with the Board of Trustees' political ideologies. Civic discourse should be happening, intentionally or not, in UNC classes already — an implicit type of teaching coined the “hidden curriculum” in education. David Boliek, the chair of the BOT who helped create SCiLL, said in a 2023 interview with Fox News that there are plenty of left-of-center progressive views at UNC-CH, but not enough right-of-center views, claiming that SCiLL was an effort to try and remedy that.
A coincidental array of political views falling on either side of the spectrum is not a problem. In the case of genuine conservative student political self-censorship, which is a problem, the burden should not fall on students to join a separate school. It is the role of the University and its professors to cultivate an environment conducive to diverse dialogue and robust inquiry, rather than create an isolated one where free speech is intended to matter more. Besides, any actions taken to address this issue — if they are to be meaningful — must be volitionally initiated by the student body. A mandate of viewpoint diversity is, after all, an ideological mandate itself. It’s duplicitous, and it will only further diminish the limited trust that UNC students have in our administration.
The new SCiLL program follows an already revamped general education program that was launched in 2022, the IDEAs in Action curriculum. If administration feels that their current roster of classes does not foster safe environments for discourse, then it would be a better use of money and resources to address these issues internally, rather than creating a separate school.
The IDEAs in Action curriculum provides a variety of classes for students to learn multiple academic disciplines in order to have a strong foundation for their careers. It is crucial that students learn to discuss and argue viewpoints about real-world issues to prepare them for any career field — which is why much of the existing general education curriculum includes these ideologies. One of the Focus Capacities in UNC's curriculum is Power, Difference and Inequality. Among the 21 political science classes alone, topics like global health, the death penalty, women's rights and climate change are highlighted. These controversial topics which we are already required to study offer the chance for debate and civil discourse.
As of very recently, DEI no longer exists at UNC. The principles which DEI advances are inherently inclusive and promote varied discourse. In juxtaposition with this, SCiLL seems even more to be a creation from a largely white male conservative base replacing structures of intersectional communication. The suggestion that politically-charged, if not outright conservative, courses will absolve our student body of self-censorship or distasteful arguments is wrong, especially in this light. You can't force a culture shift.
The inconsistency in promoting free expression among schools and classes makes the BOT's motivations questionable at best. It raises the question of what kind of speech they really want to promote on campus and which ideology they are trying to shape. SCiLL claims to encourage students to engage thoughtfully with democracy. It is not possible, however, to protect democracy while simultaneously removing student choice in regards to their education. That's inherently anti-democratic in itself.
This measure is a polarizing and partisan attempt at combating individual liberalism among the student body. To advocate so brazenly for a “remedy” to liberalism is unfair to students who expect their public institutions to be safe and neutral spaces. Public universities are not spaces wherein the personal beliefs of a Board of Trustees can be implemented and carried out without student consent. Public universities should be a hearth of independent thinking, passion and activism. No higher body has the right or jurisdiction to direct those independent motivations as they spring up in young, blazing minds.
