“This is not a normal academic center, a normal academic institution,” Smith said. “It’s an appendage — it has a parasitic presence on the campus as a whole, and it operates according to its own strange rules.”
Despite pushback, the school kept developing, hiring Atkins in March 2024. Atkins previously worked as an Associate Professor at Duke University, where he also served as the director of the Civil Discourse Project. Alongside him was Associate Director John Rose, who was subsequently hired to teach at SCiLL in August.
“They have been hired by a school that exists to hire people like them,” Julian Taylor, a member of student group TransparUNCy, said. “A school that was created to create people like them.”
Provost Chris Clemens, who was involved in the creation of the school, said the faculty were attracted quickly and outside the normal hiring cycle.
“We don’t know very much about their processes at all, how the people they’ve hired were recruited, how they were vetted, who sat on committees that were responsible for hiring them,” Smith said. “We know nothing about this.”
Inger Brodey, SCiLL faculty member and chair of the school’s faculty search committee, said in an email statement that the mission of the school was kept “front and center” when selecting candidates to interview at each stage.
“Ideology and politics never entered into our discussions,” she said.
Four of the new hires have master's degrees in religion or theological studies. Many have published articles in First Things, an educational institute aiming to "advance a religiously informed public philosophy." Atkins recently published a book titled “The Christian Origins of Tolerance.”
There are also two married couples among the new faculty: Connor and Melody Grubaugh, and Dustin and Lauren Brown Sebell.
Katie Chenoweth, an associate professor at Princeton, said it is “super unusual” to see faculty hires happen like this.
“These people were hired, as insiders, with their spouses in this very unusual way,” Chenoweth said. “This is not like in a normal academic job market.”
'A method for rectifying a cultural crisis'
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The nonprofit Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education is a grant-making organization that supports 28 programs and institutes at elite universities. Over the years, FEHE has funneled millions to various academic centers, which they call "internal university programs” on their website.
Ralph Wilson, a researcher of donor influence in higher education, said FEHE allows scholars and programs to receive grants that "on the surface" don’t appear to have any connections to conservative ideology.
"It's a bland name that has several layers removed from people who are actually operating the foundation," Wilson said.
The president of FEHE, Luis Tellez, describes the organization as a method for rectifying a “cultural crisis” at prestigious universities by spreading Catholicism in an article published last year on a Catholic priest's blog.
Chenoweth said while FEHE is not formally affiliated with SCiLL, many of the new faculty are being drawn from programs which FEHE funds.
“Coincidentally, all of these people are hired that happen to have these connections to this FEHE network,” Chenoweth said. “It smells really fishy.”
FEHE funds the Academic Freedom Alliance, an organization whose ranks include many SCiLL faculty — Molly Worthen, Flynn Cratty, David Decosimo, Rose, and Atkins. Decosimo and Atkins are both founding members of the AFA, which, according to its website, is a nonprofit organization which “uphold[s] the principles that are required if scholars are to fulfill their vocation as truth-seekers”.
“It’s no surprise that a school committed to civil discourse would attract faculty with national reputations for defending open inquiry,” Decosimo said in an email statement.
The private grant-making Bradley Foundation donated just short of $4 million to FEHE between 2014-2021. Wilson said FEHE acts as a pass through for ideological donors to obscure the origins of their funding.
Art Pope, a former state government official and UNC System BOG member, chairs the John William Pope Foundation and serves on the board of the Bradley Foundation.
“So it doesn’t look like a scholar is only getting funded by the Pope foundation,” Wilson said. “They’re also getting funded by another foundation that is being funded by Pope, et cetera.”
From 2015-2022, the Bradley Foundation donated over $1 million to the Jack Miller Center, another organization in which some of the SCiLL faculty are involved. Atkins is the center's School of Civic Thought Director.
The JMC has given money to the University of Virginia’s Program for Constitutionalism and Democracy, which new SCiLL hires Danielle Charette and Rita Koganzon both associate-directed. Charette now serves as the JMC’s Book Review Editor. New SCiLL hire Dustin Sebell was a JMC fellow in 2016.
In an email to The Daily Tar Heel, Charette said that since the JMC is interested in civics education, it is natural that some of the SCiLL faculty would have partnered with them in the past for teaching and research grants.
Wilson said that in the past few years, a new kind of center has emerged where politicians, influenced by donors, take the initiative to create the centers themselves.
"SCiLL and several other centers across the country are able to kind of bypass the criticism of donor influence, because essentially the donor becomes the state" Wilson said.
The N.C. General Assembly allocated $4 million for the development of SCiLL to be used over the next two fiscal years in their all-funds budget in April of 2023.
Taylor said the N.C. General Assembly has a terrible record of funding public education in the past.
“I think it should be pretty alarming, that all of the actions that the NCGA has taken recently have been on account of ideology and not on account of making the citizens of North Carolina’s lives better,” he said.
'Connections to Robbie George'
The Bradley Foundation gives funding to the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, a program dedicated to “the pursuit of scholarly excellence in the fields of constitutional studies and political thought”. A 2023 op-ed published by The Daily Princetonian claimed the JMP exists to further conservative viewpoints on campus and provide a platform to far-right and extremist individuals.
The director of the JMP is outspoken conservative Robert George, a longtime friend of Luis Tellez who serves as a trustee for FEHE, a member of the AFA academic committee and a member of the Bradley Foundation board alongside Pope. Over the years, George has expressed his opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion and transgender rights through his writings and speeches, often citing religion as grounds for his arguments.
"It's really concerning the number of [SCiLL] faculty that have connections to Robbie George," Taylor said.
Atkins was a visiting fellow at the Madison Program in the fall of 2019, along with new faculty member Flynn Cratty.
Micheal Hawley, a recently hired SCiLL professor, was slated to be a Madison Program visiting fellow in 2024-25 according to the programs website in May. Hawley was removed from the Program’s website by July, a month before his SCiLL appointment was announced.
In an email to The Daily Tar Heel, Hawley said he declined the Madison Program’s offer in order to come to UNC.
“The fellowship offered support for the writing of a book on ancient and modern rhetoric — a subject with no partisan valence,” he wrote.
Last year, George introduced Atkins at an event hosted by the JMP, at which Atkins gave a lecture titled "Liberalism and the Christian Origins of Tolerance."
In January, Atkins appeared on the Madison’s Notes Podcast — the program’s online discussion series. Koganzon, another recent hire, has also appeared on the podcast in the past.
In a recent tweet, George called SCiLL “grounds for hope” at one of the nation’s leading public universities.
'See past what's being presented'
In an email to The Daily Tar Heel, Koganzon said involvement with associations is a “fairly minor aspect” of the academic hiring process.
“By far the most important aspect of academic hiring is the quality and quantity of research, along with a candidate’s teaching record,” Koganzon said. “Membership in organizations is nice but mostly incidental to merit.”
In his email statement, Atkins said he strives to be as mission-forward as possible in regards to SCiLL:
“The mission guided us as we moved forward into making decisions from faculty hiring to developing curriculum – essentially the mission guided every single decision that we've made.”
SCiLL offered two new classes this semester, with three class sections, according to ConnectCarolina. Only 3 of the 18 faculty listed on the school's website are currently teaching SCLL classes.
Only 5 of the 11 faculty hired in August will be teaching SCiLL classes this spring. There will be 4 additional classes offered spanning 14 available class sections — 6 of these sections are first-year seminars.
“A lot of freshmen entering college are not going to have the skills or the tools to be able to see past what’s being presented, and that’s what they’re banking on,” Chenoweth said.
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