The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees has been loudly promoting its plan to build a new School of Civic Life and Leadership to media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. But faculty members at the university say they’ve been left in the dark, and now the institution’s accreditor has promised to determine if the board has overstepped its appropriate role.
Late last month, the Board of Trustees unanimously adopted a resolution requesting that the university administration “accelerate” the development of the leadership school, potentially within an existing college or school. The resolution talks about the need to develop skills in public discourse for “promoting democracy” and benefiting society. The school would offer undergraduate degrees and eventually aim to have at least 20 dedicated faculty members.
Just a few hours after the vote, an editorial appeared in The Wall Street Journal praising the university’s plans to hire professors “from across the ideological spectrum.” Trustees told the newspaper that the school was intended to end “political constraints on what can be taught in university classes.” A journalist at The Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s student newspaper, discovered this week that some members of the Board of Trustees had emailed the Journal about the proposed school as early as January 24.
Faculty members, on the other hand — some of whom learned about the proposed school from The Wall Street Journal — expressed shock that the Board of Trustees had not sought their input. Under the norms of shared governance, they said, faculty members have control over areas such as curriculum.
“They’re trying to insert themselves into the running of the campus and the development of the curriculum,” said Mimi V. Chapman, chair of the faculty. That’s as if to say, “we don’t respect your judgment,” Chapman said. “It’s to say, we don’t respect shared governance. It’s to say, we don’t respect the job that you’re doing now.”
By contrast, Chapman noted, when the university recently created a new School of Data Science and Society, the process took about seven years and involved a steering committee and nine subcommittees, including deans of various schools that had an interest in the new one.
David L. Boliek Jr., chairman of the Board of Trustees, said he, in turn, had been surprised by the reaction of the faculty members. Boliek said that the school of civic life was merely a “progression” from the university’s existing program for public discourse, within the College of Arts and Sciences. That program aims to promote “open, frank, respectful, and productive debate” and to teach students how to think and argue well, according to the program’s web site.
They’re trying to insert themselves into the running of the campus and the development of the curriculum.
But some faculty members previously raised concerns about that program, too, saying it had been developed without sufficient input from the Chapel Hill faculty and had been subject to undue influence from conservatives beyond campus. According to a 2019 report in The News & Observer, faculty members were told that the public-discourse program originated from an effort by the Board of Governors of the UNC system, Chapel Hill leaders, and conservative scholars in 2017.
Boliek also cited a budget-request memo from Provost Christopher Clemens as evidence that the faculty had been involved in the plans for the leadership school. Boliek said the memo has been circulated to many faculty members since the beginning of last year. That memo calls for a recurring investment of $5 million, beginning in 2023-24, to create the new school, to operate as a division within the College of Arts and Sciences. It calls for a new civic-studies major and minor to “prepare students to become active citizens and thoughtful leaders in corporations, government, and the academy in North Carolina and around the world by cultivating the capacities necessary to conduct good-faith dialogue with those with whom they disagree.”
Boliek believes the School of Civic Life and Leadership would attract professors with diverse viewpoints. “It’s extremely exciting,” he said. “Carolina can be a national leader on this front.”
The UNC system has long been accused of political overreach, prompting Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, to create a bipartisan commission to study the appointment system for boards at the state’s public universities.
At a meeting of that group, known as the Governor’s Commission on the Governance of Public Universities in North Carolina, on February 7, Belle Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, the accrediting agency for UNC Chapel Hill, raised questions about whether the Board of Trustees had violated the commission’s standards, which call for the faculty to be in charge of curriculum.
It’s extremely exciting. Carolina can be a national leader on this front.
In an interview with The Chronicle, Wheelan said that based on what it had learned from the news, her commission intends to send a letter of inquiry to the Board of Trustees to determine whether the faculty had been sufficiently involved in the plans for the school. She said the commission has an “unsolicited-information policy” that calls for the accreditor to send letters of inquiry any time issues are reported in the media that “might put the institution out of compliance.”
“It’s just a letter of inquiry,” Wheelan said. “It’s not meant to threaten anybody. It’s not accusing anybody of anything. It’s just to say, hey, what’s going on?”
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board weighed in a second time on February 12, characterizing Wheelan’s words as an accreditation threat and a political power play in support of the faculty who are objecting to the trustees’ announcement of the school without consulting faculty members.
Chapman said the faculty executive committee had invited the trustees to join it at a meeting earlier this month to discuss their vision for the new school, but that the trustees had canceled at the last minute and not rescheduled. The full faculty council is scheduled to meet on Friday to discuss how to proceed.
“It’s a very difficult place to be to feel like your governing bodies are against you,” Chapman said. “And that’s how it feels.”
