UNC Chapel Hill's new school hailed as 'bright spot' for free exchange of ideas

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) aims to encourage its students to engage in civil public discourse and, in the words of Dean Jed Atkins, "learn how to disagree better," despite a national culture increasingly mired by ideological division and censorship.

"SCiLL prepares students for the responsibilities of citizenship and civic leadership by fostering a free-speech culture and providing an education grounded in encouraging the human search for meaning and developing the capacities for civil discourse and wise decision-making," Atkins, who formerly served at the helm of a similar program at Duke University, said, per the school's website.

Its focus appears to deviate from schools that feed into the increasingly common concern that colleges and universities are becoming less welcoming of the free exchange of ideas.

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The Wall Street Journal's editorial board hailed SCiLL as a "new bright spot for traditional liberal thought" in a piece published Tuesday, adding that its existence is a "victory over the progressive monolith that tried to prevent it."

When the school was announced last year, UNC faculty members voiced their distaste for the board of trustees' resolution to "accelerate" its creation.

One faculty member, quoted in the university's newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, said he was "surprised" to find out about that resolution at the time.

Another was "flabbergasted," with several faculty members arguing they should have been consulted for input.

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David Boliek, then-chairman of UNC's board of trustees, spoke to "Fox & Friends" about the school's creation in January 2023, saying there's "no shortage of faculty with progressive, left-wing views [at UNC], like many campuses across the nation."

"The same really can’t be said of right-of-center views," he added, "So this is an effort to try to remedy that with the School of Civic Life and Leadership, which will provide equal opportunity for both views to be taught at the university."

The WSJ piece quoted current UNC board of trustees Chairman John Preyer as saying he hopes the experimental program can "become the nation’s model for what academic freedom can do for higher education, and change the entire landscape."

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SCiLL will offer courses in philosophy, politics, history, policy and more, according to a course breakdown on its site.

Some topics of study, according to the Wall Street Journal, will be the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the Federalist Papers, and the philosophies of rhetoricians like Aristotle and Montesquieu.