We vowed to keep an open mind about the new School of Civic Life and Leadership that was mandated at UNC by trustees and the legislature.
But the school looks more and more like what we were told it wouldn’t be: a center for right-wing views and something removed or exempt from normal university hiring practices.
We shouldn’t be surprised.
David Boliek, then chair of the UNC Board of Trustees, told Fox News in January 2023 there is “no shortage of left-of-center, progressive views on our campus, like many campuses across the nation. But the same really can’t be said about right-of-center views.”
The new school, he said, “is an effort to really remedy that.”
Background
Ever since the Board of Trustees, without notice to then-Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz or the faculty, resolved to “accelerate the creation of a School of Civic Life and Leadership,” our campus has been reassured that we can and should make lemons out of lemonade.
The permanent dean of SCILL, Jed Atkins, an author on the original memo that proposed SCLL to the trustees, has said repeatedly that “origins don’t equal destiny.” But how can something with scholarly and educational excellence emerge from beginnings so poisonous that the trustees had to hire an outside PR firm and enlist the editorial-page support of The Wall Street Journal to manage the fallout?
“Origins don’t equal destiny.” It’s a nice phrase, and we Americans are deeply committed to the notion of constant reinvention. Yet, from research we know that, in the absence of concerted effort, our beginnings – from zip codes to genetics – are often highly predictive of where we end up.
We don’t believe the School of Civic Life and Leadership will evolve into a vibrant part of our campus so long as the processes used to grow it are as suspect as those used to create it.
Origins do appear to be destiny, at least at SCiLL.
Two Views
Below are excerpts from two essays that shed light on the school: one by a newly appointed SCiLL faculty member and one by a longtime faculty member who is an outspoken critic of the school.
Jay Smith, a professor of history, doesn’t mince words in his criticism, which ran in The Daily Tar Heel. He takes issue with an article authored by a new SCiLL faculty member which asserts that college students are being coddled by DEI efforts, living on campus, and grade inflation. The author, Rita Koganzon, is now an associate professor at SCiLL.
Smith contends that the newly hired faculty at SCiLL have been coddled themselves by a shadowy hiring process. Indeed, the Coalition has heard from multiple faculty members in relevant, nationally ranked academic departments that faculty members in those departments have no idea how SCiLL’s faculty members, who are affiliated with their disciplines, were hired.
Koganzon wrote:
“Universities don’t openly describe students as children, but that is how they treat them. This was highlighted in the spring, when so many pro-Palestinian student protesters — most of them legal adults — faced minimal consequences for even flagrant violations of their universities’ policies. (Some were arrested — but those charges were often dropped.) American universities’ relative generosity to their students may seem appealing, especially in contrast to the plight of our imaginary waiter, but it has a dark side, in the form of increased control of student life.
“If universities today won’t hold students responsible for their bad behavior, they also won’t leave them alone when they do nothing wrong. Administrators send out position statements after major national and international political events to convey the approved response, micromanage campus parties and social events, dictate scripts for sexual interactions, extract allegiance to boutique theories of power and herd undergraduates into mandatory dormitories where their daily lives can be more comprehensively monitored and shaped. This is increasingly true across institutions — public and private, small and large — but the more elite the school, the more acute the problem.”
Read her essay here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/opinion/college-students-adulting.html
Smith responded:
“Koganzon’s essay left me shaking my head….
“I was most struck, however, by the irony baked into this latest broadside against university practices. Professor Koganzon is one of 11 faculty members recently hired to help staff the SCiLL. Unlike the joint appointees with homes in other departments, the new faculty have no formal affiliation with existing departments. This school was created — via Board of Trustees fiat, in flagrant disregard for the will and expertise of UNC faculty — for the express purpose of creating a safe environment for conservative thinkers. Although they may be fine people and scholars, the core faculty of SCiLL, lacking departmental affiliations, escaped the rigors of normal academic hiring practices. The school to which they were recruited is unconstrained by traditions of disciplinary expertise. It measures academic merit not by disciplinary standards but by one’s location on an ideological spectrum. We can only assume that tenure and promotion decisions in the SCiLL will reflect similar priorities.
“Though they would never admit it, the faculty of SCiLL benefited from affirmative action, but of the unjustifiable kind that works in reverse. Their candidacies for positions at UNC were made possible not by pure merit, which they may or may not possess, but by their membership in or adjacency to a well-funded conservative ecosystem saturated by euphemisms like ‘viewpoint diversity,’ ‘civility’ and ‘balance’.”
Read his full response here:
https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2024/09/opinion-oped-smith-scill-opposition
