We’ve spent many newsletters detailing the never-ending news cycle surrounding UNC’s School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL).
While we have misgivings about how the school was created, how it’s managed and how it fails to live up to its stated mission of promoting civil discourse on campus, we do see the value of promoting constructive dialogue in fraught times.
But do these traits and this mission need their own school? Is it in the best interest of the University and the students it serves to keep civility and leadership confined to a curriculum instead of promoted widely on campus for all to participate?
Over the next few weeks, we will share the programs, events and stories that demonstrate how civil discourse is already being promoted on UNC’s campus.
Former University of Virginia President James Ryan recently wrote a thoughtful piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education where he assessed the value of schools like SCiLL that purport to foster civil discourse on campus, and we were struck by his unsurprisingly astute analysis.
“These efforts are well-intentioned, and their goals are laudable,” Ryan wrote. “When I served as a dean and a university president, I encouraged and supported them. But the more I’ve watched them unfold, the more skeptical I have become. They do both too little and too much.
They do too little because they are typically voluntary extracurricular activities, often organized and led by self-appointed experts. Despite the headlines touting these programs, they only reach a small, self-selected, and self-motivated group of students. Why these discussions have become an extracurricular activity rather than a regular part of the classroom experience is a mystery.”
Ryan also deems it too much to start with difficult political conversations while bypassing less controversial topics where it is easier to find common ground.
“Starting with easy conversations and basic questions, for example, is a far more natural way to interact with someone you don’t know,” he writes. “I don’t know about you, but when I’m standing in line at the grocery store, I rarely turn to the guy behind me and politely ask: What do you think about late-term abortions? Easy conversations also serve as a foundation for harder ones.”
At the Coalition for Carolina, we believe in the power of higher education, public universities and, of course, our beloved UNC-Chapel Hill. We believe Carolina’s campus is a place to tackle the problems that ail our society, and promoting empathy, kindness and honest communication is certainly a worthwhile aspiration on campus and beyond.
Professor Ryan’s course of treatment isn’t more siloed schools on university campuses that are magnets for criticism, however.
“What we need is something more basic: actual friendships among people who have different political views,” he writes.
“Instead of focusing on creating opportunities for a small fraction of students to have artificially constructed conversations, I would be looking for ways to bring as many students as possible into regular contact with each other. That means focusing on seemingly mundane issues like housing and dining, including policies governing whether students are required to live on campus, whether they can choose their first-year roommates, how long they have to be on a meal plan, and whether the food in the dining halls is sufficiently edible to attract students.
…. Colleges that have dialogue programs but aren’t focused on structural barriers or inducements to bring students together may well be focusing on the symptom rather than the cause. Instead of, or at least in addition to, dialogue programs, consider whether your practices or policies draw unfamiliar students together in common spaces or disperse them into enclaves of the familiar.”
In the coming weeks, we look forward to sharing with you some ways we see common spaces being used to promote dialogue on UNC’s campus.
Please reply to this email if you have your own ideas for how to foster dialogue on campus. This is, after all, an exercise where everyone is invited and encouraged to participate.