Snow lined the roads and sidewalks at Chapel Hill as I wound through campus one day last week, past the Old Well, and found my parking spot behind the New East Building. I was visiting UNC to audit a freshman class in the new UNC School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) and learn about the progress being made by its inaugural director and dean, Jed Atkins. I had met Jed before he started his new gig, and with so much that has taken place, I wanted to check in and see how it was going.
Jed holds an undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College, a Phd in the classics from the University of Cambridge, and is a former Duke University professor. At Duke he grew a successful program that built upon the basic notion of civil discourse within classrooms and managing conflict by using methods intended to foster understanding and consensus-building. A few years ago, forward-looking UNC leaders defied academic convention and envisioned SCiLL as a similar program at the nation’s oldest public university.
I entered through the back door, climbed the stairs to this old but well-maintained building, and fell in with the flow of students traversing the hallway. Former Harvard professor Dr. Flynn Cratty, one of the new hires at the SCiLL, greeted me with a warm welcome. He offered me a desk and then said to the 14 freshmen young men and women, “Let’s put these chairs in a circle.” This prompted the kids to position themselves in a nearly perfect oval, as the class — “C.S. Lewis in a Disenchanted World” — began.
The day’s assignment was two essays for comparison; a 1917 speech Max Weber gave in Munich about the utility of “Science as a Vocation,” and CS Lewis’ 1946 short work “Talking about Bicycles.” I sat silent as the students held a rapt discussion and interacted with Professor Cratty.
If you have followed higher education at all in recent years, you have read about its declining value proposition, the prevalence of “self-censoring” students and faculty, cancellation of visiting lecturers and conservative faculty, and more recently, the on-campus “protests” prone to violent, antisemitic, and anti-American rage.
While embracing racial and gender ideology through a deeply-rooted DEI system, the leftward tilt has done little, if anything, to foster diversity of thought on campuse. And the acceleration of these disturbing trends feature prominently in any objective evaluation about the future of higher ed. So I wanted to go see for myself how SCiLL was doing in its effort to offer choices to young people who want better, richer, student-learning outcomes.
Of the 14 students in class, only one had a phone on her desk, and it was turned face down. Not once during the hour and 15 minute class did I see anyone look at a phone.
I was encouraged by this.
But there were other things I noticed: In nearly an equal mix of young men and women, within the first 20 minutes, eight of the 14 had volunteered to speak or answer Professor’s Cratty’s prompts; none evidenced any concern whatsoever for what they might say; and each appeared comfortable speaking up and out. By the end of class, 12 of the 14 had participated in a class conversation that spanned a range of topics from politics in classrooms, to Christianity and agnosticism, to the stark differences between Weber and Lewis’s very different worldview.
At the end of class, I spent a couple of minutes asking the students why they opted into this curriculum, and without exception, they said it was because they wanted to be in a learning environment that valued free exchange of different ideas, without judgment or retribution.
One young lady sitting across from me put it best: “I always thought that the ‘college experience’ was meant to expose me to differing viewpoints and that would challenge the way I think about things, so I could learn and be a better person in life.”
I cannot imagine a better answer than that.
Early critics of SCiLL, suggest that UNC-CH already values free-expression and has course offerings that touch on civic life and that the money being spent on SCiLL is wasteful. They lament that the faculty at SCiLL were not hired in the same way as the faculty-led process typical of academia.
On this last point, perhaps they are correct. But the “normal” process of hiring has led, in many campus enclaves, to an echo chamber where the vast majority of faculty represent one specific way of thinking, while the 11 or so faculty that Provost Chris Clemens and Jed have put together represent those among the best and brightest minds in liberal arts, nationwide.
And they are just getting started.
Fall of 2024, SCiLL’s first semester offered three courses, which has already grown to 12. All classes are fully filled with young minds eager to learn and to have a better, more well-rounded college experience.
After the class concluded, I made my way to the Whitehead Building, where SCiLL is housed, adjacent to the Carolina Inn, and was greeted by Derrick, the student services director. He showed me into a conference room, where I met with Jed and one of the professors, John Rose.
The outer walls of the room were lined with black iron, old-school (pun intended) radiators, guarded on the inner wall by dark mahogany bookshelves and a heavy, brick fireplace. The age of the room suggested to me that this was not the first time it had hosted a conversation about how to improve the higher education experience, and I wondered if prior conversations were as urgent as I felt this one to be.
SCiLL is not a panacea for our societal woes or partisan conflicts, but its core purpose is essential to ensuring that a place exists that values the age-old way civilizations conduct their on-going affairs of problem solving. UNC Chapel Hill should be commended for its most-recent commitment to this endeavor. And in the coming years, I hope we will see it flourish not only at UNC, but up and down our state’s education system and throughout the UNC System.
I look forward to seeing how high and far Jed and his colleagues can take it.