Infighting hits hard at university program intended to revive classical education

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Like the other programs launched at universities around the country to revive the classical liberal arts and America’s founding principles, the University of North Carolina’s School of Civic Life and Leadership has faced fierce antagonism from entrenched faculty and administrators. Mostly, the opposition comes from academics on the left who typically demean the push for traditional civics education as a rightwing enterprise.

But here at the state’s flagship university, the battle lines are not strictly ideological. Although leftwing professors have condemned the School of Civic Life and Leadership since its inception, the real damage has been caused by the internecine fighting among professors and administrators who believe in its mission.

The vitriol poisoning the two-year-old initiative rose to new heights last week with the resignation of UNC’s chief academic officer. Provost J. Christopher Clemens, who once described himself as “among the most outspoken conservative members” of the faculty, was instrumental in advocating for the School of Civic Life and Leadership, known as SCiLL, against vicious pushback from hostile faculty.

Clemens’ decision to return teaching duties follows months of acrimonious infighting and protest resignations by several UNC professors from other departments who became involved in SCiLL, marked by charges of broken promises, retaliation, character assassination, and planted media leaks. The mutual recriminations roiling SCiLL threaten to turn off students, sour donors, and scare off professors from accepting faculty positions at one of the nation’s most ambitious efforts to revive free speech and traditional scholarship in academia.

While some of the disputants are conservatives and others classical liberals, all of them are free speech advocates who all profess commitment to SCiLL’s traditional intellectual principles and democratic ideals anchored in the ideals of civil discourse. Behind those lofty principles, however, lie some very concrete free-market motivations: coveted civics professorships that pay up to twice as much as some humanities teaching positions at UNC, plus entrée into an elite academic unit whose fundraising potential in the conservative funding network is said to be in the tens of millions of dollars.

The conflict touches on a key question for a dozen similar civics initiatives that have arisen at other public universities and others in the pipeline: Do you break from academe’s progressive orthodoxy by hiring civics-minded professors already at the school, or do you recruit outside faculty who are not beholden to the status quo?

The tension between these two visions has come to the fore in Chapel Hill. On one side, longtime UNC professors who sought faculty positions at SCiLL are allied with Clemens, a self-avowed conservative who has been pushing for civics-minded programs at UNC for nearly a decade against faculty whose belligerence he once decried as “vicious personal attacks” and “persecution.”

They cast blame on SCiLL’s dean, Jed Atkins, who has focused on recruiting outside professors. A classical scholar of Greek and Roman political philosophy, Atkins has served as SCiLL’s dean for a year, after leaving his position as a professor of classical studies at nearby Duke University and director of Duke’s Civil Discourse Project.

In emails leaked to the media last month, Atkins was accused by his critics of hijacking the faculty selection process. More recent disclosures show that he is accused of retaliating against Inger S.B. Brodey, a UNC literature professor, for criticizing him.

In recent weeks, similar allegations have been leveled against Clemens, a professor of physics and astronomy who is depicted as orchestrating a hostile takeover of SCiLL. In a redacted internal email provided to RealClearInvestigations, a SCiLL professor blamed the provost for interfering in the faculty hiring process to help his allies. According to this version of events, which was cc’d to top UNC officials, Clemens poisoned the process to “create the media firestorm he personally threatened would come if the Dean did not bow to Chris’s pressure campaign to hire Chris’s friends outside of normal rules and procedures.”

Inger Brodey, one of the senior UNC professors who resigned in protest as associate dean of SCiLL and from SCiLL’s faculty search committee, suggested Provost Clemens became political collateral damage in a power struggle over the civics mission from which SCiLL may never recover.

Under political pressure, Chancellor Lee Roberts “is siding with Jed Atkins against the many faculty and administrators calling him out on his lack of integrity, poor decisions, lack of leadership ability, and betrayal of SCiLL’s mission,” Brodey emailed in a rare on-the-record faculty comment. “It damages, perhaps beyond repair, SCILL’s future ability to improve civil discourse on campus and in the community.”

UNC Board of Trustees members either did not respond to inquiries or declined to speak for attribution. Clemens and Atkins declined comment.

The bad blood spilled out in public in March in articles by Inside Higher Education and the student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, which quoted leaked emails accusing Atkins of disregarding faculty input on candidates in the hiring process. Brodey told the student newspaper by email that the faculty search was corrupted by “improprieties, slander, vindictiveness and manipulation.” The IHE article quoted an email sent by UNC economist Jonathan Williams to Dean Atkins, Chancellor Roberts and Provost Clemens declaring SCiLL to be an “unmitigated disaster.”

An Outside-Hiring Mandate

The conflict partly stems from the way SCiLL was created as a self-governing, autonomous institute designed to operate at arm’s length from the rest of the university. In the legislation creating the civics school, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled General Assembly directed SCiLL to hire 10 to 20 tenure-track faculty from outside the university, restricting lucrative professional opportunities for longtime UNC faculty.

But there was an escape hatch. UNC professors can work at SCiLL as adjuncts, with renewable contracts, and, more important, they are also eligible for  positions shared between two academic departments, called joint appointments. The “joints” are coveted positions because they not only give professors voting power over hiring and curricula – and influence over the department’s mission and philosophy– but they typically come with compensation packages more in line with full-time SCiLL professors, some of whom are paid 50% to 100% more than some veteran UNC professors in the humanities.

While directed to hire from outside UNC, SCiLL was unable to disentangle itself from UNC professors entirely. In October 2023, the university announced that nine UNC professors would serve as SCiLL’s “inaugural faculty” to help the new civics program get off the ground. Disqualified by law from seeking full-time tenured positions at SCiLL, many of these inaugural faculty joined SCiLL with the expectation that they would be rewarded with joint appointments and pay raises, according to internal emails. As SCiLL’s inaugural faculty was reviewing and interviewing outside candidates, the anticipated “joints” never materialized, sparking a revolt within SCiLL.

“They could not apply for a job at their own university – it’s borderline illegal,” said one UNC professor of the hiring restrictions. “The conservative UNC faculty who helped lay the groundwork for the program got totally burned.”

‘Tough Calls’ Have to Be Made

External hiring is a common practice in civics programs, a design feature that can lead to faculty tensions over mission and direction, said civics pioneer Paul Carrese, who is a former member of the advisory board of SCiLL’s predecessor, the Program on Public Discourse.

“I’ve been in this situation where faculty from other existing departments think they might be sympathetic and supportive,” said Carrese, who was the founding director of the civics school at Arizona State University. “And then, when it comes down to some crucial questions like hiring – the life-blood of the faculty community – there are tough calls that have to be made.”

After a contentious faculty search process that led to several UNC faculty resigning from faculty search duties at SCiLL, Atkins sent out tenure-track offers to eight external candidates.

The faculty resignations from faculty search duties are not merely symbolic protests. They complicate the requirement, under SCiLL’s bylaws, for SCiLL to have four “full” professors to hire faculty or to award tenure. Dean Atkin’s supporters see the professor resignations, and last month’s email leaks publicizing the resignations, as an attempt to sabotage the new school.

No new hires have been publicly announced since the eight job offers went out more than a month ago.

Tensions were already simmering as early as May 2024, as SCiLL was bringing in its first six outside hires. UNC philosophy professor Matthew Kotzen, one of the nine inaugural faculty members, expressed impatience in an email to Atkins for the joint appointments, reminding the dean that the UNC inaugural faculty were expecting promotions.

“Our understanding all along had been,” Kotzen wrote, that the inaugural faculty would be recommended “for non-Adjunct appointments in SCiLL, in part so that we would have formal voting rights.”

‘Toxic Environment’

One professor caught up in the dispute was Brodey, a professor of English and comparative literature who joined SCiLL as inaugural faculty and was appointed as SCiLL’s associate dean, in addition to serving on SCiLL’s faculty search committee and on the advisory committee for faculty hiring. Under university rules, all faculty votes are advisory to the dean, but it is customary for the dean to accept faculty advice.

Brodey, who came to UNC in 2003, is a full professor who has been working in academia for three decades. Before she became one of the nine inaugural faculty at SCiLL, her base annual salary at UNC was $95,509. In 2024, her base pay increased to $114,309, but she is still woefully underpaid compared to the full professor tenured in SCiLL, Dustin Sebell, whose base salary is $200,000.

SCiLL pays a competitive wage by UNC standards. The average base salary last year for a full professor at UNC was $174,500, and the average associate professor was paid $113,200.

On Jan. 8, Brodey wrote a plea to Provost Clemens, expressing alarm that Dean Atkins was unilaterally changing SCiLL’s mission and hiring “candidates who conform to unspoken, homogenous, ideological criteria.” She cited the rejection of an external candidate whose syllabus included a land acknowledgment honoring indigenous Indian tribes as “only one example of a pattern of exclusion.”

Brodey also wrote that as the sole woman on SCiLL’s leadership team, she was subject to inequities in treatment, workload, and salary. She said her joint appointment was being withheld from her as punishment for her objections to the dean’s hijacking of SCiLL.

“I feel personally betrayed by our current Dean, who promised me a joint position so that I could vote on SCiLL issues and then suddenly reversed course,” Brodey wrote. “The contract and raise I’ve consistently been promised by the Dean have been punitively removed in retaliation for perceived disloyalty – not to SCiLL’s mission, but to the blind and unquestioning loyalty that the current Dean demands.”

She described Atkins as “secretive, authoritarian, manipulative, divisive, and frequently unjust.”

Brodey urged the provost to intervene before SCiLL could hire another wave of tenure-track faculty from outside the university.

“I urge you to act soon to restore SCiLL to its original mission before a bevy of new faculty are hired, are immediately forced to polarize in this toxic environment,” Brodey wrote.

One of Atkins’ own hires in SCiLL, David Decosimo, who came from Boston University, has publicly expressed support for Brodey.

In an emailed statement to RealClearInvestigations, SCiLL professor Sebell said that a joint appointment would have to go through an internal review process involving SCiLL faculty, and that faculty are still in the process of being hired from outside UNC.

“The process involves a letter of application, a research presentation, and a vote of the tenure-line faculty on the appointment,” Sebell emailed.

On Jan. 17, Brodey wrote a two-page memo to Atkins outlining her concerns. She again mentioned the spat over the job candidate’s land acknowledgment, which “may have been required by the institution at which he currently works.”

“While it may be within the dean’s power to intervene at every stage of the search and add/remove names, overruling the opinions of the committee,” she wrote, “I have never seen this power executed outside of SCiLL.”

In a Jan. 19 email to Brodey, SCiLL professor Sebell said nothing untoward took place in the faculty selection process.

“Inger, I understand that you’re unhappy with the results of the process,” Sebell wrote. “You’re disappointed. I get it, I really do. But try to keep things in perspective, and don’t lose sight of the difference between your disappointment with the outcome in a very small handful of cases and the integrity of the process itself.”

Less than a week later, on Jan. 24, the provost intervened. Clemens took the extraordinary step of canceling SCiLL’s job search, citing a lack of funding for tenure-track positions. In his two-page memo, Clemens authorized Atkins to limit the faculty search to teaching-track positions, which are ineligible for tenure or for voting on hiring and curricula – essentially, professors without institutional power.

Then three days later, the provost reversed himself. In a brief note to SCiLL faculty, Clemens said Chancellor Roberts had committed sufficient funds to continue the job search for tenure-track professors.

More Scrutiny Likely

The SCiLL faction sees the canceled job search as payback. When RealClearInvestigations asked UNC to explain the reason for the eleventh-hour search cancellation and how funds suddenly became available to resume the job search, UNC communications told RCI: “We have nothing further to share.”

In a statement to Inside Higher Education last month, UNC’s media relations office defended the faculty search: “SCiLL’s faculty searches honored all university rules and procedures. Applicants were advanced on the basis of merit and fit with the advertised positions.”

SCiLL professors hired last year have also defended this year’s faculty selection process.

“Those who ended up receiving offers earned overwhelming support from SCiLL’s core faculty,” said SCiLL professor Danielle James. “We’re committed to hiring humanists and social scientists with impressive backgrounds in literature, history, American constitutional development, and comparative politics.”

The provost’s resignation does not signal the end of unwanted scrutiny for Chapel Hill’s vaunted civics school.

The parties involved say that the release of public records requests will trigger another wave of interest, as will the credentials and backgrounds of any future hires who accept positions in SCiLL.

If the internal turmoil spills out into the courts, as some predict could happen, a fuller picture will emerge of how the elusive ideal of civil discourse and respectful disagreement turned into a conflict that seemed everything but.

It is often said that academic turf battles are so vicious because the stakes are so low. The contretemps in North Carolina illustrates a deeper reality: Disputes over power and money in the ivory tower can make or break academic careers.

Editor’s Note: John Murawski’s wife is a UNC alumna and longtime contributor to the school who made two donations earmarked for SCiLL from her personal account in December 2024.