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UNC launches school to promote free speech culture on campus, sparks criticism

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The newly established School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, which was launched in part to foster free speech on UNC's campus, has faced criticism from students and professors. But John P. Preyer, chair of UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees, told Fox News Digital that the goal of the new school is to promote public discourse, civic life and leadership regardless of politics. 

Before that, in June 2023, the school made waves when its medical school disbanded its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) task force without implementing its recommendations just months after it banned DEI statements from admission, hiring, promotion and tenure campus wide. In August, following the monumental decision by the Supreme Court to overturn affirmative action in college admissions in which UNC was a defendant, the school announced it would no longer use race as a factor in its admissions and hiring decisions, including in the applications essays. 

Anti-Israel protestors have been causing campus unrest at the University of North Carolina since last school year. The "Gaza solidarity encampment" seen here was removed by police in April. (Travis Long/News & Observer/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

Conservative activist Kenny Xu described SCiLL as "the most ambitious plan yet in American higher education to develop a school to prepare people to debate both sides of an opinion."

"UNC is pretty much a national hotbed of newsworthiness," Xu, Executive Director of Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse, which focuses on free speech and intellectual diversity issues, told Fox News Digital. "I think students and faculty are starting to recognize that. If you're in the crosshairs of the national discourse, the need is extra high for you to build a school that can effectively navigate that discourse and the only way to effectively navigate that is through the lens of both sides."

"All the professors are extremely meritorious, all of them have advanced degrees from top universities and really, the purpose of this school is to attract a bunch of different viewpoints, including viewpoints that are not often heard on college campuses," he added. "It's likely to attract a lot of students from around the country just because students and people know, especially our generation knows, that schools most likely teach a one-sided, biased world view."

"Though they would never admit it, the faculty of SCiLL benefited from affirmative action, but of the unjustifiable kind that works in reverse," he wrote. "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.’ That ecosystem thrives on other built-in advantages." 

"SCiLL's mission, like that of other similarly inspired centers across the country, is supported by the generosity of rich donors working to defend and disguise capitalism's worst excesses, a gerrymandered GOP supermajority in our state and a university administration willing to accommodate the political goals of legislators and their minions on governing boards," he added. "SCiLL professors may well be the most protected people on our campus."

Xu said it's "almost guaranteed" that some among UNC's faculty are going to oppose a lot of the messaging out of SCiLL, but applauded the Board of Trustees for their "courage" in proposing the idea and then defending it from "withering criticism" it has received in recent years. 

South Building on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill. (iStock)

"I think the hope of the trustees is that it becomes a model," Xu said. "A lot of university presidents are following the establishment of the school carefully. If UNC becomes successful at attracting student demand, high-quality professors and enhancing debate, I think other universities might follow through with that as well."

Although, Xu argued, "not everybody is in favor of such a school for intellectual diversity."

"The issue isn't a lack of civic discourse or engagement on UNC's campus — the issue that SCiLL is meant to address is that the civic discourse on campus tends to disagree with the Board of Trustees' political ideologies," the editorial read.

Preyer described that notion as "just silly on its face" because the SCiLL aims to "promote better understanding among students for how to reason and engage in civic debate in a way that's been lacking."

"The whole point of this is to not have it be politicized and for any professor to criticize it with that concern, I think they're betraying their own bias and prejudice about the type of views that they want represented," he said. "We have 4,000 plus or minus faculty at UNC, and we're talking about a couple of dozen critics whose spirit of tolerance and diversity is, ironically, not what they would like to think it is when it comes to the establishment of a new program [or] a new school that they immediately criticize it before it has really even come to fruition."

The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s seal is covered in graffiti on Thursday, May 2, 2024. Students from the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity were commended by some after photos surfaced of them holding up the American flag during an anti-Israel protest. (The Image Direct for Fox News Digital)

"Every survey that the Foundation for Individual Rights has taken on the top schools shows that there's a lot of self-censorship and shows that there are certain perspectives that are accepted or not," Xu said. "We grew up in the age of the Internet, we grew up in the age of Twitter and X. The student demand for such a college, I think, is to the point where you can't ignore that."

"The Board of Trustees felt it important that it be formalized with the creation of a new school with a specific curriculum devoted to bringing students together to explore how to reason and engage in civil debate," he said, in an effort to "get away from the sort of canceling of a contrary view."

"Students are the ones that are quick to want to curtail the free flow of dialogue and debate and I think that that's a situation that exists on all campuses across the country," he added. "We want to remedy that by creating a school devoted to the teaching of the principles of free speech and reasoned debate in a way that helps train young people in a skill set that is going to take them into the world and hopefully make them better citizens as a result."