Has Chapel Hill’s ‘Civic Life’ School Become a Conservative Center?

In 2021, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees hesitated for months to approve a tenured position for Nikole Hannah-Jones. The Chapel Hill alumna had won a Pulitzer Prize for her introductory essay to The New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” but that work drew conservative opposition.

Amid accusations that the board was spurning Hannah-Jones due to politics, David Decosimo, then a Boston University associate professor of theology and ethics, tweeted on the situation. “Now that so many people seem to care about viewpoint discrimination in academia, let’s talk about it,” he wrote. “It’s common, unethical, intellectually dishonest and betrays the whole purpose of a university. And it almost always runs one way: against those seen as not ‘progressive.’”

Decosimo wrote that viewpoint discrimination in the other direction was “far less common and usually involves forces *external* to academia (trustees, politicians).” He said, “The most effective enforcers of viewpoint discrimination are militantly ‘progressive’ and *internal* to academia: the faculty.”

Chapel Hill didn’t ultimately land Hannah-Jones; the board eventually offered her a tenured appointment, but she went to Howard University instead. Chapel Hill’s trustees did, however, go on to employ Decosimo. That was after trustees and politicians—those external forces Decosimo mentioned—pushed to create a new school at Chapel Hill.

At least as far back as 2017, the UNC system Board of Governors had explored creating a center for conservative thought at the flagship university. Chris Clemens, a self-identified conservative Chapel Hill professor who’s now provost, spearheaded a civil discourse project and asked Robert George, a prominent conservative law scholar at Princeton University, to chair the advisory committee. The committee included members of both the UNC system and Chapel Hill boards. Many faculty feared a conservative agenda, but no conservative center materialized.

Then, in early 2023, the Chapel Hill board abruptly passed a resolution urging university administrators to accelerate their development of “a School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL).” Clemens said he had written a draft budget memo for a school that would expand on the earlier civil discourse work, and the board members had heard about the idea from him. But Clemens said he didn’t know the resolution was coming.

On Fox News, then–board chair David Boliek said Chapel Hill has “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. So this is an effort to try to remedy that.” Prior chairs of the Chapel Hill faculty denounced the creation of the school, and hundreds of faculty signed a letter saying it would violate the academic tradition that the faculty controls the curriculum. But the GOP-controlled State Legislature pitched in millions in funding and passed legislation requiring Chapel Hill to create the school and hire 10 to 20 faculty from outside the university, plus make them eligible for tenure.

In August, Chapel Hill announced the hiring of 11 new faculty members to work at the new school, making a faculty of around 20. Among the newcomers was Decosimo, brought in as one of two associate deans. Some current UNC faculty members were involved in the hirings, but others have criticized the appointment process.

Jay Smith, the president of North Carolina’s state branch of the American Association of University Professors and a Chapel Hill professor, wrote in the Daily Tar Heel student newspaper that the School of Civic Life faculty “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,’” Smith wrote. He said the school’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.”

Faculty Connections

Did Boliek get his remedy for the lack of ideological balance on Chapel Hill’s campus that he alleged? Has this become what some said it would—a center for conservative thought?

What’s considered “conservative” is debatable and evolving. But the new School of Civic Life faculty does include outspoken critics of diversity, equity and inclusion and other causes associated with the left. It features those who allege there’s widespread viewpoint discrimination in academe and seek to combat it. It includes researchers and proponents of Christian ethics. And in another sense of “conservative,” it includes scholars who study and teach about ancient philosophers and the Western literary canon.

These faculty hail from elite institutions. And, as previously reported by The Daily Tar Heel and The Assembly, a North Carolina–focused online outlet, they also hail from some of the same programs. Those include the Duke University Civil Discourse Project, which School of Civic Life dean and director Jed Atkins led before leaving for Chapel Hill.

These scholars have also been supported by some of the same organizations, including the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education and the Jack Miller Center. The Princeton, N.J.–based Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education funds multiple university-adjacent institutes, including a Roman Catholic ministry at Princeton and a “Catholic intellectual tradition”-fostering institute at the University of Pennsylvania. George is a board member of the foundation, which is tied to the Witherspoon Institute, a think tank that has opposed same-sex marriage. (R.J. Snell, a senior adviser to the foundation and director of academic programs at the Witherspoon Institute, told Inside Higher Ed the foundation is not “religious in any way, we’re nonconfessional, nonsectarian” and “we’re supporting the full range of academic enterprise that you would expect at a university.”)

We have no shortage of left-of-center, progressive views on our campus … But the same really can’t be said about right-of-center views. So this is an effort to try to remedy that.”

—David Boliek, former Board of Trustees chair

The Philadelphia-based Jack Miller Center, which has supported at least a handful of the new faculty, says on its website that it promotes “teaching America’s founding principles and history,” and laments that “judging the past has become more important than understanding the past.” It says it’s “been strategically investing in scholars dedicated to the American political tradition, creating a talent pipeline to meet the hiring needs” of civics centers.

Atkins, who didn’t provide an interview for this article, said in a statement that key parts of the School of Civic Life’s mission include preparing students for “citizenship and civic leadership by fostering a free-speech culture and providing an education grounded in encouraging the human search for meaning, developing the capacities for civil discourse and wise decision-making, and understanding the history, institutions and values of the American political tradition.” The school is offering classes and a minor and plans to provide a 30-minute program to all freshmen on free expression and civil discourse on campus.

So who has been hired for this mission?

The Newcomers

Not all of the new school’s faculty are new to Chapel Hill. Fewer than half predated it and are still affiliated with departments outside the school. For example, the school’s second associate dean, Inger S. B. Brodey, is a Jane Austen scholar who serves in multiple parts of the university.

Some of the faculty newly hired to work specifically at the School of Civic Life appear similar to Brodey in two senses: Their research focuses on Western subjects or writers—such as Cicero and David Hume—and they don’t appear to have a significant public profile.

But others, such as Decosimo, have publicly weighed in on contemporary controversies. Decosimo, who has degrees from elite institutions, is a scholar of Christian and Islamic thinkers and directed Boston University’s Institute for Philosophy and Religion. He has a book coming out called The Spirit of Christian Ethics. (Atkins, the school’s dean/director, recently released The Christian Origins of Tolerance.)

Decosimo hasn’t refrained from denouncing Republicans. In 2017, he excoriated Donald Trump in The Washington Post over his attempt to ban people from Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. “Trump and his administration could learn a thing or two about American values such as freedom and equality from the religion and people they so hate,” Decosimo wrote. “For Islam and the American founders alike, freedom is about protection from arbitrary power and rule by law, not the caprices of men.”

He’s also repeatedly denounced DEI efforts. Last year in The Wall Street Journal, Decosimo criticized the implementation of Ibram X. Kendi’s antiracism philosophy at BU, where Kendi is a professor (and where his Center for Antiracist Research has faced accusations of mismanagement). Decosimo’s critique wasn’t limited to BU. “At universities everywhere, activist faculty and administrators are still quietly working to institutionalize Mr. Kendi’s vision,” Decosimo wrote. “They have made embracing ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ a criterion for hiring and tenure, have rewritten disciplinary standards to privilege antiracist ideology, and are discerning ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action ruling.”

In October 2023, after Hamas’s attack on Israelis and some controversial faculty statements about Israel, Decosimo posted on X that there had been “years of faculty searches that have been explicitly ideological and partisan, prizing and hiring for the illiberal radicalism on display in the Kendi debacle and Hamas-praise alike.” He also wrote that “much DEI is expressly anti-Israel (settler colonialism/whiteness) and conflates mandatory support for Palestine (liberation) with supporting Hamas.”

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.”

—Jay Smith, president of the AAUP’s North Carolina chapter

Melody Grubaugh, who is listed as a lecturer and an adjunct assistant professor at the new school, has less of a public profile than Decosimo. Her bio page on the website says she “focuses on constitutional studies, political theory and politics and literature.” She was a “senior reader” at the Canterbury Institute in Oxford, one of the 28 programs and institutes that the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education says it funds at elite U.S. and U.K. universities.

Not noted on Grubaugh’s bio page is her managing editor position at Fairer Disputations, a website that promotes what it calls “sex-realist feminism,” a school of thought “grounded in the basic fact that sex is real.” Among other things, the website publishes and shares outside articles from around the web that criticize the transgender movement.

Connor Grubaugh, Melody’s husband and an intellectual historian and political theorist, is also coming to work at the school July 1. In 2021, in the Jewish magazine Tablet, he defended political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s controversial 1959 essay “Reflections on Little Rock,” in which Arendt wrote that “enforced integration is no better than enforced segregation” and “the moment social discrimination is legally abolished, the freedom of society is violated.”

He used Arendt’s essay to criticize antiracist thought. “Long before progressively expansive interpretations of Brown v. Board and the 1964 Civil Rights Act by courts and federal agencies made school busing an antiracist mandate—long before Ibram X. Kendi pronounced ‘leveling group differences’ an ‘antiracist idea’—Arendt could foresee a day when the right of free association would be radically restricted in the name of equality overrunning its proper sphere,” he wrote.

Connor Grubaugh has also authored multiple articles for First Things, a longtime publication of a nonprofit whose stated mission “is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.” In a 2018 First Things article, “The Impossibility of ‘Alt-Right Christianity,’” he argued that orthodox Christianity was more immune from manipulation by racists than liberal Christianity.

The Grubaughs didn’t respond to requests for comment. The School of Civic Life website says Connor Grubaugh is finishing a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. In an interview with the Berkeley Institute, which lists him as an alumnus, he said he’s part of Duke’s Civil Discourse Project—the project Atkins led. The Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education supports both the Civil Discourse Project and the Berkeley Institute.

Connor Grubaugh has degrees from UC Berkeley, the University of Notre Dame and Oxford University, according to another short bio of him from the Barry Center, which says his position at the Duke Civil Discourse Project is as a “John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Fellow.” The Barry Center itself is a project of the Morningside Institute—yet another Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education–supported institute.

Academic Freedom Mavericks

Flynn Cratty says on his website he’ll be a professor of the practice and director of operations at the school. He was a lecturer on history at Harvard, where he took on a leadership position by founding the Council on Academic Freedom. The New York Times reported that Cratty seemed to play a role a year ago in causing a Harvard board member to lose faith in now-former president Claudine Gay.

In January, the newspaper wrote that one board member “caught word of a recent closed-door session at the Harvard Club of New York City where Flynn Cratty, a prominent Harvard academic, pointedly criticized Dr. Gay’s and the university’s commitment to academic freedom.” That board member and another later listened to “Cratty and other professors air their concerns about Harvard’s leadership,” and at least one of the two board members had “his confidence in Dr. Gay shaken” and joined her opponents, the Times wrote. But Cratty, who didn’t return Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment, told the Harvard Crimson student newspaper that the dinner conversation was “about ways Harvard can grow in its commitment to civil discourse and diversity of thought” and “we did not discuss or request President Gay’s removal.”

Cratty was associate director of Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, which says it studies “topics relevant to human flourishing, which may include family, friendship, virtue, community, work, beauty, forgiveness, religion, purpose, and meaning.” He was, like Connor Grubaugh, a John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and his Barry fellowship was in Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. George directs that program, which is also funded by the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education.

In an interview last year, Cratty told the Academic Freedom Alliance (another foundation grantee) that he was among those who worked on the Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry, released last year by the James Madison Program. The Princeton Principles differ from some past free speech and academic freedom statements by explicitly recommending that university trustees and alumni get involved in situations where “there is clear and convincing evidence that faculty members and administrators are not adequately fulfilling their responsibilities to foster and defend a culture of free inquiry.” The principles also say, “Government and private donors may fund programs devoted to fields of inquiry that they think would enhance intellectual diversity”—initiatives such as the School of Civic Life.

Cratty told the Academic Freedom Alliance that “I am somewhat insulated from the current battles over America’s past since I study and teach early modern European history … But it shapes the whole profession when, for example, the president of the American Historical Association is forced to issue a groveling apology for criticizing the 1619 Project.”

UNC Chapel Hill

Another incoming professor has written about issues within higher education in the pages of prestigious publications. Rita Koganzon, who was associate director of the University of Virginia’s Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy, where another new faculty member also worked, has written op-eds such as “The Coddling of the American Undergraduate” in The Chronicle of Higher Education and “An Infantilizing Double Standard for American College Students” in The New York Times.

Koganzon told Inside Higher Ed she specifically wanted to work at one of the civics centers like these that have appeared in multiple states. Republican lawmakers have backed their creation in Florida, Ohio and elsewhere. She said she partly heard about them through the Jack Miller Center, on whose academic advisory council she sits.

Another hire from Duke, John Rose, a professor of the practice at the School of Civic Life, was associate director of the Duke Civil Discourse Project. He has a master’s from Duke Divinity School and a doctorate from Princeton Theological Seminary.

In 2021, Rose wrote in The Wall Street Journal that he teaches “classes called ‘Political Polarization’ and ‘Conservatism’ that require my students to engage with all sides of today’s hottest political issues.”

Rose explained that his students respectfully discussed critical race theory. “Some thought it harmfully implied that blacks can’t get ahead on their own. Others pushed back,” he wrote. His students also “spoke up for all positions on abortion,” he wrote. He said that “When a liberal student mentioned this to a friend outside class, she was met with disbelief: ‘Let me get this straight, real Duke students in an actual class were discussing abortion and some of them actually admitted to being pro-life?’”

After the pro-Trump mob entered the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Rose said he asked students if they “had a family member or friend who voted for Donald Trump. In a class of 56, 50 hands went up. I then asked them to keep their hands up if they thought this person’s vote was motivated by anything unsavory—say, sexism or racism. Every hand but two went down.” Rose said that “when you actually know others, they aren’t an abstraction onto which you can project your own political narratives.”

The School of Civic Life and Leadership is no longer an abstraction to the Chapel Hill faculty who had opposed it. What do faculty think of it now?

A Questioned Mission

A few of the school’s initial faculty, who were at Chapel Hill before its creation, have ended their affiliations with it. One was Matthew Kotzen, Chapel Hill’s philosophy department chair. Kotzen told Inside Higher Ed in an email that his staying depended, among other things, on his level of enthusiasm for the school’s trajectory. He hinted at concerns with that trajectory.

Kotzen said his own views for the school had aligned more with those of Sarah Treul, who was interim dean and director but was passed over for the permanent position (Clemens, the provost, had the final sign-off on the hire before the Board of Trustees approved it). Kotzen said he had wanted “a broader diversity of voices, disciplines, perspectives and intellectual focus.”

Kotzen also said he thought that appointment, promotion and tenure decisions for the school’s faculty would go through the Chapel Hill College of Arts and Sciences and its leadership. But he said these decisions ended up going directly from the school to Clemens. Further, Kotzen said he “had some misgivings about the way that the tenure-track faculty searches last year were conducted, though I am confident that all relevant university rules and policies were followed.” He didn’t provide more specifics.

Treul, an American politics professor, told The Daily Tar Heel that the school seemingly “has narrowed its focus to the humanities with a further concentration in religion and historical political thought.” She told The Assembly that “the school is not what I envisioned.” She didn’t provide further comment to Inside Higher Ed.

Multiple School of Civic Life faculty are scholars of Christian thought. In an email, Decosimo wrote that this makes sense: In a liberal democracy, he said, citizens must wrestle with the question of “What role, if any, should our deepest convictions about the most important things play in our political activity and common life?” He said, “Educating for civic life … requires learning how to talk and wrestle with fundamental questions alongside those who disagree with us and in conversation with the important texts and figures who shape the world and country we inhabit.”

Koganzon said that “Christian thought is simply part of Western thought—it’s impossible to understand Western thought without understanding Christianity.” She said, “I’m not Christian, but I’ve taught [Thomas] Aquinas, I’ve taught Augustine, I’ve taught the Bible—it’s just pretty much part of the political theory canon.”

“I think the purpose of our program and similar programs is to bring together people from complementary liberal arts disciplines to try to find a better approach to understanding politics,” said Koganzon, who noted she wasn’t speaking for the school as a whole. She said, “The academy has done a pretty poor job of accounting for the roots and popularity of right-populist movements in the U.S. and abroad over the past decade, a failure that I think is due in part to its having marginalized both ‘conservative’ forms of scholarship like the history of political thought and politically conservative scholars.” She also said, “I think there is a growing appetite for the revitalization of more robust political debate on campus.”

It’s unclear what the majority of UNC faculty now think of the school that hundreds protested. But Beth Moracco, current chair of the Chapel Hill faculty, said she’s heard cautious optimism; faculty have said the school could help, for instance, with the vigorous debate that may arise due to the election results.

“We as a society are quite polarized,” Moracco said, and “there’s always room for more engaged, constructive civil discourse.”