When Students Vote with Their Schedules

When the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees voted in 2023 to create a School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL), hundreds of UNC faculty signed a public letter accusing state leaders of forcing student education into “preapproved ideological containers.” The Chapel Hill AAUP chapter predictably called the school a “conservative-driven” project . Critics warned of legislative overreach and the death of shared governance. Three years later, the school that many tried to destroy in its first steps has nearly 1,000 students enrolled , declared minors jumped more than 90 percent in a single semester, and the University has announced that SCiLL will become the university’s 15th independent academic unit. Chancellor Lee Roberts notes the minor is “ heavily oversubscribed .” The faculty council remains unhappy. The students keep signing up. SCiLL is the clearest test case yet for whether you can build something new inside an institution whose dominant faculty culture is openly hostile to the project. The conventional wisdom has historically been that you cannot: tenure protects the monoculture, faculty governance slow-walks initiatives to death, and new hires get filtered through search committees populated by the very people the reform was meant to balance. The standard reformist move has therefore been external. SCiLL’s premise was different: build the parallel institution inside the gates, give it real faculty lines, real curricular authority, real budgetary independence, and let student demand do the rest. That premise has been vindicated, and the vindication is structural. Independent status means SCiLL is no longer a center a future provost can quietly defund. It sits alongside the Kenan-Flagler Business School and Hussman School of Journalism, with its own dean, faculty, and degree-granting authority. Jed Atkins , a classicist recruited from Duke’s Civil Discourse Project, has built a faculty of more than 20 around American political thought, the classical tradition, and great books. The school holds a $10 million National Endowment for the Humanities grant supporting eight endowed professorships, and a signature course on political polarization is now taught at thirty-five institutions nationwide . The infrastructure is permanent. None of this came easily. SCiLL has weathered significant advisory board turnover , criticism over hiring practices, and an expensive independent review commissioned by the university itself. Building a new school inside a hostile faculty culture produces turbulence by definition; if there had been no friction, the school would not be doing the work it was created to do. The question is not whether the launch was placid but whether the institution survived intact and grew. Enrollment quadrupled, faculty more than doubled, funding compounded, and the university’s response to the most contentious chapter of its short history was elevation, not retrenchment. That is what institutional success under fire looks like. This is a Tocquevillian achievement, and not an imposition on UNC’s tradition but a recovery of it. The university’s founding charge , attributed to Trustee Samuel McCorkle, held that “not more than a fifth part of the duties of society are enforced by civil laws” and that the rest required serious civic learning. The genius of American civic life has always been the capacity to build parallel associations rather than capture existing ones. SCiLL executes that move inside a university rather than outside one: The board did not try to convert the existing humanities and social science departments. It built a new school with a different mission and let students choose. A thousand of them have. According to Heterodox Academy , 45 such centers now exist across 25 states, most created by legislative mandate at public universities. The civic education revival is the largest structural movement in American higher education today. The harder question is what happens in the private sector. Private universities face no analogous external pressure. Their boards typically defer to faculty governance and to administrations on everything else, leaving private campuses as the monocultures that public-university reformers are now actively dismantling. The cost to students is not abstract. Without a SCiLL-type structure, undergraduates at most private institutions receive little serious instruction in American political thought, constitutional argument, or the habits of disagreement across difference. They graduate articulate within their own ideological tribe and unprepared for the pluralistic democracy they will inherit. The civics movement will reach private institutions only through donors and trustees willing to insist on structural independence as a condition of major giving. Until that happens, the most consequential reform energy in American higher education will remain a public-university phenomenon, and private universities will continue to lose ground on the very civic mission they were founded to serve. The students are telling the higher education universe exactly what they want, and they are voting with their course choices and their hearts and minds. The question is whether the institutions that purport to serve them are willing to listen, or whether they will continue mistaking faculty discomfort for principle and call that shared governance. The post When Students Vote with Their Schedules appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .