By Art Padilla

WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH (October 23, 2025) – The mess at Carolina’s new School for Civic Life and Leadership goes on. And on.

The creation of the new school is an experiment that has proven to be a bad idea. Not least among the school’s problems are its vague and unrealistic goals. This is a shame because a supposed basic notion behind its creation–fostering civil discussions in American political life–is a terribly important one.

However, despite the late date and a waste of resources, the UNC trustees could still reel it in. Unlike Coach Belichick, they wouldn’t need to complete several Hail Mary passes to save the season.

A first step is to recognize this was not the best way to address any imbalance in the liberal-conservative campus discourse or to attract conservative scholars to UNC. 

Indifference and acrimony

Most Carolina faculty members have predictably reacted to the school with indifference. A few of the more directly involved professors from mainstream departments have been critical and have engaged in acrimonious disagreements over hiring.

There’s little the trustees or the chancellor can do now about the university’s reception. The faculty was excluded from the initial discussions, all “happy talk” about collegiality notwithstanding. Students have not exactly overwhelmed the civic life seminars with their attendance; it’s apparently hard to get a job with a BA in Conservative Studies. The UNC system headquarters remains absently silent.

The trustees and the top administrators have continued to sideline the faculty. They’ve bypassed normal academic processes and given the new school’s dean bizarrely independent hiring power, which will invite greater discord and isolate the school further. The school’s faculty and administration are regarded by many as right-wing affirmative action, which is just as harmful as are left-wing ideological litmus tests.

The new school was an ill-considered exclamation of power or exasperation aimed at the university and its “tenured radicals.” Admittedly, there has been a great deal of “woke” nonsense and intolerable, and often illegal, demonstrations that have annoyed or infuriated many within and outside universities.  At the same time, however, there’s zero evidence that students are indoctrinated by liberal professors or that students are silenced by professors in classroom discussions.

A new center for civil discourse

Here’s what makes more sense:

First, the school should be re-imagined as one of the University’s premier centers. Centers are different from academic entities like the School for Civic Life and Leadership in several important ways. They are interdisciplinary focal points that bring together resources from across a campus for collaboration on various educational functions. Harvard’s Kennedy School, for example, has 12 affiliated centers such as the Bloomberg Center for Cities, the Center for Public Leadership, or the Taubman Center for State and Local Government. They don’t offer traditional courses or award degrees. They often involve faculty but the academic “homes” and tenures of the professors remain at one of the traditional academic departments.

The overarching goal of this university-wide center for civil discourse would be to present and examine the obstacles that hurt and separate Americans by bringing a wide spectrum of eminent speakers once or twice a year to Chapel Hill. Its advisory board would include some of the most distinguished professors at Carolina, as well as trustees and other state leaders. Its branding should highlight solutions and not labels. It should meaningfully involve existing classes and curricula throughout the university.

The center’s usefulness and impact would be evaluated during its third year. Its continuance would depend on what it had accomplished and on how well it had done so.

Second, the University should re-energize its heretofore languid efforts to reduce administrative bloat and to re-direct resources to academic purposes. It’s a bloat that includes an autonomous array of non-academic activities sustained by student fees (e.g., myriad student affairs fees, health fees) that students are obliged to pay on top of tuition charges. 

In addition, peripheral curricula and departments should be examined for possible elimination or absorption into existing academic departments. Their contributions would be assessed with the same rigor as are other mainstream academic units.

It is within these programs that much of the Latinx, preferred pronouns, and ideological dribble resides. It would signal a re-alignment of priorities that have long been out of balance.

Meddling or preaching

These efforts would accomplish two things. First, they would take trustees out of the meddling and into the preaching realms. The problem with the new civics school isn’t the idea behind it; few oppose more balance within the academy. The problem is that its imposition represents unwarranted micro-management and contravenes sound curricular development and intelligent pedagogy.

Second, the changes would underscore the academic purpose of the university and begin a turn to a decades-long dilution of academic priorities.

The world’s greatest enslaver has always been ignorance; its most vibrant emancipator is truth understood. With its international prominence, Carolina could lead the national debate on social discord and political polarization, making Chapel Hill the place to come for comprehension and renewal.

Instead, the new civic school wallows in a divisive quagmire that has become yet another recent embarrassment for UNC.

Dr. Art Padilla splits his time between homes in Wrightsville Beach and Raleigh. He served as a senior administrator at the University of North Carolina System headquarters and later at NC State, where he was chairman of the Department of Management. He has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, and the University of Arizona, winning several teaching awards and recognitions, including the Holladay Medal, the highest faculty honor at NC State. He recently completed the 2nd edition of his book Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments.