Can Free Speech Flourish Again At UNC?

A School of Civic Life And Leadership Aspires to Instill Civility and Humility In Students

An effort to restore a thriving culture of free speech at the University of North Carolina received a major write-up in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, with Barton Swain spotlighting UNC’s new School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) and its Dean, Jed Atkins. It’s a good piece of reporting and an ambitious and inspiring project. We urge you to read the entire piece here.

The new school has drawn fire from certain circles, writes Swain. Detractors portray it as a “right-wing Republican fifth column” bent on conquering Chapel Hill. But nothing in the piece supports such alarmist spin. The school’s aims don’t just strike us as sensible. They also seem much needed, if one aim of higher education is preparing younger Americans to lead the world’s greatest constitutional republic.

“I can’t think of many things less controversial than providing a civic education that brings students from all backgrounds and viewpoints into community to be able to explore the big questions of human flourishing,” Atkins told the WSJ. And we agree. Isn’t that what a university is supposed to do?

Atkins describes America’s growing inability to discuss serious matters civilly and rationally as a “civic crisis.” He hopes to quell the crisis by creating a culture within SCiLL that “asks students to rise above their partial viewpoints and perspectives to consider questions that transcend their own time and place, and to do that together.” Atkins later talks about nurturing an ethos of “humility” inside the school. And wouldn’t a little more humility, and a lot less hubris, be a breath of fresh air inside academia today?

“Mr. Atkins speaks frequently about his students coming to appreciate the complexity and fluidity of their own social and political views, and by extension the recklessness of judging the views of others too easily. “There’s a humility that comes with recognizing how complicated the world can be,” he says. We don’t often hear about students at top-rated universities learning and exhibiting the virtue of humility. Maybe, in time, we will.”

What’s so radical and alarming about any of this? It doesn’t sound like right-wing bomb-throwing to us.

Atkins told Swain that sporadic words of support for free expression and open discourse from college administrators, while welcome, aren’t enough. What’s needed is a campus-wide cultural change, for which this program might be a catalyst.

“Mr. Atkins thinks well-meaning university administrators—people who genuinely want universities to cultivate small-l liberal values—have too often assumed that subscribing to formal statements on “free expression” would solve the problem. “It’s very much about culture,” he says. “Statements of principle are important. The Kalven Report, the Chicago Statement”—the former a 1967 recommendation that the University of Chicago adopt a position of institutional neutrality, the latter a declaration of principles on free speech—“all those are important. I support those statements. But I think over the past 20 or 30 years we’ve spent a lot of time talking about principles and statements, which can be action-guiding, but not nearly enough time creating a free-speech culture in the classroom, in the residential halls.”

Universities are large, unwieldy, frequently hidebound institutions, making campus-wide change a daunting challenge. But what gives this a better-than-average chance of success are the important allies SCiLL will have as it takes shape. It has allies in the Statehouse and on the Board of Governors. That board recently hired a new chancellor, in Lee H. Roberts, who warmly welcomed the new school despite the sniping from certain circles.

Also there to lend SCiLL support is the UNC Alumni Free Speech Alliance, which sees the program as a harbinger of needed reform and an antidote to the appalling lack of civic literacy among younger Americans.

Can one small outpost of reasoned thought, civil discourse, and traditional scholarship really revolutionize the free speech culture at a long-established, set-in-its-ways school like UNC-Chapel Hill? Of course it can, if given the time to take root and flourish.

After all, from tiny acorns mighty oak trees grow.