UNC-Chapel Hill’s Lesson in Civics

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Four days before Chris Clemens publicly announced his resignation as UNC-Chapel Hill provost, he enacted a new hiring policy at the School of Civic Life and Leadership. 

It was a surrender.

There had been near-constant upheaval over faculty recruitment in the school, also known as SCiLL, since Jed Atkins was appointed its dean and director in March 2024. But the breaking point came in January when Clemens canceled a hiring search over Atkins’ protests. He reversed course a few days later, saying Chancellor Lee Roberts put the search back on.

Clemens had clearly lost the power struggle with Atkins, and his new policy made it official. 

Called a “Subdelegation of Tenured and Tenure Track Hiring Authority in the School of Civic Life and Leadership,” it cedes the provost’s authority over SCiLL hiring to Atkins for the rest of 2025, unless SCiLL completes its legislatively mandated hiring before then. Days later, Clemens surprised many with the news that he was resigning; he recently alleged in a lawsuit that Atkins helped push him out.

It was a stark change in fortunes for Clemens, an outspoken conservative who had been widely viewed as the mouthpiece for the Board of Trustees and the General Assembly that empowers them. Trustees admitted his political leanings helped him get the job. He was also the one who marshaled SCiLL into being.

The battle that has divided the school and cost Clemens his prized creation was, on the surface, a process-heavy dispute about who makes hiring decisions, with faculty on all sides claiming that their opponents were out to hire their own friends. But underlying the personal animus is a central and long-running rupture over the foundational mission of civics schools like SCiLL, which are proliferating around the country: Should they reform how universities teach by prioritizing civil discourse, or should they add viewpoint diversity by hiring more conservatives? 

Clemens and his allies positioned themselves behind the former. “The rule in hiring is ‘first-rate places hire first-rate people.’ Period,” Clemens said in a statement to The Assembly. “To do otherwise invites rent seekers, sycophants, and a depressing decline into mediocrity.”

Atkins, who declined to comment for this story, also emphasizes civil discourse. But he told The Assembly last year that he shifted the school’s mission to include “providing an education grounded in encouraging the human search for meaning” and “understanding the history, institutions, and values of the American political tradition.” He’s hired 15 new UNC-CH faculty members who predominantly come from conservative circles and work in religious and Western political philosophy. 

“The original faculty for SCiLL were maybe a hodgepodge of people from all different disciplines around the campus,” said Marty Kotis, a trustee who has backed the school. “This is more people that are highly focused on School of Civic Life and Leadership-type topics.”

Atkins’ vision hasn’t just won the support of trustees. It has earned the backing of state lawmakers who have proposed legislation giving SCiLL even more latitude, and it aligns with the goals of prominent national conservatives, including a longtime friend who is also an adviser to powerful conservative donor Paul Singer.

Founding Fathers

The debate about how to encourage a broad array of political views on UNC-CH’s campus started before SCiLL.

In 2019, Clemens launched the school’s predecessor, the Program for Public Discourse, and began collaborating with Atkins, who ran a similar program at Duke University called the Civil Discourse Project. 

Two years later, Atkins put Clemens in touch with Keegan Callanan, who had been a friend since they attended Maine’s Bowdoin College together in the early 2000s. 

“The rule in hiring is ‘first-rate places hire first-rate people.’ Period.”

Chris Clemens, former UNC-Chapel Hill provost

Tax records show Callanan had recently taken a position at the Paul E. Singer Foundation, a grant-making organization founded by the billionaire investor. A man so well known for his adversarial approach to corporate takeovers that the former president of Argentina called him a “financial terrorist,” Singer has also become an influential political donor. He’s the chairman emeritus of the Manhattan Institute—home to conservative higher ed activist Christopher Rufo—and has personally donated nearly $100 million to national campaigns since 2021, according to an Assembly analysis of Federal Election Commission data.

Callanan, the Singer Foundation’s higher education director, is a proponent of hiring more conservatives for faculty positions. In 2018, he was asked during a panel discussion how to overcome a perceived liberal bias in faculty hiring without resorting to “conservative affirmative action.”

“Target of opportunity hiring is not something that should be off the table,” he said. “You can call this affirmative action for conservatives if you like.”

In Clemens’ telling, that difference of opinion kept them from working together.

“Jed Atkins introduced me to Keegan Callanan in 2021 as someone who might help secure funding for the Program for Public Discourse,” Clemens wrote in a statement to The Assembly. 

“Our subsequent conversations did not lead to anything substantive because Callanan wanted explicit hiring preferences for conservatives, something our PPD faculty had categorically rejected from the beginning.”

Callanan did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. 

By 2022, Inside Higher Ed reported, Clemens had become frustrated that the Program for Public Discourse wasn’t progressing faster. He enlisted Atkins to help him and Christian Lundberg, a professor with the program, write a budget request for what would become SCiLL. Clemens met with Callanan during that period, too. Entries from his calendar that The Assembly obtained via a public records request indicate that he and Callanan had meetings scheduled in May and November 2022. 

Clemens encouraged Lundberg to meet with Callanan, but Lundberg told The Assembly he declined. 

“In the early development of the School of Civic Life and Leadership, the provost said that he was being encouraged to reach out and potentially coordinate with Callanan,” Lundberg said. “A call was set up, and I declined to take it. I was worried that SCiLL was becoming more about partisan political balance than teaching students how to listen and debate.” 

“If you find someone that’s an inspirational leader, you may want to follow them or go to their program.”

Marty Kotis, UNC-Chapel Hill trustee

Lundberg declined to elaborate, but he has publicly argued against the idea that campus discourse can be improved by hiring more conservatives to bring “viewpoint diversity.”

“It seems so simple: just hire some conservatives to simulate balance,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Boston Globe. “But a partisan dictate reinforces the worst of our polarized moment.”

In January 2023, UNC-CH’s Board of Trustees passed a surprise resolution calling for the creation of SCiLL. Most faculty learned the school was coming from media reports later that day. Then-Chair Dave Boliek appeared on Fox News to champion the school—and signaled where trustees stood on the ideological diversity debate.

SCiLL was “all about balance” in political viewpoints on a campus with no shortage of liberals, he said. “But the same really can’t be said about right-of-center views. So this is an effort to try to remedy that with the School of Civic Life and Leadership, which will provide equal opportunity for both views to be taught.”

The General Assembly wrote SCiLL into the state budget that October, requiring UNC-CH to hire at least 10 faculty from outside the university. Atkins was hired as SCiLL’s inaugural dean and director in March 2024.

The Many Committees

Then the hiring debate turned into a schism.

Before Atkins joined, UNC-CH announced that SCiLL would begin with nine adjunct faculty, all of whom had tenure in other departments on campus. The 10 additional faculty the General Assembly mandated would be hired starting in 2024.

In typical cases, a search committee selects the finalists, then the department’s faculty votes on which candidate to hire. If the person is being considered for tenure at the same time, a subset of the faculty—those who are tenured in the department at or above the candidate’s proposed rank—vote again on whether tenure should be included with a job offer. The department’s chair can overrule the faculty votes, but that’s rare in practice.

Things were more complicated in SCiLL. Because its inaugural professors were only considered adjuncts in SCiLL, they did not have voting rights. Instead, the faculty formed an advisory committee, then-SCiLL professor Matthew Kotzen explained in a 2024 email to Atkins obtained by a public records request. They thought the adjuncts would vote on which candidates to hire, and the committee would take the second vote about tenure once SCiLL completed its first round of hiring.

Neither happened, Kotzen said.

Kotzen wrote that Atkins dissolved the advisory committee without telling any of its members, then formed a new one. SCiLL’s current professors were sidelined from the hiring process, according to Kotzen. 

Five of the nine resigned before the fall semester began, but the search ended with 10 new faculty joining SCiLL from outside UNC-CH.

The second round of hiring was even more combative, according to a series of emails obtained by The Assembly. The search committee consisted of three people: David Decosimo and Dustin Sebell, who were both hired into SCiLL with tenure in 2024, and Inger Brodey, one of the remaining adjuncts. 

Decosimo and Brodey found themselves in opposition to Sebell over multiple candidates during a round of Zoom interviews. Five people they wanted to bring in for in-person interviews were denied for reasons they believed to be illegitimate. 

“I now understand from Jed that these include a candidate’s use of a (compelled speech) land acknowledgement in a syllabus found online, and a ‘lack of interest by faculty’ in a prior visit to campus that was not part of this search process,” Clemens wrote in an email.

Sebell wrote off those complaints as “sour grapes.” Critics of the process were simply “disappointed that the Dean did not offer you and/or your friends joint appointments in SCiLL,” he wrote. 

“You are also hoping to demoralize and defame the Dean, a man of singular goodness and integrity.”

Dustin Sebell, School of Civic Life and Leadership professor

A 2024-25 hiring plan obtained by The Assembly shows that Atkins intended to give Brodey a joint appointment in SCiLL, in addition to her current one in English and Comparative Literature, by October 2024. Real Clear Investigations reported that in January, she wrote an email to Clemens saying she felt “betrayed” by Atkins because it didn’t happen.

Other candidates with just Sebell’s vote moved forward, with Atkins’ backing. He and Sebell said Decosimo and Brodey were the ones treating candidates badly.

Giselle Corbie, UNC-CH’s vice provost for faculty affairs, wrote in an email that Atkins and Sebell “felt that some candidates were subjected to unfair follow-up questions in the Zoom round.” 

Decosimo and Brodey both resigned from the committee, and Atkins replaced them with two other faculty members who had been hired the prior year, one of whom was still completing a postdoc at Duke University, emails show.

In January, Clemens tried to cancel the job search. He said it was because of a lack of funds, but most people contacted by The Assembly believed it was because of the committee discord. Days later, Clemens said the search was back on. He wrote that Roberts had “committed sufficient funds,” Inside Higher Ed reported.

The next month, Corbie emailed Atkins to say that “HR agreed that the safest thing to do would be to extend campus interviews to those” Decosimo and Brodey supported, since they constituted a majority of the search committee. (The candidates Atkins felt were subjected to unfair questions had already moved forward, so no additional actions were needed, Corbie noted.)

Atkins declined, saying “campus invitations were extended strictly on the basis of the search criteria.”

Brodey resigned from SCiLL, saying that she had “lost faith in the director’s leadership, and can no longer trust that the original mission will be honored.” Jon Williams, an economics professor and a member of the new advisory committee Atkins had formed, resigned as well, saying Atkins “ignores any advice that isn’t simply confirmation.” All the UNC-CH faculty except Lundberg have now left SCiLL, and school sources say he didn’t attend a faculty meeting all year. 

Sebell, though, said they were the problem. He directed his most heated accusations at Clemens.

“Clearly, you are hoping … to exercise your power in an extraordinary and unprecedented way—specifically by denying SCiLL’s hires,” Sebell wrote in another email. “You are also hoping to demoralize and defame the Dean, a man of singular goodness and integrity, by lighting the media storm you ominously warned us would come if he did not hire your friends in violation of the spirit if not the letter of the law passed by the General Assembly.”

Sebell said in multiple internal emails that he had documentation of his allegations, but The Assembly was unable to obtain materials to back up that claim.

“The University follows established faculty hiring and appointment procedures, which involve multiple levels of review and oversight,” a university spokesperson said in a statement. 

New Hires and Old Friends

Regardless of the dispute about process, SCiLL has clearly shifted from what many of its creators envisioned.

One plan a committee of campus leaders authored in June 2023, after the trustees accelerated its creation, called for an oral communications lab. It also suggested the school should be rooted in other departments and existing areas of strength across campus.

Instead, most of SCiLL’s new hires come from conservative academic networks and focus on Western political philosophy.

In June, SCiLL named Daniel DiSalvo associate director. He is listed as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where Singer is chairman emeritus, and he received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia’s Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy, where he was advised by Jim Ceaser, the program’s director. Ceaser told The Assembly that Callanan, Singer’s higher education adviser who completed a postdoc at the program, is a good friend of his. Two other SCiLL hires, Rita Koganzon and Danielle Charette James, formerly served as the program’s associate directors. 

Atkins, DiSalvo, Koganzon, James, and Callanan received grants or fellowships from the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History, as did Sebell and Michael Hawley. The center is nonpartisan but has received significant donations from the foundation of billionaire conservative mega-donors Dick and Liz Uihlein. It is also closely associated with the Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy.

Atkins, DiSalvo, Callanan, Flynn Cratty, and Hawley also previously received fellowships from Princeton’s James Madison Program, which has become known as a hub for conservative academics. 

There are also extensive connections to Duke, where Atkins taught and Callanan completed his Ph.D. Hawley was Atkins’ doctoral student there, and five others—Connor Grubaugh, John Rose, Kathryn Wagner, Ejuerleigh Jones, and Nora Hanagan—taught in programs he founded or was affiliated with. All of those programs have ties to conservative donors or are known to attract right-leaning faculty. (Another SCiLL professor, Rasoul Namazi, taught at the university Duke launched in China.)

“The school is not what I envisioned,” Sarah Treul Roberts, a UNC-CH professor who served as  SCiLL’s interim director before Atkins was hired, said last year. He made it “a little bit more based on conservative thought” than she planned. 

“A partisan dictate reinforces the worst of our polarized moment.”

Christian Lundberg, SCiLL professor

Decosimo implied something similar when he announced his firing on X.

“Reform must be built on merit, courage, & principle, not nepotism, ideology, & secret handshakes,” he wrote. “Affirmative action for anyone is bad. Demanding loyalty oaths & unquestioning docility while selecting for personal connections & membership in certain networks is even worse.”

He also said he received no explanation about why he was being removed from the associate dean position. (He remains on faculty.)

Atkins’ backers say those connections are par for the course in hiring.

“If you find someone that’s an inspirational leader, you may want to follow them or go to their program,” said Kotis, the trustee. “I don’t think I’m hearing that those people aren’t the most qualified.”

A university spokesperson also said such overlaps are “not unusual.”

“Jed Atkins has a long history of working in the field of civic discourse and higher education,” they said in a statement. “Over the course of his career, he has collaborated widely and built professional connections with scholars and educators across the country, including many at UNC.”

The Assembly also obtained a text message Clemens sent after the most recent round of hiring that praised the cohort.

“Although I was unhappy with the process I am hearing positive vibes from the current UNC faculty about these hires,” he wrote, citing three by name who are more appealing to liberals on campus given their research interests and backgrounds. “Even without the input from his leadership team Jed seems to be hiring into a broader and more inclusive strategy than I anticipated.”

Dead Ends

As SCiLL’s hiring fight has boiled over into public view, Atkins’ critics within the school have compared notes about his relationship with the Singer Foundation’s higher education director. Callanan and Atkins thanked each other in their books, and a person with knowledge of SCiLL showed The Assembly documentation of discussions between the two about matters related to the school since Atkins became dean. A UNC-CH trustee also described meeting Callanan at a national higher education event. (The trustee said they didn’t know if Singer or anyone else had donated to SCiLL but requested anonymity to speak about potential university funders.)

“We do not comment on the personal relationships of trustees, donors, faculty or staff,” a UNC-CH spokesperson said in response to detailed questions about Callanan.

UNC-CH also would not say whether SCiLL has received donations from the Singer Foundation or any other group. 

“We respect donor privacy and are prohibited by law from publicly reporting on individual donations without consent. Donors are not given influence over academic or personnel decisions, including faculty hiring,” the university spokesperson said.

UNC-CH faced a flashpoint over a donor’s influence on hiring in 2021 when the journalism school’s namesake, Walter Hussman, objected to the hiring of Nikole Hannah-Jones. 

Many donations to UNC-CH, including a $1 million gift to SCiLL in 2023, are routed through private nonprofits controlled by the university. The General Assembly this summer passed the Personal Privacy Protection Act, giving donors additional privacy protections.   

It’s difficult to trace the Singer Foundation’s donations through its disclosures as well. The most recent two years of tax data show that 90 percent of its donations—nearly $200 million—went to the JP Morgan Charitable Giving Fund, a special type of foundation that allows Singer to direct the money without disclosing where it ends up.

In 2019, before he joined the Singer Foundation, Callanan said the JP Morgan Charitable Giving Fund was one of the organizations funding the center he ran at Middlebury College in Vermont.

“The University follows established faculty hiring and appointment procedures, which involve multiple levels of review and oversight.” 

UNC-Chapel Hill spokesperson

Singer has funded conservative efforts in North Carolina. ProPublica reported that the Concord Fund, controlled by longtime Federalist Society executive Leonard Leo and heavily funded by Singer, was a top donor to the Republican State Leadership Committee, a national group that supports state candidates. It helped flip North Carolina’s Supreme Court to Republican control in 2022, and state Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr. attended a party at Leo’s home to celebrate the victories.

Last year, the Concord Fund gave $2.9 million to the Republican State Leadership Committee, and $3.5 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association, national groups that in turn funded two of the largest Republican organizations in the state.

Callanan also has ties to the General Assembly. His twin brother was once the legislature’s lawyer, and Callanan served as an expert witness defending Senate leader Phil Berger and former House Speaker Tim Moore in three separate lawsuits. 

Legislative Mandate

The General Assembly has given strong indications of what it wants hiring at SCiLL to look like. The state Senate’s 2025 budget proposal—the first draft of which was released just weeks before Clemens gave up hiring oversight—would double the minimum number of faculty SCiLL has to hire from outside UNC-CH from 10 to 20, while affirming Atkins’ authority over hiring. 

“All faculty hired by or appointed to the School shall be subject to the approval of the Dean of the School,” it reads. (A similar provision was included in the legislation that first created SCiLL.) 

It would also prevent the school from providing joint appointments to existing UNC-CH faculty until the school hires 20 new people, ensuring adjuncts like the inaugural faculty don’t obtain voting rights in the next round of hiring, and it would add “the study of the great texts and traditions of Western civilization that form the foundation of the American republic” to SCiLL’s mission. 

Most tellingly, the budget would forbid the chancellor or trustees from delegating their authority over hiring the SCiLL dean to the provost or anyone else. Clemens’ successor would have no oversight of Atkins or whoever comes after him.

The General Assembly’s budget negotiations have been stalled for months, so it’s unclear if any of these requirements will become law. But none of the SCiLL items were altered during negotiations thus far, indicating that there’s little objection among GOP legislators.

Meanwhile, university leaders have tried to calm faculty concerns about hiring. Roberts told faculty recently that UNC-CH was investigating the situation. The message seemed likely to ease some of the frustration, until Paul Newton, who left the North Carolina Senate in March to become UNC-CH’s general counsel, told The Assembly that the investigation into SCiLL was launched at Atkins’ request.

Clemens told The Chronicle of Higher Education that it was “troubling, because to be credible it has to examine [Atkins’] own conduct. It is outright alarming when you consider that earlier this year UNC Media Relations assured the public that ‘SCiLL’s faculty searches honored all university rules and procedures.’ I know this statement to be false.”

In addition, the lawyer leading the investigation, Nathan Huff, has represented state Republican leaders in at least 10 cases, including all three cases where Callanan testified as an expert witness. A university spokesperson said neither Huff nor his firm were involved in hiring Callanan, that he had represented a wide variety of clients, and had never done so based on political party.

University leaders say that the success of SCiLL will remain a priority. “The mission remains worthy and valuable,” Roberts said at a faculty meeting on October 3.

With their new hires on board and most of the dissenters gone, SCiLL might finally agree on what that mission is.