View This Email In Your Browser
Going into last week, Democrats hoped civic engagement by young voters would help secure North Carolina for Vice President Kamala Harris. Historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, were seen as key.
In the days since Harris’s election loss, much discussion has focused on the failures of Democratic Party turnout. But after spending months organizing their peers to get to the polls, students at North Carolina HBCUs say their efforts weren’t in vain. No matter what comes next, they say, they will remain committed to improving American democracy.
“The whole purpose of our work was not for Kamala to win, or for Dems to sweep the ballot,” said Kyla Holton, a senior at North Carolina A&T State University and attorney general for the campus student government. “It was to get my community engaged.”
–P.R. Lockhart
HBCU Students Want to Drive Civic Engagement
Kamala Harris would have been the nation’s first president to graduate from an HBCU. Students at N.C. A&T and Bennett College say her loss in last week’s election won’t damper their commitment to political awareness.
How has your campus responded to the election results? Let us know at highered@theassemblync.com.
Thanks for reading The Quad, a higher education newsletter written by The Assembly’s Matt Hartman and Erin Gretzinger.
Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe here to get our weekly higher education newsletter.
UNC Trustee: SCiLL Promotes Democracy, Not Religion
Perrin W. Jones, a Charlotte anesthesiologist and a member of the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees, submitted this response to our story about UNC-CH’s School of Civic Life and Leadership. We are running it in full.
The Assembly’s recent story on UNC-Chapel Hill’s pioneering new School of Civic Life and Leadership missed an opportunity to explain clearly to your readers what the program teaches, what its students learn, and what those students think about it.
Instead of illuminating the pro-democracy program’s academic content, The Assembly’s 3,000-plus-word story followed the lead of other news media in obsessing over process, impugning participants’ motives, and highlighting the school’s origins—while getting that wrong.
The story asserts at the top that SCiLL was “launched at the behest of the UNC-CH Board of Trustees and the state legislature.” That’s not merely debatable, it’s false.
As former Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz explained to Carolina’s accreditor in March 2023, SCiLL’s origins involved the faculty and date at least to 2018, five years before the BOT adopted a resolution endorsing the administration’s civics-education proposal and urging its acceleration.
“It is worth noting that, though we are still very much in the beginning of the process, the work regarding the curriculum expansion for the Program for Public Discourse derives from planning, conversations, discussions with faculty leaders, and site visits dating back to February 2018,” Guskiewicz wrote. “This planning included a site visit by senior leaders to the campus of Arizona State University in 2018 to learn about their School of Economic Thought and Leadership, among other objectives.”
Curiously, The Assembly omitted this definitive history. The truth is that SCiLL evolved gradually from PPD, it has been a long time coming, and North Carolina and America need it.
Director Jed Atkins frames the school’s purpose perfectly: “Preparing students for the responsibilities of citizenship and civic leadership by fostering a free-speech culture; 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.”
Yet instead of showing how SCiLL tries to fulfill that noble mission, The Assembly warned its readers darkly that “at least half of the current SCiLL faculty attended theological schools or have research interests involving Christianity.” This puts them in dangerous league with such right-wing radicals as Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jimmy Carter.
Worse still, apparently, Atkins and his wife homeschooled their children, joining a broad national movement that began in the 1970s among counterculture liberals.
Mercy! Will you next publish an investigation into the national over-representation of Jewish professors of law, medicine, science, history, and finance? Or perhaps expose the existence of Carolina’s Center for Jewish Studies or its Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies?
Most alarming, however, is The Assembly’s startling revelation that “Atkins studied Roman statesmen like Cicero.”
What on Earth is a professor of classical studies like Atkins doing studying ancient leaders, of all people? O tempora! O mores!
We must put a stop to this outrage at once!
–Perrin W. Jones
Professor Alleges SCiLL Hiring Irregularities
Speaking of SCiLL, The Assembly recently obtained emails via public records request that show one former SCiLL faculty member felt sidelined by the process the school used to hire 11 new faculty this year.
SCiLL’s personnel policies require that the school’s faculty vote on any new appointments or promotions. But since no one had tenure in SCiLL yet, they took a different approach for those new faculty hired this year. The faculty vote was replaced by the vote of an advisory committee.
Matthew Kotzen—chair of the philosophy department and one of five SCiLL faculty to disaffiliate from the school this year, as we reported last month—emailed SCiLL’s dean and director, Jed Atkins, in May with concerns about that process. Kotzen said he had been on a previous advisory committee and “nobody had informed me that it had been dissolved or that I was no longer on the Committee.” He said he also believed that the committee was a technical step but that SCiLL faculty would still vote on any new hires.
Atkins responded that he had believed Kotzen supported the new process, the emails show. “I am puzzled by your confusion, since I explained the entire hiring process to you and our other SCiLL faculty colleagues on two separate occasions,” Atkins wrote.
In an email to The Assembly, Kotzen said he resigned from SCiLL about two weeks after that exchange. He also said he never learned who was on the advisory committee that voted to extend offers to the new faculty.
A UNC-CH spokesperson said in a statement: “All tenure-line faculty hired by SCiLL, including those welcomed this summer, were identified through a search committee comprised of tenured faculty from the College of Arts and Science’s astronomy and physics, Asian and Middle Eastern studies, communications, and English and comparative literature departments.”
–Matt Hartman
Reach our team with tips or ideas at highered@theassemblync.com.
Student Media on the Election
As questions linger about young voters in North Carolina, student journalists continue to home in on what drove their classmates to the polls, how that influenced the results, and what happens next on campuses across the state.
“Inflation, bro-code and charisma” helped former President Donald Trump secure victory, The Technician reported at North Carolina State University. A post-election forum dug into more of the reasons why Trump won.
The Chronicle reported that Duke University’s recently revived College Republicans chapter saw the election results as a stand against “elitism” in the Democratic Party, while other Duke students expressed concerns about Trump.
The College Republicans chapter at Appalachian State University celebrated sweeping victories for conservatives in county races, The Appalachian reported. While Republican students looked ahead to the next Trump administration, the university’s College Democrats chapter declined to be included in the story.
At UNC-CH, The Daily Tar Heel found some students rushing to make appointments and secure long-term birth control methods following the election. UNC Campus Health didn’t respond to the newspaper’s request for comment.
The executive board of The Old Gold & Black at Wake Forest University urged students to “show one another compassion.” The board promoted different outlets for discussion on campus and offered the newspaper as a space for ongoing conversations, too.
–Erin Gretzinger
We plan to regularly feature student reporting in The Quad, so send us the best coverage at your college.
Recent Assembly Stories
Such a Thing as a Free Lunch
The pay-what-you-will cafe format flourishes in the South.
The Race to Save America’s Favorite Christmas Tree
The Fraser fir is threatened by a nasty root rot. State scientists are trying to save the iconic species.
The State’s Democrats Ask: What the Meck?
Mecklenburg County is the largest Democratic stronghold in the state, but it hasn’t turned out voters at the rate of other urban centers.
The Assembly is a digital magazine covering power and place in North Carolina. Sent this by a friend? Subscribe to our newsletter here.
You must be logged in to post a comment.