The Quad: UNC-CH Investigates SCiLL

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Civil Disagreement

At a faculty council meeting last week, a UNC-Chapel Hill professor asked Chancellor Lee Roberts to respond to recent accusations of distinctly uncivil behavior in the School of Civic Life and Leadership. In response, Roberts revealed that the university has opened a review of the school.

Internal conflicts have been bubbling up regularly for more than a year, leading to the departure of several faculty members. Most recently, David Decosimo claimed that he had been fired from his associate dean position without explanation.

Roberts did not say what, exactly, was being investigated. But in a statement to The Assembly, General Counsel Paul Newton said that it was a “thorough process and policy review” led by outside counsel and that it began this summer at SCiLL Dean Jed Atkins’ request.

Newton downplayed the turmoil and turnover within the school at the meeting last week. “The reality is, you’re going to expect some turbulence with a start-up like this, whether it’s private sector, public sector—particularly one that started with some controversy,” he said.

— Matt Hartman

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Thanks for reading The Quad, a higher education newsletter written by Matt Hartman and edited by Emily Stephenson. Reach us with tips or ideas at highered@theassemblync.com.

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Risk Report

At UNC Charlotte‘s August Board of Trustees meeting, chief risk officer Steven Dunham presented a list of the top 10 risks the university faces. Davis Cuffe, a UNC Charlotte student who worked with us on our big DEI project in the spring, covered the presentation for The Quad.

Dunham’s list, which ranked the items from most risky to least worrisome, read as follows:

• Federal funding impact on research activity
• Regulatory and policy change management
• Inflation
• Athletic financials and funding
• Protests and demonstrations
• Charlotte student market share
• Safety and security
• Enrollment
• Perceived value of four-year degree
• AI – efficiency and productivity

Dunham said the list reflected areas of the greatest uncertainty for the school. All of the categories but three—safety and security, protests and demonstrations, and enrollment—were getting more concerning, he said.

Some items on the list, he said, were new this year. Universities across the country are grappling with federal funding freezes under the Trump administration. UNC Charlotte recently said it had frozen non-essential hiring in response to concerns about federal and state funding this year.

It’s also not surprising that athletic finances made the list. UNC Charlotte recently broke ground on a stadium expansion, and it is banking on increased sports revenue to make that investment pay off.

Dunham also said 22 percent of all first-time college students from Mecklenburg County who enrolled at a UNC System school chose UNC Charlotte in 2024. While “market share” was noted as a risk, Dunham said that was an improvement over 19 percent the prior year. 

A UNC Charlotte spokeswoman said that the school doesn’t have a target for this metric but that “a stable or increasing share affirms that we are reaching prospective students effectively and contributing to the educational and economic vitality of the Charlotte region and North Carolina.”

While Dunham said none of the risks on the list were fading, UNC Charlotte hasn’t faced significant, disruptive protests since spring 2024, when activists held a 14-day encampment in support of Palestinians. On August 29, the same day the trustees met, a group of 14 students and professors gathered to advocate against the Trump administration, without intervention from campus personnel.

— Davis Cuffe

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No Longer Rutter-less

You may recognize Deborah Rutter’s name from the headlines generated when Donald Trump fired her from her last job as president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. 

Now Rutter is on board at her new job as Duke University’s vice provost of the arts, and our colleague Sarah Edwards at Assembly Network publication INDY Week sat down with the executive to discuss the intersection of education and arts programming, her plans to get to know Durham, and more.

From a higher ed perspective, the part I found most interesting was Rutter’s comments on how public arts programming dovetails with other university priorities.

“I think that the president and the provost of Duke University did not hire me with their eyes closed, but with intentionality,” she told Edwards. “And I think we’ve got to figure out how we can have impact, how we can fit into the university and help advance the larger university initiatives, as well as understanding what it means to have an arts life as a human being, and help the student body and the faculty have that.”

Read the full interview.

— Matt Hartman

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Assigned Reading

Au Revoir Albanese: The president of the Duke University Health System, Craig Albanese, is leaving his job at the end of the month to join California health behemoth Kaiser Permanente. (Related: we republished a story from the Charlotte Ledger and NC Health News about Duke Health’s statewide expansion.) 

What’s the Deal? In other Duke news, Jerry Seinfeld made a surprise appearance on campus Tuesday. While introducing an event with a former hostage of Hamas, Seinfeld called the “Free Palestine” movement antisemitic and compared it to the Ku Klux Klan. Duke Chronicle has the story.

Course Review: Conservative watchdog groups like the Oversight Project have been using public records laws to request course syllabi from universities across the state. UNC-Chapel Hill denied the request, claiming that syllabi are the intellectual property of the faculty and thus exempt. WUNC explored the legal arguments and the impact the requests have on faculty.

Let us know what’s on your radar at highered@theassemblync.com.

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