This Tuesday, TransparUNCy is giving a microphone to the professors whom our administration is trying to stifle.

Dr. Kiran Asher should have been our newest Women’s & Gender Studies professor- until her hiring was blocked.

Dr. Cemil Aydin spent years contributing to the growth of Middle Eastern, Asian, and Islamic Studies through research and teaching, yet has recently witnessed the defunding of area studies centers and the censorship of critical global scholarship.

Dr. Ariana Vigil is the chair of the Women’s & Gender Studies department and is leading the fight for her department’s right to exist on our campus.

These faculty members are on the front lines of UNC’s attacks on our academic freedom. Their stories pull back the curtain on a years-long project to starve our education- and how we can fight back.

Join us in asking questions that those in power want us to ignore:

Are we customers or students? Why does our administration target departments like gender studies and area studies? Most importantly- how can we fight with faculty to defend our education?

Looking forward to seeing you there.

In simple terms, he is a conservative businessman whose money funds Republicans across North Carolina. He is the most powerful conservative benefactor in this state. And on June 25, 2020, he was elected to the University of North Carolina Board of Governors.

Pope’s wealth stems from his family’s business, a discount retail chain called Variety Wholesalers. He is the chairman and CEO of the conglomerate, which has expanded to become the largest privately owned variety retail store chain in the Southeast. Pope is also the president of the John William Pope Foundation, a roughly $140 million stockpile named after his father. After his father’s death in 2006, Art Pope took full control of the foundation and significantly expanded its political reach. Under his leadership, the foundation became one of the largest supporters of conservative public policy in North Carolina. Prior to 2011, more than two-thirds of the foundation’s $140 million had been directed toward conservative lobbying groups. Using this foundation of wealth, Art Pope has spent the past three decades building a network of political power and influence that stretches across North Carolina and beyond.

Five of the most influential conservative research, advocacy, and legal organizations in North Carolina were either created by or heavily backed by Pope. In most cases, he not only funds the majority of these groups’ budgets but also serves on their boards of directors, giving him direct oversight of their priorities and messaging. Alongside the John William Pope Foundation, Pope and his father created The Pope Center on Higher Education Policy, a passion of Pope’s father, who had served on UNC-Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees. They then created the NC Institute for Constitutional Law to focus on legal issues in the state. Following that, they created the Civitas Institute in 2005, which is now North Carolina’s most broadly supported conservative policy organization. Finally, the pair helped to launch the North Carolina chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a neoliberal lobbying group.

Although they describe themselves as independent nonprofits, the primary financial backer behind these groups is the Pope Foundation. While the foundation publicly claims to support a broad range of “arts, humanitarian, and educational” causes, its own records show a much narrower focus. By June 2013, $55 million, roughly half of the foundation’s total giving, had gone exclusively to these five groups. Non-profits that disproportionately rely on a single benefactor are classified by the IRS as “private foundations,” meaning that the donor retains extraordinary control. In this case, Pope holds unparalleled influence over multiple organizations that shape research, public opinion, litigation, and policy proposals across the state.

The chart below was taken from the Institute for Southern Studies, which did an extensive analysis in 2011 of how these “independent” groups influenced the outcome of the 2010 election. Pope’s biggest investment by far has been in the John Locke Foundation, where his family foundation accounts for $19.7 million or 79% of JLF’s $25.0 million income for FY 2001-2010.

What do these groups have in common?

They are all pushing conservative agendas, aiming to overhaul social services and taxes, defund public education, and restrict voting rights. Education policy is a central throughline. The John Locke Foundation, the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, and Civitas have consistently argued for school vouchers, charter school expansion, and reductions in funding for public universities. Pope’s election to the UNC Board of Governors connects this ideological project directly to the governance of our very own UNC Chapel Hill. The Board of Governors holds sweeping power: it sets tuition and fees, approves budgets, selects university system leadership, and influences academic priorities. Under conservative control, the board supports policies aligned with Pope-funded organizations, including reduced funding growth for public universities, increased emphasis on “workforce development” over liberal arts education, and heightened scrutiny of academic programs and faculty governance.

Art Pope is so much more than merely a political donor. What makes Pope particularly dangerous is that his influence extends far beyond elections. While politicians come and go, the network he has funded continues to shape public opinion, write policy proposals, train political leaders, and influence the governance of North Carolina’s universities. The budget cuts, attacks on academic centers, attempts to reshape curricula, and efforts to subject faculty and research programs to ideological scrutiny are not isolated controversies. They are part of a broader strategy to weaken the autonomy of public higher education and to redefine universities in the image of conservative political priorities.

In many ways, Pope’s project anticipated the current national assault on higher education. Long before the Trump era, Pope-funded organizations argued that universities were dominated by liberal ideas, called for greater political oversight of faculty and curricula, and promoted the redirection of public resources away from academic inquiry and toward narrowly defined workforce training. These same themes are now central to national conservative initiatives such as Project 2025 and the broader movement led by organizations like the Heritage Foundation. Today’s national political takeover is not a departure from Pope’s vision; it is an expansion of it. And as universities across the country face growing political attacks, Pope’s rise serves as a reminder that these efforts do not begin in legislatures. They begin with conservative elites who believe their extreme wealth entitles them to absolute power.

Exercising our power begins with understanding that the structure of our governing institutions is inherently political; it determines who controls our education and where their power comes from. Tracing power through UNC’s institutions of university governance is the first step in unpacking the unruly politics of our university. On paper, this power begins with the North Carolina General Assembly (NCGA)—170 representatives from the North Carolina House of Representatives and the Senate. The NCGA is dominated by conservative politicians tied to far-right donors and think tanks. These conservative lawmakers are kept in power by one of the most gerrymandered electoral systems in the country. Thanks to this Jim-Crow era political capture, there is structural injustice in the veins of North Carolina’s electoral system. The General Assembly controls the university budget and appropriations and passes educational legislation concerning university operations. The NCGA also has the power to dictate how on-campus decisions are made and often uses political influence to tip the scales in favor of conservatives. When it comes to UNC governance, the buck officially stops with the NCGA, as does the money and power to which these legislators are accountable.

The next link down the chain of command is the Board of Governors (BoG), responsible for the big-picture governance of the entire UNC system. The BoG consists of 24 voting members, all elected by the NCGA. It includes one non-voting student representative, the president of the University of North Carolina Association of Student Governments (UNCASG). The BoG elects the president of the UNC system, the chancellors of each university, and eight members of each university’s 13-member Board of Trustees. The BoG describes its political leaning as “principled neutrality,” but partisan influences have dominated BoG policy in recent years. From the dismantling of DEI to the elimination of the UNC Poverty Center, many right-wing oversteps into university life have been at the behest of the BoG.

Zooming in from system-wide governance, the most powerful body on campus is the Board of Trustees. Each UNC campus has a Board of Trustees (BoT), which is a group of 15 members charged with the “sound development of [its campus] in functions prescribed for it.” These 15 are made up of eight members elected by the Board of Governors, six appointed by the NCGA, and the student body president. Unsurprisingly, the BoT’s politics mirror those of the BoG and NCGA that nominate it. Our BoT is dominated by conservatives, hostile to even moderate political views, and dedicated to imposing their extreme views upon the university. One member of the BoT-- a registered Republican-- described feeling marginalized for being “too liberal” amongst his Trustee peers.

Outside of the Board of Trustees, the two most prominent roles in UNC-CH governance are the chancellor (Lee Roberts) and the provost (Magnus Egerstedt). The chancellor is the chief officer on campus, holding “complete executive authority” to carry out the policies of the BoT and BoG with “wide discretion.” The chancellor is nominated by the president of the UNC System and confirmed by the BoG. The provost is second-in-command, serving as the chief academic officer and overseeing the planning and implementation of academic priorities. The Provost is hired by the Chancellor and approved by the BoT.

Finally, there is the UNC-Chapel Hill community. Our campus in Chapel Hill is home to roughly 32,000 students, 4,000 faculty, and 10,00 non-faculty staff. We do not govern the university, but we are the university —the ones who do the teaching, learning, and working. The bodies that represent us are the Faculty Assembly, the Staff Assembly, and the Association of Student Government. These organizations have no institutionalized power outside of the student body president’s single vote on the BoT.

As Holden Thorp, former UNC Chancellor, said of university governance: “Of course it’s political; it’s always been political.” And, like all political systems, our governance reveals its interests in who is empowered and who is excluded. For instance, notably missing from our university governance are people from marginalized communities: of 24 members of the Board of Governors, four are POC, and six are women. Of 15 Trustees, three are POC, and two are women. Beyond demographics, other groups that are strikingly excluded from power include staff, faculty, and students. While our representative bodies hold peripheral advisory roles in this vast structure, this inclusion is a far cry from substantive representation. In essence, our governance represents neither the state of North Carolina nor the UNC community. Instead, those whom it is designed to represent are the ultra-rich conservatives who control the BoT, the BoG, and the NCGA.

From the NCGA to our on-campus lives, the corrosive influence of far-right politics permeates our university. An “unaccountable legislature” nominates a “far-right” Board of Trustees, who in turn implement ideological agendas that degrade the quality of our education in favor of right-wing political interests. It is a destructive cycle that our governance is designed to facilitate. That is as political as it gets.

We can’t wait to see you there!

The School of Civic Life and Leadership continues to pose a grave threat to our campus. While other essential academic programming gets cut, MAGA politicians send tens of millions of dollars to SCiLL to advance their right-wing agenda. Jed Atkins, the authoritarian Dean of the school, has flagrantly disregarded university policy in order to consolidate his own power and fill SCiLL with his political allies. After spending $1.2 million on an investigation into these abuses of power, Chancellor Lee Roberts now says he won’t release the 400 page report to the public.

Students deserve accountability and transparency. Jed Atkins is dangerously unfit for academic leadership, yet Lee Roberts and the Republicans in Raleigh allow him operate with impunity. We reject the growing MAGA influence on our campus. Join us on Tuesday, April 14th at 7pm in the Campus Y for a community assembly where we’ll learn more about the political history of SCiLL and why boycotting the school is the most effective tool students have to fight back. We’ll also learn about the ongoing collusion and cover-up from South Building and why we must demand Lee Roberts release the Atkins Files!

Bring your friends, professors, parents, and pets! See you there!

*If you’re viewing this email through Outlook, make sure to allow “blocked content” at the top of this email to view attachments.*

Cameras in our classrooms, publically published syllabi, new limits on academic freedom…

Lee Roberts and UNC Administration are quietly changing the rules to stifle free speech on campus.

These dangerous new surveillance policies are a threat to YOU and your education. Come to our Teach-In on Tuesday to learn what is going on and how you are implicated.

UNC Student Group Illuminates Administration’s Opaque Decisions

As the last of our founding members prepare to graduate this spring, we’re honored to have our work over the last four years memorialized. In this time of transition, IHE reporter Emma Whitford reminds us that TransparUNCy is thriving! Our next generation of talented leadership will continue to speak truth to power as they help us understand: who controls our education, how they do it, and what they don’t want us to know.

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/868c7da4b2ac25048f3d4241512185fb8adb188e?hash=2f5853b5e1dc97db74a41ef9479603be

ICE’s brutality across the country has attracted nationwide attention. Whether the shooting of Keith Porter, Jr. in Los Angeles by an off-duty ICE officer, the point-blank shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, or the abduction of preschool student Liam Ramos, the officers’ violence is lawless and reprehensible.

Beyond the murders and kidnappings covered by mainstream media, Minnesota organizers point to other deeply troubling behavior during ICE’s operations. Several organizers (here and here) reported that ICE frequently releases injured detainees in the woods in the middle of the night without clothes, phones, or ID. The point is to intimidate and brutalize: ICE’s violence is unmistakably fascist.

It might seem like the direct threat of ICE is far away from Chapel Hill. That’s precisely the point. Legal scholar Aziz Huq, building on the theory of Jewish labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel, writes that America is witnessing the rise of a dual state. Everyday life (the democratically administered rule of law that he calls the “normative state”) continues as usual while fascism spreads slowly and insidiously. Parallel to normal life, Frankel theorizes a “prerogative state” that operates with “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees.”

The key is that, at first, the prerogative state is confined. Arbitrary violence initially targets a small and already-marginalized subset of society while the normative state—everyone else’s everyday lives—proceeds uninterrupted. However, the boundary between the prerogative and normative states isn’t as solid as it seems. As fascism expands, previously protected classes can suddenly be torn from the normative state and thrust into the brutality of the prerogative state.

ICE’s illiberal behavior isn’t anything fundamentally new, and it shouldn’t be surprising. Since U.S. Border Control’s inception, the tools of the prerogative state—race vigilantism, white supremacy, and arbitrary violence—were core to its identity and conduct.

In 1924, white supremacists in Texas seized control of the nascent Border Patrol to rid the state of Mexican migrants, who were momentarily exempt from the 1924 Immigration Act’s racialized quota system. Drawing heavily on established tactics of control pioneered by institutions like the slave patrols of the 19th century, border agents employed violence as a matter of practice, not exception. They shot, beat, lynched, and raped migrants and operated vigilante groups with close ties to white supremacist vestiges like the Ku Klux Klan. They used children as bargaining chips, threatening to separate families to extract confessions. They subjected migrants en masse to inhumane and unsanitary detention conditions.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. The recent expansion of ICE’s brutality is not a sudden, one-off crisis. It’s ICE functioning exactly as it was intended from the start—to oppress, to violate, to control. The origin begets the destination: the continued creep of the white supremacist, prerogative state is inevitable and will eventually reach Carolina. Whether or not you realize it, the normative state is crumbling and will not protect you.

Last January, Lee Roberts announced he would collaborate with ICE if they came to campus because “the University has a duty to comply with all applicable laws.” Roberts’ statement gives institutional cover to ICE’s actions, presupposing that the agency operates according to the law. (It’s worth noting, Roberts’ whitewashing of extrajudicial conduct is not a new phenomenon: the administration justified arbitrary violence against UNC’s pro-Palestine encampments under the guise of “official” university policy.)

But ICE does not follow the law: they proudly and repeatedly violate it. New reporting indicates that ICE’s top leadership has ordered its agents to forcibly enter homes without a judicial warrant, an unequivocal violation of Americans’ 4th amendment rights. Their actions are not immigration enforcement, but, as New York Times journalist Lydia Polgreen writes, “an occupation designed to punish and terrorize anyone who dares defy this incursion and, by extension, Trump’s power to wield limitless force against any enemy he wishes.”

Roberts’ statements normalize ICE’s actions by extending the legitimacy of the normative state to what is fundamentally a lawless agency. He wants to hide behind a seemingly neutral “obligation to follow the law.” We can not let him. Left unchecked, ICE’s rapidly-expanding brutality will eventually come to Carolina. It’s not a matter of if, but when. When ICE comes to Chapel Hill, we need a University administration that will protect us, not one that will enable the violent oppression of students, faculty, staff, and community members.

Lee Roberts and the UNC administration should declare publicly that they will not comply with ICE. They should not share any information about any campus community member without a federal judicial court order. They should notify any campus community member about federal enforcement attempts. Finally, they should ensure UNC’s entire campus is a 4th amendment workplace with comprehensive training for all community members about how to safeguard against warrantless operations by ICE.

The university must play an active role in safeguarding students, graduate workers, campus staff, and faculty. Chancellor Roberts’ deference to ICE is a political decision, not a legal one. We call on him to choose: the safety and dignity of our community, or the authoritarian violence of the Trump administration.

In terminating the area studies centers, administrators will eviscerate Carolina’s global promise, damage our reputation, and deprive students and faculty of invaluable experiences gained through global research and engagement. Cuts to the area studies centers undermine UNC’s mission to serve North Carolina’s students and the world. Chancellor Lee Roberts and Chief Financial Officer Nate Knuffman treat UNC as a consumer product — something that can be quantified in crude financial metrics — rather than the thriving research institution it aspires to be.

Roberts and Knuffman are both right-wing financial technocrats with no experience in higher education. Roberts formerly ran the State Budget Office under Republican Governor Pat McCrory, where Knuffman was his deputy. They bring the same approach to university administration as they did to their efforts to eviscerate public spending more broadly in North Carolina. They have no understanding of the value of a college education. They unilaterally chose to cut the area studies centers, neglecting to give center faculty, staff, or students a voice. But we will not be silenced. Here, we provide undergraduates, graduate students, alumni, faculty, and staff the chance to share their stories.

[“I’ve certainly heard people say that in some centers, the work is duplicative…you’ve got…work that’s being done elsewhere in the University, more broadly, or that outlive[s its] usefulness.”* (Chancellor Lee Roberts in a DTH interview on 1/11/26)

“The center brings together students from multiple disciplines centering on a common question. If the center disappears, these disciplines will fragment into their respective homes, and there will not be any overarching context through which these multiple disciplinary approaches can coalesce through a geographical focus. Where else on campus can students interested in political science, business, history, literature and the arts, economics, anthropology, sociology, among many other disciplines, come together to think together about a specific part of the world, feel engaged with that part of the world, and train innovators who will make a difference in that global context? UNC is one of the most venerable public research institutions in the United States. If it is to live up to the potential of its legacy—with a capacious vision for the future—it should be growing, increasing its global footprint, not contracting it. We are at a moment in American culture that seems to be locally contracting, but this is only one moment; we need an institution that thinks not just in the present, but for the future.” —Gabriel Trop, Department of German and Slavic Languages

CFO Nate Knuffman believes that our area studies centers do not generate quantifiable “outputs.” He asks, “What does the Center produce? What are its research/service/instructional outputs?” (Slides from the UNC Board of Trustees meeting on 11/12/25). We have the answers:

“My relationship with the area studies centers—particularly the Center for African Studies—has been foundational to my professional work at UNC and to the public-facing mission I carry as Director of Carolina K–12 (...) From the outset, the center modeled what meaningful, ethical collaboration between scholarship and public education can look like.” —Cori Greer-Banks, Director of Carolina K-12

“The [Center for African Studies]’s support was critical because, historically, UNC had sent students, staff, and faculty to Malawi under UNC-Project Malawi since 1990. That initiative began as a collaborative HIV/STD research effort between UNC-Chapel Hill and Malawi’s Ministry of Health, culminating in the establishment of research and clinical services at Kamuzu Central Hospital in Lilongwe.”

— Mohamed Mwamzandi, Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies

“I earned my PhD in Political Science from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2008. I am an expert in Latin American politics and a Professor of Political Science at the University of Richmond. I have published three books, more than ten articles, and I regularly provide expert commentary to the media and policy forums like the United Nations Development Program, the OECD, and the State Department. None of this would have been possible without the Institute for the Study of the Americas.” —Sara Niedzwiecki, UNC Alumna

The UNC administration’s decision to cut the area studies centers not only erases the centers’ tangible benefits for Carolina and the world, but also fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of a global research university. The centers are a vital component of a rigorous global education at Carolina, and enrich undergraduate education in ways that go far beyond financial terms. The administration’s assessments of the area studies centers are reductive, narrow, and frankly, embarrassing.

“I wonder if we’ve ever had a metric that includes customer satisfaction” (UNC-CH Trustee Jennifer Lloyd in the Board of Trustees meeting on 9/24/2025)

Can your life at Carolina be reduced to a customer experience? Would you want the world to know the incompetence and callousness with which UNC administrators treat our school’s academic programs?

“My global education through [the Institute for the Study of the Americas] has meant the world to me. It has broadened and deepened my sense of identity and purpose at UNC, in the US, and beyond. Through cultural exchange and education, I have found my place in a global community amongst people I admire.” —Bebe Castañeda, Global Studies Undergraduate Student

“As units that bring together faculty with particular area studies expertise, Area Studies centers have served as sites of enrichment for our students. They have served as intellectual homes for students from immigrant communities on our campus. They have served as sites of discovery for students from across the state, many of whom have had very little exposure to other languages and cultures in their home communities.” —Dr. Nadia Yaqub, Professor, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

“The closing of these centers directly affects my sense of belonging at UNC. I am very active in research and community building surrounding the Middle East. In fact, one of the reasons I chose UNC and not the several other prestigious grad programs I was awarded entry to was because of the existence of [the Center for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies]. Without it, I do not feel I have a proper intellectual community and regional cultural understanding in my academic home.” —Georgina Lily Gemayel, Geography and Environment Graduate Student

Finally, an elucidating quote on what administrators want the meager savings from cutting the area studies centers (and, remember, $63 million in other planned cuts!) to go towards.

“[This is] going to allow us to execute our top fiscal priorities: to be able to make sure we can grow enrollment [and] invest in AI.” (Website for ServiceFirst, UNC’s cost-cutting initiative).

“In the service of austerity, we are turning inwards, discarding what is excellent, and becoming what? A brand? A football team with a biology department?” —Anonymous Undergraduate Student

At the end of the Faculty Executive Committee meeting discussing these cuts, trustee Jennifer Lloyd spoke directly to Lee Roberts:

“You’ve only been here a year. It’s not yet your fault. But it soon will be, right?”

There is no question in our minds whose fault it is. As long as our administration sees us as no more than numbers on a balance sheet, we will say loud and clear that they are to blame. We will not be silent as they perpetrate irreparable harm to our community and our education.

The administration claims the university is experiencing a budget crisis and has no choice but to cut programming. This is false: the university is in excellent financial health and the supposed budget crisis is merely a pretense to cut programs out of step with the priorities of MAGA Republicans in the state legislature.

UNC’s area studies centers provide students with numerous study abroad, research, and internship opportunities, support cultural programs on campus, sponsor bachelor’s and master’s degree programs, and facilitate collaboration with the international community. They serve as Carolina’s connection to the world. Global research is a core part of UNC’s reputation. Eliminating the centers will irreparably harm UNC’s standing.

The decision to cut the centers was made without even the pretense of faculty engagement. The administration refuses to show the faculty committee that supposedly advised the decision and directors of the area studies centers told TransparUNCy that their requests to meet with the UNC administration were repeatedly rebuffed.

The UNC administration says that the budget cuts are in preparation for expected cuts to the UNC Chapel Hill budget from the NC General Assembly and cuts to federal grants that sponsored international programs. However, the state’s proposed budget with the education cuts hasn’t passed, and the Trump administration has announced that federal grants will return, now through the State Department.

Even if cuts to state funding and federal grants materialized and had the impact on UNC’s budget that Roberts claims they would, there is no need for UNC to implement budget cuts at this scale. An external audit of UNC’s finances showed that the university is in excellent financial health. UNC’s own 2024 financial report backed up that assessment: “The University…remains financially sound with a robust and diverse revenue base.”

UNC’s endowment is specifically meant to insulate the university from political pressures like the ones Roberts claims the university is responding to, and the size of the endowment has doubled over the past ten years. If the administration wanted to draw from it to defend our academic resources, they could. The real reason Roberts isn’t fighting back is because he agrees with the state legislature.

Concerns about a budget crunch certainly did not stop the Roberts administration from offering Bill Belichick $10 million a year in addition to another $40 million in investments in the rest of the football program (we saw how that turned out). When right-wing political interests in the General Assembly and on the UNC Chapel Hill Board of Trustees want to spend money on their pet projects, there are always enough resources around. The problem is not money; it’s politics.

The administration plans to incorporate the work of the area studies centers into other departments on campus, offering no concrete details on how this might work. The work of the centers is not easily transferable — the administration’s plan fundamentally misunderstands the centers’ work and operations. The administrators implementing these budget cuts have no expertise on the subjects they’re cutting and no accountability to the campus community they are harming.

It’s no accident that the area studies centers were chosen for closure. Global research has long been a target of right-wing attacks, including in Project 2025. UNC’s cuts to the area studies centers show how budget-trimming can be a smokescreen for reactionary politics. Budget hawks like Roberts and Knuffman provide cover for the political decisions of the right-wing legislature. The area studies centers don’t square with administrative priorities of increasing enrollment and investing in AI (yes, these are their stated priorities!), so they’re thrown by the wayside.

Unlike the UNC administration, we believe global studies and the humanities are an essential part of a liberal arts education. UNC is a thriving, diverse institution. The richness of our academic programs can’t be reduced to mere dollar value. And, to reiterate, there is no budget crisis! Cutting the area studies centers saves UNC a paltry sum of money and causes immense damage to the university’s culture and reputation.

The area studies center cuts supposedly represent only $7 million of $70 million in planned cuts. The departments and programs you rely on could be next. We must defend our university from Roberts’ and CFO Knuffman’s austerity and reject the ultraconservative attacks that are really behind this decision.

What can you do?

On Thursday, Jan. 22nd, the UNC Board of Trustees is meeting to deliberate on the proposed budget cuts. Join us for a press conference at 9:30 AM by the Friday Center where the Board is meeting to hear from the center directors and other members of the University community speaking out in defense of global studies and against the austerity attacks from the Roberts administration.

We will be leading a delegation by bus leaving at 9AM from Fetzer Hall for students who want to show support. Be there to defend your education— no one is safe from Lee Roberts’ weaponized budget crisis!

Hello from the TransparUNCy team!

Last week, TransparUNCy held our Halloween teach-in about the scariest thing on our campus: the School of Civic Life and Leadership. Thank you for everyone who turned out, we had a packed house (including some surprise SCiLL faculty themselves, we see you and appreciate you!)

If you weren’t able to make it or are looking for resources to do your own research, we’ve got you covered. Below you’ll find a summary of last week’s teach-in, an explanation for why we should boycott SCiLL, plus classes you should take instead and resources to help inform your own research.

Teach-in Recap

Chris Clemens, previously one of the most important right-wingers on campus, stepped down as Provost last spring and is now suing the board of trustees. This was a shocking development: for most of his tenure as Provost, Clemens was an important ally to the Republicans in the state legislature, Board of Governors, and Board of Trustees. But that has changed over the last year. Fault lines have appeared due to the rapid expansion of the School of Civic Life and Leadership. Jed Atkins, the School’s Dean, has grown increasingly power-hungry and authoritarian as he seeks to grow SCiLL’s influence on campus and in the state legislature. As reporting has shown, Clemens was forced out last year because of a power struggle with Atkins that originated in questions of funding and hiring at SCiLL.

It’s no secret that TransparUNCy has been extremely critical of former Provost Clemens, but we shouldn’t celebrate his departure. With SCiLL on the rise and Atkins replacing Clemens as the Raleigh Republicans’ favorite campus ally, Chapel Hill is even more vulnerable to right-wing political attacks than before.

By this point, SCiLL’s origins in right-wing political networks are very well established. There is a long history of conservative billionaires seeking to buy influence in higher education by funding so-called “beachheads” at elite universities: programs that use seemingly neutral language like “civil discourse,” “economic thought,” and “western civilization” in order to launder free market economics and right-wing social politics. The most successful beachhead is the James Madison Center at Princeton university led by influential conservative academic Robbie George.

In 2017, Clemens, then a senior associate dean, invited George to speak with the Board of Governors to advise on creating our own beachhead in Chapel Hill. After years of development behind the scenes, our Trustees announced the creation of the school over the protests of hundreds of faculty, by announcing it on a Fox and Friends segment called “Waking up to Wokeness.”

The overtly political mission of SCiLL has been obvious since its inception and TransparUNCy immediately identified it as a dangerous and undemocratic threat to our campus. But over the last year, SCiLL has grown far more dangerous than we could have predicted, thanks largely to the actions of its leader Jed Atkins. Atkins has continually violated important norms and rules around hiring in order to staff the school with loyalists who are largely funded by the same small set of insular right-wing organizations. His authoritarian leadership of the school and the clear ideological, political, and financial affiliation of the new faculty hires, have led to dozens of resignations among the inaugural UNC faculty who helped support SCiLL in its early days. As Professor Matthew Kotzen, chair of the Philosophy department and an early supporter of SCiLL said, “Dean Atkins has fostered a dysfunctional anti-intellectual culture at SCiLL that rewards hostility, dishonesty and self-righteousness in the pursuit of his ideological and personal aims. That disqualifies him from holding any leadership position at UNC.”

Even some right-wing faculty who were hired specifically by Atkins are now speaking out against him. Professor David Decosimo, an early hire and former associate dean of the school, was fired at the beginning of the semester in apparent retaliation after voicing disagreements over Atkins’s hiring practices. Decosimo, an outspoken conservative in his own right, has said that Atkins has turned SCiLL into a “silo for conservative careerism” based on “nepotism, ideology, and secret handshakes.”

This criticism has done little to slow the growth of the School. Reporting around his power struggle with Clemens and the subsequent lawsuit have confirmed: Atkins is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful people on campus. Budget proposals from the state legislature this summer have promised millions more for SCiLL’s ambitious projects, at the same time as they threaten to cut tens of millions from the rest of the university. Trump’s Department of Education has followed suit, recently sending SCiLL close to $3 million as part of a massive grant to promote “citizen competency and informed patriotism” on university campuses, just as they cut tens of billions of dollars in research grants for subjects they deem “too woke.”

The accumulated scandals among SCiLL leadership have prompted an official investigation into the school. Even Chancellor Roberts and the republican-aligned university administration can’t ignore the mountain of evidence from all sides of the ideological spectrum that Atkins is unfit to run the school. But we should be cautious about accepting the results of this investigation. As criticism against him mounted, Atkins himself called for the investigation, presumably in order to get in front of the accusations and reclaim high ground. Atkins knows that he has political allies in the right places who can give such an investigation the appearance of legitimacy, while ultimately acquitting him of any wrongdoing. UNC Chapel Hill’s general counsel is Paul Newton, who was until earlier this year was the number two-ranking republican state legislator in the North Carolina General Assembly and a crucial SCiLL supporter. Unsurprisingly, the outside counsel that Newton contracted to run the investigation has represented North Carolina Republican leadership over ten times in a variety of high-profile political cases.

To summarize: SCiLL was founded as part of a longstanding effort to spread conservative influence in higher education, its new leader has consistently violated institutional norms to consolidate his own power, and Republican politicians at the state and federal level have rewarded him handsomely with millions in future funding and political protection from true accountability.

So what are we to do?

SCiLL’s primary mission is to transform the university by changing how it educates undergraduates. For decades, right-wing donors and activists have focused on building influence in universities, attempting to win the hearts and minds of young people who go on to lead business, government, and media. On the whole, they want college graduates to be less concerned with social justice, less critical of unchecked corporate power, ignorant of the sins of our nation’s history, and incurious about how we might repair them. With this ideological influence—the theory goes— college graduates will go into the world and shape society to align with the policy priorities of the Republican Party and their wealthy benefactors.

But the theory advanced by all of these right wing donors and politicians relies on us students actually taking their classes. The best way for us to fight back is to just simply to boycott. We can refuse to take part in this blatantly political attack on the integrity of our campus. SCiLL, like all academic programming, relies on performance metrics to sustain its funding. If students don’t take their classes and enrollment numbers remain low, leaders like Atkins have a harder time justifying the value of their efforts. If students understand SCiLL for what it truly is—a trojan horse for a reactionary political movement, rather than a serious academic initiative—we can undermine their attempts to build ideological influence on our campus. Even if we don’t control the budgets, we control the culture. No matter how much money and political support Republican politicians pour into it, students can fight back if we simply make SCiLL into a cringe joke. Tell your friends: don’t participate, don’t take the classes.

With that said, it’s worth addressing some pro-SCiLL arguments head on. Some curious readers might be asking themselves: Surely civil discourse is a good thing? SCiLL describes its mission as “prepar[ing] students for the responsibilities of citizenship and civic leadership by fostering a free-speech culture and providing an education grounded in encouraging the human search for meaning and developing the capacities for civil discourse and wise decision-making.” Who could disagree with that?

No one—that is exactly what makes it an effective rhetorical strategy. The problem is not that civil discourse and civic education are bad, the problem is that SCiLL is not sincerely committed to this academic mission in good faith. UNC-Chapel Hill already has many, many academic departments full of world-renowned scholars with diverse perspectives on American politics, history, and philosophy, who offer classes where students can grapple with big, challenging ideas and engage in thoughtful discourse with their peers. What frustrates Republican politicians is that these departments are not beholden to right-wing donors and are insulated from political pressure. It’s not that these classes aren’t being taught, they just don’t like how they’re taught. So they enlist Atkins to make it seem like there is a grave crisis of discourse and intellectual inquiry on our campus in order to justify the creation of an entirely new school which they then use to grow their influence.

If you’re a student who’s curious about American politics, our nation’s history, or complex and even controversial philosophical questions there are plenty of ways you can satisfy your intellectual interests without supporting SCiLL’s parasitic growth on our campus. You might take PHIL. 171 - The Norms of Public Discourse, POLI. 279 - American Political Thought through 1865, HIST. 367 - North Carolina’s Unfinished Democracy, or a host of any other classes in our wonderful social sciences and humanities departments that are led by thoughtful professors, not a foot soldier of the NCGOP.

Of course, you should also take classes that these right wingers consider to be “woke.” These courses and the invaluable faculty who teach them help us understand the way power and inequality manifest in society, and provide critical analysis about how we can imagine and fight for a more just world. Some courses include WGST 101 - Introducing Intersectionality: Gender, Race, Class, and Sexuality, AMST 265 - The Black Interior, or ENGL 687: Queer LatinX Environmentalisms. The wonderful thing about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is that we can study and appreciate the Western intellectual tradition, challenge it from a variety of critical and anti-colonial perspectives, and do both of these things while simultaneously rejecting Jed Atkins and SCiLL.

Do not be fooled by the lofty public rhetoric from Atkins and SCiLL supporters. SCiLL is not about civics education. A powerful group of Republican politicians and far-right donors are trying to turn you into their guinea pig as they attempt to remake the ideological foundations of American society. We understand the true nature of their political project and we will not participate.

Further reading:

Before He Quit, UNC-CH’s Provost Was Involved in Messy Fight at School of Civic Life

Former Provost Sues UNC-Chapel Hill Trustees Over Closed Meetings

Resignations, Disagreements With Dean Roil Chapel Hill Civics School

UNC-Chapel Hill’s Lesson in Civics

The uncivil origins of the School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC

Has Chapel Hill’s ‘Civic Life’ School Become a Conservative Center?

How Right-Wing Billionaires Infiltrated Higher Education

Chris Clemens emails Robbie George

More than 670 UNC-Chapel Hill faculty oppose “overreach” by legislature, political appointees

UNC looking to counter ‘woke’ campuses with new school: Creating a ‘level playing field’

It’s a SCiLL Issue

North Carolina General Assembly State Budget Proposal Spring/Summer 2025

American History and Civics-National Activities Grants - Department of Education

CUTS TO WOKE PROGRAMS

SCiLL associate dean fired amid continued faculty turnover

UNC-Chapel Hill Investigates the School of Civic Life and Leadership

UNC School of Civic Life and Leadership under independent review

UNC hires former top Republican lawmaker as general counsel

The Politically Connected Law Firm Leading Civics School Investigation

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LAWSUITS, INVESTIGATIONS, INFIGHTING, RESIGNATIONS & FIRINGS.

The School of Civic Life and Leadership is a disaster, and YOU are paying the price of it.

Come learn more TODAY about all the drama unfolding & how you are implicated in it all.

Hello from the TransparUNCy team!

Come celebrate Halloween with us next Tuesday as we learn about the spookiest thing in Chapel Hill: The School of Civic Life and Leadership!

Right now the school is consumed with a host of scandals: lawsuits, investigations, and paranoid infighting. At the same time, money from the Republican state legislature, the Trump administration, and shadowy right-wing billionaires continues to pour in. Just as the school is getting more unstable, it’s getting more powerful too.

As students sign up for classes for next semester, it’s more important than ever to understand the truth about SCiLL and the threat it poses to our campus. Spread the word! Bring your friends, professors, families, pets! Come out this Tuesday, November 4th to Union 3411 at 5:00pm to learn more. We’ll see you there!

For this year’s First Amendment Day, TransparUNCy will be joined with former Provost Chris Clemens for a discussion about some of the most contentious conflicts in higher education and their implications for free speech. How do debates around DEI, “institutional neutrality,” student protest, tenure, and the ongoing politicization of university governance affect the conditions for free speech on our campus?

Free speech, academic freedom, and student protest face increasing scrutiny on our campus and across the country. Come Wednesday October 8th 2:00 pm @ Freedom Forum (Carroll Hall, 3rd Floor) to learn what’s at stake and who are the people deciding what speech is actually free.

If you cannot make it, please join us live on our Instagram @ transparUNCy

For this year’s First Amendment Day, TransparUNCy will be joined with former Provost Chris Clemens for a discussion about some of the most contentious conflicts in higher education and their implications for free speech. How do debates around DEI, “institutional neutrality,” student protest, tenure, and the ongoing politicization of university governance affect the conditions for free speech on our campus?

Free speech, academic freedom, and student protest face increasing scrutiny on our campus and across the country. Come Wednesday October 8th 2:00 pm @ Freedom Forum (Carroll Hall, 3rd Floor) to learn what’s at stake and who are the people deciding what speech is actually free.

Bring your friends and we’ll see you there!

Hello from the TransparUNCy team!

We’re back with another teach-in tomorrow afternoon about the UNC administration’s dangerous decision last year to dismantle the historic, student-led honor court. What political interests were behind this move? How does it fit to a longer history of student movements and administrative repression? What did they replace the old system with and how can we defend our rights to due process and free speech in the face of these attacks?

Join us as we explore the history of student dissent on campus + a special guest feature from the Student Advocacy Network to help us understand our rights under the new system. Come out this Monday, September 22nd to Union 3411 at 5:30pm to learn more.

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Hello from the TransparUNCy team,

Don’t forget to come out tonight at 5pm to Union 3411 for the first TransparUNCy teach-in of the semester!

Learn the secrets about who controls your education that UNC doesn't want you to know AND how to fight our administration's complicity under the Trump administration.

Bring friends, bring professors, bring new students! We hope to see you there!

A reminder that TODAY is our last teach-in of the semester in Union 3411 at 5pm (CLE)! Come learn about all the drama (see articles below) in the School of Civic Life and Leadership and what it means for UNC in the future.

'Original strife' to spring sign-ups: How the School of Civic Life and Leadership came to be

‘No one has provided me with clear answers’: Four inaugural faculty leave SCiLL

Before He Quit, UNC-CH’s Provost Was Involved in Messy Fight at School of Civic Life

In North Carolina, College Reformers Have Met the Enemy and It Is ... Them

Bring your friends and we’ll see you there!

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Hello from transparUNCy!

With LDOC only a week away, we are wrapping up teach-ins for the semester with another round of updates on the School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL). Come out to hear the drama (and trust us, there’s a lot) and what it means for the future of UNC on Wednesday from 5-6pm in Union 3411 (CLE provided)!

SCiLL is the disaster we said it would be and there is so much tea. How is the “least civil department” a threat to the rest of UNC? Their words, not ours.

See you there!

Subscribe now