After suing UNC, ex-Provost Chris Clemens talks DEI, protests and ‘bullying’ from DC
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Clemens sued UNC and trustees for alleged secret meetings, texts and Signal use.
- He argued DEI bans reflect a push for political balance and cited prior faculty pressure.
- Protests, trustee actions and School of Civic Life triggered governance debate.
Diversity, equity and inclusion policies, pro-Palestinian protests at UNC-Chapel Hill and the controversy surrounding the School of Civic Life and Leadership all came in for examination Wednesday in a public discussion between a student leader and a former UNC administrator who says he was pressured to resign.
Former UNC Provost Chris Clemens has recently drawn attention for suing the university and its Board of Trustees over alleged violations of North Carolina’s open-meetings and public-records laws.
Clemens joined TransparUNCy, a student group that advocates for transparency in university governance, on Wednesday at UNC’s Freedom Forum Conference Center before a crowd of about 100 students for a wide-ranging discussion.
Questioned about Republican-led DEI bans and what responsibility administrators have to protect free speech, Clemens, who once described himself as “among the most outspoken conservative members” of the UNC faculty, said he views the actions as an attempt to restore political balance.
Still, Clemens said “some of the rhetoric we are hearing out of Washington” feels like “bullying.”
His appearance comes just months after stepping down from the provost role in May and weeks after filing the lawsuit against the university and its trustees. After his resignation, Clemens returned to the faculty as a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy.
That lawsuit says trustees held closed sessions for reasons not allowed under state law, discussed business over text messages without notice and used auto-deleting apps to avoid public records laws. The News & Observer previously reported. It says unnamed university leaders asked him to resign, citing his disclosure of closed-session discussion.
On Wednesday, Clemens filed a motion in that lawsuit, seeking to stop what he alleges is the university’s ongoing destruction of evidence related to public business conducted secretly on the app Signal, according to documents obtained by The N&O.
Two sources with knowledge of the situation told The N&O that Clemens has used Signal himself. Screenshots appear to show him discussing university business on the app this year with the auto-delete function enabled, though it is unclear who turned the feature on.
Asked by The N&O about that on Wednesday, Clemens said: “The Signal app by itself is not problematic any more than WhatsApp. It’s the auto-delete feature ... and I have never turned it on.” He added he doesn’t always “notice what’s turned on” but that he tends to answer regardless.
DEI and institutional neutrality
The discussion was led by TransparUNCy co-founder Toby Posel, who pointed to reports of right-leaning groups such as the Oversight Project seeking access to course syllabi to ensure classroom instruction complies with diversity, equity and inclusion bans. Posel questioned what responsibility the university has to ensure those bans do not threaten free speech and what it means to uphold a policy of institutional neutrality amid what he called “asymmetric political and legal attacks.”
The UNC System Board of Governors repealed diversity initiatives last year. DEI offices at public universities that had them have either closed or been significantly restructured.
Clemens said he doesn’t view Republican actions as an attack on higher education but as an attempt to restore political balance in academia. Citing the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, he said “the institution itself is not the instrument of dissent, and the administrator is not the instrument of dissent,” but that role belongs to “faculty as individuals and collectively.”
On DEI, Clemens said when universities “take federal money, you put yourself in position to be whipped around by the federal government.” He said UNC previously received “a very threatening” letter from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office for Civil Rights regarding its DEI practices, mostly focused on hiring and affirmative action. Those directives began to “touch the curriculum,” pressuring administrators to police what faculty could say or teach — an overreach he described as “bullying.” Clemens did not specify when that letter was received. He was provost from late 2021 to May 2025.
He said he saw his role as provost as needing “to push back” whenever such pressures threatened academic freedom.
School of Civic Life and Leadership
Clemens is also known for playing a role in developing the Program for Public Discourse and the School of Civic Life and Leadership, initiatives aimed at encouraging open dialogue and debate on campus. Both have drawn criticism for their perceived conservative leanings and influences, The N&O previously reported.
That school is being investigated by outside counsel brought in by the university following faculty and administrative turnover, The Assembly reported.
Posel said the school is “connected to a lot of these themes of attacks on faculty governance, institutional integrity and politicization of the university,” arguing that its creation bypassed traditional faculty processes. The Board of Trustees first proposed the school through a resolution, and lawmakers in the GOP-led General Assembly later formalized it. Posel questioned whether the school’s ideological origins and the decision to sidestep faculty input contributed to what he called the “crisis” surrounding it now.
Clemens said a group of UNC faculty — including those who leaned conservative — wanted to create the Program for Public Discourse to encourage debate across political lines, but “explicitly said they did not want a conservative program.”
He said the trustees’ resolution was largely symbolic, saying it “really just said hasten the construction of the school.” Faculty opposition, he added, had repeatedly stalled the idea. “Because it kept getting stopped through fear of the dissenting faculty, and it kept getting stalled, it required at some point an act of trustees and provost to make something happen,” he said.
Clemens added that he did not disagree with Posel that “the wrong way to make a school (is) by legislative fiat, with people who don’t understand academia calling shots.”
Pro Palestine protests
Posel also questioned the university's response to pro-Palestinian protests in 2024, saying it was a “highly militarized police response” justified with accusations of antisemitism.
He said the Trump administration is using what he called a “moral panic around antisemitism” on campuses as an excuse to cut funding and silence dissent.
“As a Jew, I find the weaponization of antisemitism by the federal government, by your administration, to be reprehensible,” Posel said. “There’s nothing about standing in solidarity with victims of a genocide that is antisemitic.”
A United Nations commission of inquiry has said that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The Israeli government has denied such claims and says it is defending itself and trying to free hostages taken in the terrorist attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.
Posel also criticized what he called political theater, pointing to UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts’ appearance after protesters removed the U.S. flag and raised a Palestinian flag in its place. Roberts, flanked by police officers, oversaw the flag’s re-raising — a moment Posel described as staged to appeal to Republicans.
Enforcement was based on rule violations, not politics, Clemens said, noting that pitching tents on campus grounds violated university policy. He said he was not involved in police decisions and recalled being spat on and having his car attacked during the protests.
While rejecting the idea that the university’s response was politically motivated, he said “some of the rhetoric we are hearing out of Washington and other places feels just like that same kind of bullying” he dealt with before, that marginalizes dissenting views.
“This is why we wanted a discourse program. This is why we wanted a program for public discourse,” Clemens said. “I think lowering the temperature is the responsibility of responsible administrators,” and of those in Washington.
“I do not see any desire to lower the temperature, and I think it's not healthy for the country,” he said. “I think we would all be well advised to lower the temperature, to take the rhetoric down a notch, to try to be authentic with one another.”
Posel said he was pepper-sprayed after not dispersing when police ordered him to. But the response was excessively violent “and brutal and political in nature,” he said.
Clemens said he “was not the final decision maker, but I did acquiesce to that decision and I thought it was the right thing. So inasmuch as my acquiescence caused you harm or pain, I am sorry.”
Posel said he appreciated the apology and agreed that “in the interest of taking down the temperature, conversations like this are important and valuable.”
This story was originally published October 9, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
