UNC’s School of Civic Life is now an independent unit. What does that mean?
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- UNC elevated the School of Civic Life and Leadership to an independent academic unit.
- Dean Atkins will have increased autonomy over hiring, budget, curriculum, and operations.
- SCiLL now reports to the provost and has over 20 faculty and its own minor.
UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Civic Life and Leadership is now an independent academic unit, the university announced Wednesday.
Rather than being housed in the College of Arts and Sciences, the elevated status means that the school will stand alone — on par with units like the Kenan-Flagler School of Business or the Hussman School of Journalism.
That will give the dean of the school, Jed Atkins, more autonomy over the school’s operations: things like hiring practices, budget considerations and curriculum. This independent status was always the plan for the School of Civic Life since its creation in 2023, Chancellor Lee Roberts told reporters Wednesday.
The school, commonly referred to as SCiLL, is controversial both because of the conservative values that informed its creation and the infighting and allegations that have swirled ever since, causing massive turnover in its faculty ranks.
The university spent more than $1.2 million on an investigation into hiring practices and leadership misconduct at the school, only to announce that it would not release the results of the probe.
Now, the school has more than 20 faculty members and its own minor.
“We were incubating it within the college, primarily for administrative and managerial reasons,” Roberts said. “When it first started, it didn’t need its own HR function [or] its own development function. It could lean on the college for those functions as it ramped up and made progress. Now that it’s got a full slate of faculty [and] 1,000 students took classes in SCiLL this past year, it’s at a point where it is building out those freestanding functions like any other school.”
“It’s time to pull it out of the college and let it stand on its own,” Roberts concluded.
Instead of reporting to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Atkins will now report directly to provost Magnus Egerstedt.
“The budget model follows every other budget model on campus, and it’s living by the same rules as everyone else on campus,” Egerstedt said on Wednesday.
The Board of Trustees also conferred tenure on two new SCiLL hires in their Wednesday meeting: history professors Erica Charters and Guy Chet.
