UNC SCiLL completed its first pilot class of 14 students through Ready for Life: Adulting 101 at J.F. Webb High School in Oxford, North Carolina. During the course, students gained valuable insight into their duty and responsibility as citizens. “They’re getting ready to vote for the first time. They’re learning about their duties, their responsibilities,” said Jed Atkins, SCiLL dean and director. “That’s what we mean by self-governance: to make decisions for themselves, to rule themselves and to be active and engaged citizens in our democracy. It’s at the heart of what SCiLL is. And I think it’s also at the heart of what Carolina is.” Thank you to our partners at J. F. Webb High School, Stan Winborne, Ed.D. and Granville County Public Schools; Rob Rivers, Devin Duncan, and the UNC Student Government Executive Branch; UNC Admissions; UNC Athletics and Phil Ford; and the UNC School of Civic Life and Leadership students, faculty, and staff — including John Rose, Rita Koganzon, Giuliano Rosas, Cara Allen, Kenean Nooks, Kavita Hall, and everyone else whose hard work helped make this pilot project a success. unc.edu/posts/2026/06/08/sci…

I don't think the author of this article had their heart set on the critique. They seem instead to show that SCiLL is doing what they claim to.

Civil discourse should be part of everyday campus life—not confined to one school. As conversations around SCiLL continue, we’re exploring how Carolina can foster real dialogue through shared spaces and meaningful connection. Read More: ow.ly/fcqt50ZaK4Y

This sounds great - is this group supported by a SCiLL booster to make critics looks silly?

This organization discredits itself with such a lazy criticism. The article it uses as evidence makes SCiLL sound great, and the student it quotes clearly thinks it is. Somehow this is a "highly politicized academic agenda."

The @UNCCoalition made the School for Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) sound so cool that I made a small donation.

It’s true. SCiLL’s critics are doing free PR on its behalf. “Most of the syllabi require students to reckon with Christian thought.” And this is supposed to be a bad thing? Americans internalized Judeo-Christian values so deeply that they have operated unconsciously for generations. You don’t need to be a religious person to recognize that civilizational decline is accelerating in part because we stopped articulating, defending, and actively transmitting those values. That is precisely what these new civic centers and discourse initiatives are now attempting to do (at least, the half of them that aren't just DEI offices with canny branding). Given the state of higher ed, the authors’ grievances are almost satirically trite. They are especially perturbed that, in one SCiLL course, “students are visited by a Christian convert to hear her experience.” I wonder if they recall last October, when Harvard appointed the drag queen “LaWhore Vagistan”—a man whose self-declared pronouns are “she” or “aunty”—as a visiting professor to teach courses on “Queer Ethnography” and “RuPaulitics: Drag, Race, and Desire.” The article’s most humorous moment is provided by UNC historian and SCiLL skeptic Eric Gellman, who seems to believe that the Western canon should begin in 1976. He appreciates many of the classics that SCiLL teaches—he just wishes they weren’t so OLD.