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

Before Chris Clemens unexpectedly announced his resignation as UNC-Chapel Hill’s provost on April 3, he was embroiled in a contentious faculty battle over hiring at the university’s new School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL), The Assembly has learned.

Several professors have left the school over the past year, with some complaining SCiLL’s leadership inappropriately sidelined them as it hired more faculty. But in a March 21 email obtained by The Assembly, Dustin Sebell, a professor hired by SCiLL last year, dismissed those complaints and claimed Clemens had taken “extraordinary and wildly improper” efforts to ensure his “friends” were appointed to faculty positions in the school. Sebell sent the pugnacious email to his supervisor, SCiLL Dean and Director Jed Atkins; Clemens, who is the university’s chief academic officer and Atkins’ supervisor; and Chancellor Lee Roberts, among others.

Sebell alleged that Clemens also had “expectations or requests” to receive an appointment in SCiLL himself and that he attempted to cancel a search for additional SCiLL faculty “in retaliation for the Dean’s refusal to commit to offering one of his friends a joint appointment outside of normal rules and procedures.” 

Sebell didn’t provide evidence in the email. The Assembly requested an interview and additional information, but he didn’t provide comment. A UNC-CH spokesperson declined to comment on behalf of Clemens and the university.

Clemens, an astronomer who became provost in 2022, will return next month to his faculty role in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. 

The apparent tension between him and SCiLL’s leadership came as some conservatives outside the university also took jabs at the provost. 

Writing in the conservative North State Journal last month, Heritage Foundation fellow Adam Kissel lambasted UNC-CH Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs Giselle Corbie for supporting various diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. He also painted Clemens as her ally.

“When he hired Corbie, UNC Chapel Hill Provost Chris Clemens praised her efforts to deliver ‘an integrated curriculum in leadership, equity, diversity and inclusion,’” Kissel wrote. “In other words, he knew. She got the job not in spite of her promotion of racialist policies but because of it.”

Jenna Robinson, president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a conservative education think tank, dinged Clemens in March for writing a letter in support of UNC-CH joining a federal program to increase diversity among postdoctoral fellows in science, technology, engineering, and math.

Meanwhile, as The Assembly reported last October, conflict within SCiLL had been growing since Atkins was appointed dean last March.

Five of the nine UNC-CH faculty who joined SCiLL from other departments to help launch the school left their SCiLL positions before it even started offering classes last fall. Some raised complaints about the direction of the school, which they said was becoming narrowly focused on political theory and religion rather than the skills of civil discourse. Those faculty also said they were sidelined when the school began hiring, a process they said broke from the normally collaborative academic practice in which many faculty have a voice.

In a May 2024 email to Atkins that The Assembly obtained through a public records request, philosopher Matthew Kotzen, an early SCiLL adjunct and member of its advisory committee, alleged that nobody informed him that his panel had been dissolved and another started in its place. Kotzen told The Assembly he never learned who was on the new committee. He resigned from the school shortly after. 

Another now-former SCiLL adjunct, Jason Roberts, raised similar complaints in an email to Kotzen around the same time. “As you know I have similar questions about how Jed is running the SCiLL hiring process and the SCiLL advisory committee,” Roberts said. “Like you, I have never been on a faculty that did not vote on hires.”

This winter, SCiLL embarked on another round of hiring, and similar complaints arose that the school’s faculty weren’t part of the process. Inger Brodey, one of SCiLL’s associate deans, resigned in late February, telling the Daily Tar Heel that the hiring process was marked by “improprieties, slander, vindictiveness and manipulation.” 

Economics professor Jon Williams resigned from SCiLL’s advisory board over the hiring drama, writing in his March 7 resignation letter that he’d “seen incivility and dysfunction, biased and unfair processes, a complete disregard for governance, and a willingness to deceive and misrepresent that is unlike anything I’ve witnessed in my 15 years in academia.”

In January, Clemens tried to cancel SCiLL’s faculty search, Inside Higher Ed reported last month, citing a lack of funding for the new positions. But in an email to Atkins that the publication obtained, Clemens also seemed to allude to the department’s internal conflict. 

“I want to emphasize how important it is for a School of Civic Life and Leadership to serve as a model of civic life and civil discourse,” Clemens wrote, adding that he would “address how we can fulfill those expectations for future searches in collaboration with SCiLL leadership and with HR.”

A few days later, Clemens said the search would continue, Inside Higher Ed reported. SCiLL has not publicly announced any hires as a result of that process. Three months later, Clemens said he would step aside as provost.

The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that SCiLL is not living up to its name. In his March 21 email, Sebell told his recently resigned SCiLL colleagues, “This use or rather misuse of speech amounts to a rejection of everything SCiLL stands for.”