Don’t Spend $83M on a New UNC Law School Building

A new School of Civic Life and Leadership is a better use of funds and would be a fraction of the cost.

Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget proposed $8 million to begin work on a new building for the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law. The total estimated cost for the project right now is $83 million.

Budget writers should scrap the proposal and instead fund a new School of Civic Life and Leadership. It’s a better use of funds and would cost much less.

We’ll explain first why lawmakers should fund the School of Civic Life and Leadership, and then explain why lawmakers shouldn’t fund a new law school building.

School of Civic Life and Leadership Fills an Urgent Need

The UNC System’s own survey concludes large proportions of students feel the need to self-censor their political views in class and with friends.

Polling done by CPR last month shows 66% of North Carolinians, including 45% of Democrats, believe “political correctness and wokeness have gone too far in our state’s public colleges and universities.”

People both inside and outside UNC System schools, then, think there’s a problem, and the School of Civic Life and Leadership hopes to help fix it.

UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees Chair David Boliek and Vice Chair John Preyer explained the school this way:

“Its mission would be to develop students’ capacity and knowledge necessary for healthy democratic citizenship. The school would promote a culture of free speech and open and civil inquiry in which we recognize members of divergent political groups as friends to learn from instead of as foes to vanquish.”

Proposed curriculum at the school includes: Capitalism and its Critics; Conservatism and its Critics; Liberalism and its Critics; and Liberty and Equality in American Political Thought. In other words, an even-handed examination of the diverse spectrum of political thought.

Higher education needs more of that sentiment, not more of the same.

Why Exactly Does the UNC School of Law Deserve a New Building?

While the School of Civic Life and Leadership meets a clear need with a clear solution, the rationale for a new $83 million building for the UNC School of Law is hard to discern.

Is the school helping resolve the university’s diversity of thought problem, or is it contributing to it?

The jury is still out, but just this month a UNC law student was arrested for domestic terrorism. That in itself is not grounds for condemnation – surely administrators can’t foresee students engaging in illegal activity.

Except the law school admitted this particular student after he was arrested in 2016 during an anti-police protest, arrested in 2017 during an anti-Trump protest, and arrested in 2020 after resisting a public officer during a George Floyd protest. The student’s latest arrest involved an attack on a police training center in Atlanta.

Surely the university wouldn’t admit a student who skirmished with police during, say, the U.S. Capitol riot. Why did the university treat this student differently? They haven’t said.

And then there’s the clinics the university offers its students: economic justice; immigration; youth justice; and “critical race lawyering,” which includes a “CRT bootcamp.” The catalogue doesn’t really suggest intellectual diversity.

To be clear, we believe strongly that the UNC School of Law should not be defunded because it gives students an opportunity to explore critical race theory. The ideology, though we find it condemnable, surely belongs on a college campus if students wish to pursue it, and the clinic isn’t mandatory.

But policymakers aren’t deciding whether to defund the law school. They’re deciding how and whether to spend $83 million in finite resources at UNC.

In our opinion, a new School of Civic Life and Leadership is a far more justified way to spend those dollars than a new law school building.