Back in January, the University of North Carolina’s board of trustees voted to accelerate plans for a new School of Civic Life and Leadership. Since then, the state has resounded with the whining and wailing of leftist academics and media.

In today’s Martin Center article, Jenna Robinson looks at the controversy and the media’s lopsided coverage.

She writes, “The following week, at a meeting of Chapel Hill’s Faculty Executive Council, faculty members expressed their disdain for the new program and their distrust of the process. Faculty Chair Mimi Chapman’s comments were representative: ‘To me, this is a solution in search of a problem, and the way it is happening and the content of what is happening is deeply, deeply troubling.’”

Other UNC bigwigs blew their tops. The bombastic law professor Gene Nichol, for example, called the board “an occupying force.” Actually, it’s Nichol and his ilk that are the occupying force.

The media has also been predictably lopsided. Robinson reports, “Local media have also continued to parrot faculty opinion. The Daily Tar Heel, UNC-Chapel Hill’s official student newspaper, devoted several news articles to the faculty’s response to the new school. It also published an editorial by its own editorial board, saying, ‘[The] School of Civic Life is just another example of ideological combativeness’; a satire lampooning the proposed school; and an op-ed calling incivility in the classroom ‘a problem that doesn’t exist.’ The paper has published just one item, a letter to the editor, in support of the school.”

Over the years, UNC has added lots of curricular junk with a leftist slant. That’s never a problem, but suggest a non-politicized addition and all hell breaks loose.