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About Us

Our Vision

To support a strong culture of public deliberation at UNC through curricular and extracurricular programming. We base our work on the following core beliefs.

  • The university is a center for the creation, exploration, and dissemination of knowledge, and it serves a unique role both in history and in our contemporary culture.
  • The proper functioning of the university requires a vibrant exchange of ideas, anchored in a commitment to open, frank, and respectful-dialogue.
  • When our faculty teach students through instruction and example, how to think and argue well, reasonable justification open to examination, they enrich the educational experience for all.
  • When students have opportunities to observe and participate in robust deliberative practices, they will better prepared to contribute meaningfully as democratic citizens.
South Building
“Learning how to engage in civic discourse and communicate across differences is an important skill and necessary for the health of our democracy.”
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Jim White
Craver Family Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
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Our Mission

Our mission is to prepare students for lives of civic leadership by empowering them to flourish in the democratic tradition of reasoning together for the public good. Specifically, we aim to sharpen student capacities for argumentative inquiry, situated in the rhetorical tradition of public deliberation.

How we execute our mission is vital to gaining university-wide support. To that end, we emphasize the following values:

  • Prioritizing student needs
  • Maintaining transparency and welcoming input
  • Developing robust partnerships – internally and externally
  • Leading by example: serving our mission while embracing constructive disagreement

Read more in our Mission Statement.

Our Cornerstones

We will achieve our mission by serving four general areas:

  1. Student Development: Our primary purpose is to equip students with the capacities for argumentative reasoning in the classroom, across campus, and beyond. To that end, we proudly sponsor the Agora Fellowship, a yearly cohort of students committed to the study, practice, and facilitation of public discourse.
  2. Faculty Collaboration: To serve our students, we must support our faculty in their efforts to transform their classrooms into vibrant deliberative settings for the robust exchange of ideas. To that end, we offer interactive faculty workshops and collaborative experiences for faculty to hone their pedagogical techniques.
  3. Community Engagement: As the nation’s oldest public university with an expressed mission to serve the citizens of North Carolina, we must strive to ensure our curricular efforts expand into the community. To that end, we regularly partner with local organizations to foster deliberative spaces across the state.
  4. Public Engagement: By showcasing leading public voices deliberate issues of public controversy, we invite the general public to share in the transformative potential of public discourse. Primary examples of such work include the Abbey Speakers Series and the Debating Public Policy series.