Silent Sam, the Confederate statue on the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s campus, before it was toppled by protesters. The university plans to construct a new campus building to house the statue, but as an object of study, not veneration.
The Confederate monument known as Silent Sam will be back at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but not on the pedestal from which it was toppled three months ago, according to a plan university officials released on Monday.
The chancellor, Carol L. Folt, and her Board of Trustees recommended that Silent Sam be installed in a yet-to-be-built center on history and education. The cost of the new center would be $5.3 million with $800,000 a year in operating expenses. The building, which would be completed by 2022, would feature “state-of-the-art security measures, as well as the development of excellent exhibits and teaching materials,” according to a 10-page document explaining the plan.
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Sara D. Davis, Getty Images
Silent Sam, the Confederate statue on the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s campus, before it was toppled by protesters. The university plans to construct a new campus building to house the statue, but as an object of study, not veneration.
The Confederate monument known as Silent Sam will be back at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but not on the pedestal from which it was toppled three months ago, according to a plan university officials released on Monday.
The chancellor, Carol L. Folt, and her Board of Trustees recommended that Silent Sam be installed in a yet-to-be-built center on history and education. The cost of the new center would be $5.3 million with $800,000 a year in operating expenses. The building, which would be completed by 2022, would feature “state-of-the-art security measures, as well as the development of excellent exhibits and teaching materials,” according to a 10-page document explaining the plan.
“We are the only public university to have experienced our nation’s history from the start – war, slavery, Jim Crow laws, suffrage, civil unrest, as well as hope, freedom, emancipation, civil rights, opportunity, access, learning, and great discoveries fostered here,” Folt said in a written statement. “All of these subjects will be covered in the proposed center.”
Folt said she would have preferred to move the monument off campus, but a 2015 state law to protect “objects of remembrance” prevents that.
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The plan, which to take effect still needs approval by the UNC System’s Board of Governors, is something of a compromise, but is bound to inflame entrenched positions on both sides. To some, anything short of restoring the statue to its pedestal in the campus’s McCorkle Place is a capitulation to the forces of anarchy. But to others, including many faculty members, the statue simply doesn’t belong anywhere on the campus.
“This is a racially hostile act and will live in infamy in our university’s long and dark history,” said Samee Siddiqui, a graduate student. “This decision will continue to make UNC-Chapel Hill a racially hostile environment to work and study.”
One key concern voiced by Siddiqui and others is the cost of protecting the monument. Ever since a white-supremacist rally turned deadly last year in Charlottesville, Va., the university had stepped up security around the monument. After its toppling, in August, the site required an even heavier police presence as students and activists clashed in often-violent protests, with statue supporters waving Confederate flags.
The price tag of the new history and education center, which would be located on the main campus at a site formerly used for student family housing, surprised many who already felt as if the university had invested too much money in a lost cause.
Silent Sam, a statue of a Confederate soldier, dominated the main entrance of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for more than a century, despite decades of protests. But suddenly, in August 2018, the statue was yanked down by protesters. And in January 2019 the campus’s chancellor, Carol L. Folt, removed the statue’s pedestal and other remnants. Here’s how Silent Sam moved from dominance to disappearance.
The cost led faculty members on Monday to wonder what else they could do with the money rather than house and protect a Confederate monument: eradicating food insecurity among undergraduates and giving faculty and staff members raises after many years of belt-tightening, one said. Another, William Sturkey, an assistant professor of history, lamented the lack of a specialist in North American slavery in his department.
“A lot of folks,” he said in an email, “are just sick and tired of public dollars being used to venerate a failed nation that tried to destroy the United States of America.”
Some faculty members, like Harry L. Watson, a history professor, said the university was in a politically tough spot. It’s noteworthy, he said, that after 105 years the monument will be shifted from an object of veneration to an object of study. In fact, the university’s plan frequently refers to Silent Sam as an “artifact.”
“This is about the best outcome that could be expected, given all the pressures and the counterpressures,” he said. “This is a reasonable solution.”
Vimal Patel, a reporter at The New York Times, previously covered student life, social mobility, and other topics for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
