After protesters tore down Silent Sam, the Confederate statue at the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, administrators began crafting a plan for what to do with the monument. The system’s governing board on Friday rejected the flagship’s plan to build a $5.3-million campus history center to house Silent Sam.
After a key meeting on Friday, Silent Sam’s fate remains uncertain.
The University of North Carolina system’s Board of Governors did not approve the flagship’s plan to house the toppled Confederate monument in a new, campus history museum, dealing a blow to Chapel Hill administrators who had hoped their compromise solution would end the rancor over Silent Sam.
After a three-hour closed session to discuss the monument, the board chair, Harry Smith Jr., said that while members “applaud” the plan, the board could not support it in its current form, “given the concerns about public safety and the use of state funds for a new building, or the proposal to expend $5.3 million” on the building, as outlined in Chapel Hill’s plan.
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Logan Cyrus, AFP, Getty Images
After protesters tore down Silent Sam, the Confederate statue at the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, administrators began crafting a plan for what to do with the monument. The system’s governing board on Friday rejected the flagship’s plan to build a $5.3-million campus history center to house Silent Sam.
After a key meeting on Friday, Silent Sam’s fate remains uncertain.
The University of North Carolina system’s Board of Governors did not approve the flagship’s plan to house the toppled Confederate monument in a new, campus history museum, dealing a blow to Chapel Hill administrators who had hoped their compromise solution would end the rancor over Silent Sam.
After a three-hour closed session to discuss the monument, the board chair, Harry Smith Jr., said that while members “applaud” the plan, the board could not support it in its current form, “given the concerns about public safety and the use of state funds for a new building, or the proposal to expend $5.3 million” on the building, as outlined in Chapel Hill’s plan.
Five members of the Board of Governors will work with Chapel Hill’s chancellor, Carol L. Folt, and the campus’s Board of Trustees to present a revised plan for the monument by March 15.
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The vote “gives Carolina more time to review relocation options for the Confederate monument and offer a revised recommendation,” Chapel Hill said in a statement on Twitter. “An off-campus solution remains our strong preference, and we will work until March 15 to more fully explore this option.”
While the plan “did meet the letter” of the Board of Governors’ charge, it “hasn’t satisfied anyone, and we recognize that,” said Folt in a subsequent call with reporters. The statue has presented a burden “disproportionately shouldered by African-Americans,” she added, and the campus has a responsibility to determine a solution that allows everyone to “thrive and feel safe.”
“I’m really grateful for the extension,” she said. Chapel Hill may use it to speak further with the state’s historical commission, which has approval power for relocation plans, and explore using “non-state funds” to cover the expense.
The systemwide board, the body elected by the state legislature to oversee North Carolina’s public universities, had asked Chapel Hill to submit a plan for Silent Sam this week. Before the statue’s fall, members of the Board of Governors were divided on its fate. After they saw the plan, some questioned its legality and called it “cowardice.”
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In announcing her plan for the monument, Folt sold it as a careful compromise. She would have preferred to move the statue off campus, she said, but a 2015 state law tied the university’s hands. Still, the backlash to the plan has been swift and broad. Hundreds of faculty members, alumni, students, and prominent current and former athletes have denounced the monument as a symbol of white supremacy that has no place on the campus.
But it seemed they had little say in the matter as the final decision headed from Folt and the flagship’s trustees to the Board of Governors.
‘Nobody Has Any Faith’
In gloomy weather on Friday, demonstrators gathered under the moniker “Drain the BOG” and shouted slogans in advance of the board’s meeting, kept from the building by barricades set up by the police. At least one protester was arrested, according to local news reports.
“Nobody has any faith” in the Board of Governors, said Lindsay Ayling, a graduate-student activist at Chapel Hill, on Thursday evening. Ayling is one of several teaching assistants reportedly withholding undergraduates’ grades unless Chapel Hill withdraws its plan and the Board of Governors holds “listening sessions in good faith with the campus community.”
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.
Protesters decamped briefly for a “teach-in” about the Board of Governors before returning to the building as the meeting began.
Inside, Margaret Spellings, the system’s departing president, gave her final report to the board. Spellings said she and Smith, the board chair, had held a two-hour meeting on Thursday with administrators, faculty members, and student leaders at Chapel Hill.
After Spellings’s remarks, the board members moved to a closed session to discuss Chapel Hill’s plan, then determined they could not support it.
Folt’s defenders have said she’s in an impossible situation: She can abide by a 2015 state law restricting the relocation of monuments, and risk undercutting the college’s reputation on matters of racial diversity, equity, and inclusion. Or she can refuse to house Silent Sam on the campus, and risk her job.
Opposition to Chapel Hill’s plan, and to Silent Sam, has broadened to include groups across academe. The National Council on Public History criticized the campus’s Board of Trustees on Thursday for skirting scholarly voices while forming its plan.
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The group also lauded the “principled and historically informed antiracist protests” of UNC students and graduate students, and recommended against retaliation of the sort proposed by W. Marty Kotis III, a member of the Board of Governors who told The Chronicle this week that he planned to introduce a policy to fire striking TAs.
The board passed a modified version of Kotis’s proposal that will ask its university-governance committee to examine conduct policies for community members who participate in violent and “riotous” action.
Friday marks the last day of final exams. Chapel Hill told The Chronicle on Thursday that it had not received “any specific reports” of grades’ being withheld, and could not comment on personnel decisions regarding the punishment of striking teaching assistants.
It remains unclear what consequences, if any, might arise for some students as they head toward winter commencement on Sunday. Campus officials expect a pro-Confederate gathering that day around the monument’s vacant pedestal.
Steven Johnson is an Indiana-born journalist who’s reported stories about business, culture, and education for The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic.
