Amid a week of standoffs between activists, the police, and officials at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill over its plan to house a Confederate monument, Silent Sam, in a campus center, the protesters have a new bargaining chip: students’ grades.
Just as the fall semester is set to close, activists say, at least 79 teaching assistants and instructors have joined a rare “grade strike,” pledging to withhold more than 2,000 final grades unless the university meets their conditions. A Chapel Hill spokeswoman said on Friday evening that the university could not verify those numbers.
Final exams have already begun, and the first grades will be due next week.
On Monday hundreds gathered on the campus to protest the university’s proposal that Silent Sam, a statue of a Confederate soldier that activists pulled down in August, be housed in a $5.3-million history center.
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.
In revised demands posted on Thursday to their website, the activists urged teaching assistants and instructors not to grade final exams or assignments this semester until the campus’s Board of Trustees withdraws its proposal for the history center and for a 40-person “mobile force” to increase security across the 17-campus system.
Administrators on Thursday told deans and instructors that a grade strike was out of bounds. They said the new tactic threatened to derail students’ eligibility for graduation, scholarships, loans, and military commissions. And they warned that a grade strike, and using classroom spaces to promote it, could violate instructors’ duties and federal law.
The activists said they wanted the university to keep the statue off campus, “in accordance with expressed student and faculty demands,” and the systemwide Board of Governors to hold “listening sessions in good faith with the campus community.”
Further activism by teaching assistants and faculty members will follow in the spring, the protesters said, unless the university also met their demands on Silent Sam’s placement, campus policing, and funds for building maintenance and worker benefits.
‘Serious Consequences’
Chapel Hill administrators have said that they prefer to relocate the statue off campus, but state law prevents them from doing so. The university also says plans for a history and education center have been underway since 2015.
In an email on Thursday evening to deans, Robert A. Blouin, executive vice chancellor and provost at Chapel Hill, warned that the grade strike “violates our university’s instructional responsibilities” and opens the university and strikers to legal action.
Blouin also wrote that the university had received complaints that instructors had urged students in their classrooms to “take a stand on the strike.”
“Such actions have been interpreted as coercion and an exploitation of the teacher-student relationship, and in fact are a violation of students’ First Amendment rights as well as federal law,” Blouin wrote.
Continued actions in that vein “will result in serious consequences,” he added. Blouin and Kevin M. Guskiewicz, dean of the college of arts and sciences, wrote a similar email to instructors.
Blouin and Guskiewicz met with graduate-student activists on Friday morning. They seemed to suggest they didn’t want Silent Sam on the campus, said Lindsay Ayling, a teaching assistant participating in the strike who attended the meeting.
“Throughout the course of this action, they have claimed that the TAs are harming students. That is not true,” Ayling said. “We gave them a number of pathways that they could use to express their support for our position.”
A ‘Twist of the Knife’
At a tense Faculty Council meeting on Friday afternoon, students and faculty members confronted the university’s chancellor, Carol L. Folt, over the plan for Silent Sam. Students read from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” and questioned the history center’s proposed placement in South Campus, close to a synagogue and many black students’ residences.
The council debated a proposed resolution about the monument, approving one that called for the university’s board to withdraw the plan. But the council rejected an amendment to the resolution that would have opposed retaliatory action against the teaching assistants who were striking.
The grade strike and the administration’s proposal on Silent Sam and campus policing this week have drawn activist groups together in campaigns both online and on the campus. Their unifying purpose is “to tackle the university’s antiblack racism,” said Calvin Deutschbein, a doctoral student in computer science and a campus labor activist. Deutschbein said he joined the protest on Monday, but since he isn’t teaching classes, he isn’t directly participating in the grade strike.
“This certainly isn’t the first time many of us have been threatened by the university,” Deutschbein said. “Sometimes the university makes good on their threats, and sometimes they don’t.”
To activists, the email was “another twist of the knife,” he said.
Activists have also devised letter templates for undergraduates to petition their departments to join the grade strike.
“I know many departments have also said that this action could hurt undergraduate students,” the form letter reads. “I’d like to emphasize that Silent Sam’s presence on campus hurts us more.”
Follow Steven Johnson on Twitter at @stetyjohn, or email him at steve.johnson@chronicle.com.
