UNC’s Chancellor Is a Consensus Builder. Silent Sam Is Her Greatest Test.

To appreciate the depth of the mess facing Chancellor Carol L. Folt about where to put “Silent Sam,” the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Confederate monument toppled last month by protesters, consider a message she sent to the campus on an otherwise sleepy Friday afternoon.

In that note, sent on August 31, Folt said there was a place on the campus for the monument, but not at its “front door,” indicating that she did not want to put the eight-foot-tall statue back on its nine-foot pedestal in McCorkle Place.

The message talked of hope and opportunity, healing and peace. And it was met warmly by many faculty members, who saw it as an important first step in resolving the Silent Sam debate.

But to many Chapel Hill constituencies, it fell far short — for wildly different reasons.

In a local bar, graduate-student activists shook their heads, frustrated that Folt appeared to them to be walking a tightrope, trying to keep everyone happy. One line in the message that seemed to seek understanding of the statue’s supporters especially raised their ire: “I hope we can agree that there is a difference between those who commemorate their fallen and people who want a restoration of white rule.”

Meanwhile, the chair of the university system’s conservative-leaning governing board, it seems, shook his fist. Where the activists found Folt’s statement to be ineffectual, Harry Smith, the board chair, rebuked the chancellor for “her strong views and opinions” in the “hasty release,” according to The News & Observer, a local newspaper. Smith could not be reached for this article.

The dilemma is clear. On a state-university campus that largely wants to purge itself of the statue, in a state whose residents don’t, Folt is in a bind. The academic community, in a flurry of petitions it’s hard to keep track of anymore — 41 department heads here, more than 400 faculty members there — has demanded that the chancellor take a more forceful stand against the return of the statue.

At the same time, the board members to whom Folt answers, the legislators who control the spigots of university money, and the residents of the state whose taxes support the institution also have demanded justice — for Silent Sam. In a deluge of emails obtained by The Chronicle and other publications, former students and North Carolinians demanded that the statue be re-erected and those who yanked it down brought to heel immediately.

Ever since August 2017, when a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., turned deadly, Silent Sam has been the focal point of the Chapel Hill campus’s struggle to reckon with its racial history. It has also trained a microscope on the leadership of Folt. The chancellor’s self-described “consensus building” style holds appeal in a state where the university has struggled to find common ground with politicians and the public, but it has long frustrated faculty and student critics who have wanted her to stake out a more forceful defense of university values, consequences and politics be damned.

In a 2015 article in The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper, Folt gave insight into how she approaches leadership, about how she doesn’t view her role as staking out opinions on controversial subjects. The headline: “Folt Believes She Should Keep Her Opinions Private.” Through a spokeswoman, Folt declined to comment for this story.

“I like to work with people, and I think there is always a problem when you start off with the largest voice in the room stating their opinion,” Folt told the Tar Heel. “You create what is a polarizing conversation — it’s either ‘you’re with me or against me,’ and I’m never going to lead with a ‘with me or against me’ posture.”

Silent Sam is putting that leadership style through an intense stress test. What is a consensus builder to do when it doesn’t appear there’s a consensus to be had?

The Hands of a Healer

When the university was looking for a new chancellor, it wanted a healer, said John McGowan, an English professor who was on the committee that selected Folt, in 2013. Chapel Hill was digging out from an athletics scandal that had felled the former chancellor, and it needed a steady hand who could lead the community to a better place, McGowan said. Folt seemed to check all the boxes.

“In retrospect, we were somewhat naïve,” McGowan said. “She was coming from a private university” — Folt had been provost and interim president of Dartmouth College — “so she didn’t have experience with the politics involved with a state university. We were also naïve in thinking that someone who wanted to please all sides was going to be helpful in the current political climate in North Carolina.”

The Rise and Fall of Silent Sam

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.

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She didn’t fight the way he and many others would have liked, McGowan said, and the system’s Board of Governors and Republicans in the state legislature saw her as someone who would not push back forcefully or publicly. “To put it bluntly,” he said, “they walked all over her.”

McGowan, however, is hopeful. Unlike the activists and the board chair who panned Folt’s August 31 statement, McGowan approved.

In one reading of the message, the one shared by many activists, Folt didn’t really say anything new. She had said publicly, even before the statue’s fall, that she would rather not have it on the pedestal. The question has always been how hard she would fight the opposition from her bosses. But in McGowan’s reading, the chancellor finally took a stand.

The statement, McGowan said, “was taken on campus to mean that Carol Folt was saying, ‘I will not preside over the reinstatement of that statue on the pedestal. If someone forces that statue back on the pedestal, I will quit as chancellor.’ That’s how the statement has been understood.”

McGowan is reading between the lines. In a white-hot controversy, the lack of forceful communication has given the green light for faculty, students, and community members to fill in the gaps with their own interpretations.

A ‘Self-Preservation Strategy’?

To be clear, no one seems naïve about the difficulty of Folt’s position. Even her critics — like Samee Siddiqui, a Ph.D. student in history who was in McCorkle Place the night Silent Sam came down and who broke the news to the world via Twitter — acknowledge the dilemma. Announce her intent to remove the monument, said Siddiqui, and Folt risks the fury of the board and maybe her job. Devise a plan to keep it on the campus, and the chancellor faces a revolt from the academic community, perhaps in the form of a no-confidence vote. Either way, he said, the toppling of the statue has made Folt’s “self-preservation strategy” untenable.

Where activists see “self-preservation,” Folt’s administration sees a chancellor who has expressed her position on the monument but received little credit for doing so. A Chapel Hill spokeswoman cited as an example a November 2017 statement at a meeting of the campus’s Board of Trustees.

“Based on everything we know,” Folt said at the time, “there is no question that the monument was erected during a period where white supremacy, bigotry, and racism were a strong message that was conveyed publicly by those who supported the symbolism of the artifact and spoke at its dedication.”

Folt added that if she had the authority, “in the interest of public safety, I would move the monument to a safer location on our campus where we can preserve, protect, and teach from it.”

The spokeswoman noted that Folt had created a history task force that was developing markers and interactive elements to “tell the full story of the monument.” Had the statue not fallen, “these contextualization efforts would have been in place this fall.”

Before the statue’s toppling, Folt was able to explain that she hadn’t done more to remove Silent Sam, Siddiqui said, by citing a 2015 state law that protects “objects of remembrance.” While the law allows an exception for safety reasons — a loophole many, including the state’s governor, Roy Cooper, an alumnus, urged her to take — it has been the position of university leaders that the law tied their hands.

But now the statue is down. “Now,” Siddiqui said, “she has to make a decision.”

An ‘Honest Broker’

That decision will come by November 15. The Board of Governors, which oversees the entire University of North Carolina system, charged Folt and the Board of Trustees, which governs the Chapel Hill campus, with devising a “lawful and lasting” plan for the monument. In Folt’s August 31 message, she wrote that Silent Sam “has a place in our history and on our campus where its history can be taught, but not at the front door of a safe, welcoming, proudly public research university.”

But to about 60 black faculty members who signed a letter — and some 400 faculty members who supported it — the campus has no place for the statue. “To reinstall the Confederate monument to any location on UNC’s campus is to herald for the nation and for the world that UNC is not a welcoming place for black people,” says the letter, which was sent in September.

The system’s president, Margaret Spellings, who is Folt’s boss, said in an interview on Tuesday that Folt must navigate an increasingly complicated issue that has become more polarized in recent years. She said she expects Folt to be an “honest broker” during the process of figuring out what to do with the monument and to explore all options, including putting the monument back on its pedestal.

“The people who are paying the bills in the state of North Carolina, who underwrite in very significant ways the cost of operating that and every other institution in this system, by all polling and all accounts seem to support the restoration of the statue,” Spellings said. “Conversely, the community of Chapel Hill seems to feel very strongly that it should not be restored to its original place.”

A Search for Leadership

One faculty member who has voiced support of Folt’s handling of Silent Sam is Holden Thorp, Folt’s predecessor as chancellor and now the provost of Washington University in St. Louis. He became an emeritus professor at the university when he left five years ago.

Thorp declined to speak with The Chronicle, saying he had nothing to add about Silent Sam. But he recently told The State of Things, a talk show on North Carolina Public Radio, that he constantly wonders whether he could have done more to remove the statue when he was chancellor, and he congratulated the activists who tore it down. He added that Folt, the only person who “knows all the facts,” is in “a very complicated political environment.”

“If she decided that the right thing to do was to hang back and say after the statue is down that she doesn’t want it put back up,” Thorp said, “then I feel compelled to trust her.”

That level of good will for Folt is in short supply on the campus.

Steve May, an associate professor at Chapel Hill who studies organizational communication, said it’s common for leaders in crises to focus on only the most powerful stakeholders — in this case, conservative legislators and the Board of Governors. But faculty members are looking to Folt for a defense of the university’s values. Many academic departments have spoken out against Silent Sam, and they want the chancellor to do the same.

“What you see at the same time, in some of the messages from the individual departments, is the desire for some aspirational commentary,” May said. “What we’re looking for in leaders is not just to focus on compliance and safety, which is really how the discussion began.”

His own department, communications, is one of many academic units filling what they see as a leadership gap on Silent Sam. Visitors to the department’s home page are greeted with a strongly worded statement about the monument, calling on the university to support those who tore it down instead of disciplining them. “Silent Sam was never silent,” it reads. “He spoke loudly to generations of Carolina students, faculty, and employees about the hierarchies of race, power, and servitude.”

The statement seemed a rebuke to Folt’s early public statements in the aftermath of the statue’s fall. The chancellor used some of her most confrontational language to criticize how the monument was taken down, by a crowd of angry protesters, and vowed to employ “the full breadth of state and university processes to hold those responsible accountable for their actions.” She issued that statement as the statue’s supporters wondered why the university police did not prevent Silent Sam’s toppling. Again, university leaders were in a tough spot.

Edwin B. Fisher, a professor in the department of health behavior, was aghast at the strong language. So he sent an email venting to a few friends. That became a petition, signed by more than 400 faculty members, that demands “leadership, not bureaucratic obfuscation,” by the university’s administration.

“I know Chancellor Folt is working as hard as she can for the benefit of the university as she sees it,” he said in an interview. “But I think the long-term benefit of the university will be better served by saying there are some things we don’t bend on. If that means people get fired, and our budget next year takes a pounding, that short-term harm might be worthwhile.”

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.