UNC’s Chancellor Was Criticized as a Consensus Builder. How She Departed May Have Changed Everything.

U. of North Carolina

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the last remnants of a much-debated Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill vanished from the campus.

Carol L. Folt, the Chapel Hill chancellor, had ordered the removal of the pedestal and plaques that made up the base of Silent Sam, a monument that had become one of higher education’s most polarizing cultural flashpoints. In the same breath, Folt announced that she would resign, effective in May.

Folt’s order effectively cost her the chancellorship. The UNC system’s Board of Governors released a statement saying its members were “incredibly disappointed” that she had made a decision related to Silent Sam without their input, and on Tuesday they voted to make her departure effective at the end of January, four months early.

But Folt’s action on Silent Sam seems to have had another ripple effect that’s played out more favorably: It has burnished her legacy.

Throughout her tenure, many faculty members had been outspoken critics of Folt and had described her as a weak leader who sought to please all sides and didn’t exhibit moral clarity at key moments — especially with respect to Silent Sam, which many see as a century-old symbol of slavery and racism that should have been removed from the campus a long time ago.

Students have excoriated her, too. At a recent faculty meeting, one black student, who had earned a scholarship named for Martin Luther King Jr., told Folt that she was “a disgrace” and implored her to “never utter MLK’s words ever again.”

Yet most faculty members who spoke with The Chronicle on Tuesday said that what’s transpired over the past two days had made them more sympathetic to Folt. They described the tough environment in which she was doing her job. They said they respected her for trying to find a compromise in a situation where it seemed increasingly impossible.

They said they blamed the UNC system’s board members, and the state lawmakers who had appointed them, for putting her in a bind on Silent Sam. Several described her decision to remove the statue’s base as “courageous” and as a compelling protest against a hyper-partisan board.

Many are no doubt happy to see Folt go. Students have been trying for months to appeal to the chancellor’s moral sensibilities, pleading with her to rid the campus of Silent Sam. And observers were quick to point out that Folt’s surprise announcement about taking down the pedestal occurred only after sustained student activism, including the toppling of the statue itself, in August.

Still, some professors were quick to praise the chancellor for ultimately doing what needed to be done, even though she sacrificed her job in the process. That the system’s board is rushing her out the door, they said, is drawing only more sympathy to her.

In the end, no UNC chancellor had ever taken action to move any part of the statue off campus, despite decades of protest. But Folt did.

A Risk-Management Problem

Now the university finds itself comparatively leaderless. Within three months, both Folt and Margaret Spellings, the system’s president, have called it quits. (Spellings’s last day, in fact, was Tuesday.) The two leaders have said simply that it was time to move on. Their departures, though, come as tensions, already ratcheted up this past fall, have only intensified between the system’s board and Chapel Hill and system administrators.

Last month the board rejected Folt’s proposal for a $5.3-million center to house Silent Sam on the campus and called for new efforts to find a compromise. One board member has declared publicly that the statue should be reinstalled on the Chapel Hill campus immediately. Not only was it the right thing to do, he said, but it was required under a 2015 state law protecting “objects of remembrance” on public land.

University officials acknowledged that the law constrained what they could do with the statue. But they said, with increasing urgency, that the statue’s return would pose a huge threat to campus safety.

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.

• UNC’s Silent Sam Settlement Sparked a Backlash. Now a Judge Has Overturned the Deal.
• UNC’s Silent Sam Settlement Was Reached Quickly. The Blowback Might Last Longer.
• UNC Will Give Silent Sam to a Confederate Group — Along With a $2.5-Million Trust

The debate over Silent Sam has laid bare the tensions that have grown over the past eight years within UNC governance. In 2011, Republicans took control of North Carolina’s legislature for the first time in decades — a shift that set in motion a conservative revolution. That wave hit the UNC system’s board, too, because the legislature appoints its members.

Republican lawmakers have often cast a skeptical eye on the UNC system, and the UNC board has followed suit. In the past the board was seen as an advocate for the university, said Jay Smith, a history professor at Chapel Hill. Recently, he said, the board has become more adversarial and partisan. Board members have intervened more often in matters that were traditionally left to the individual UNC campuses, like Silent Sam.

A more-active board found its passive counterpart in Folt, whose tenure in Chapel Hill has been defined by legal maneuvering. She took office amid a vast academic-athletic scandal that left the university in the cross hairs of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and multiple federal investigations into whether the university had broken the law by mishandling sexual-assault cases.

Facing such an onslaught of legal threats, Folt tended to act as a risk manager. She also described herself as a consensus builder and as someone who didn’t go out of her way to publicly express her opinions.

Folt has consistently framed the Silent Sam issue as a risk-management problem, and she did so again on Tuesday. The most compelling reason to remove the pedestal and keep the statue off campus, she said at a news conference, was campus safety.

Asked about what she’d say to people who have criticized her for, in their view, lacking moral leadership, Folt said she had largely done what she was supposed to do: uphold her legal obligations. “I will always start from a legal perspective,” she said. On Silent Sam, she said, “I’ve been able to stay within that legal framework all along.”

For months, Folt tried to balance those legal constraints with the emotional pleas of students and professors who said the statue made the campus unwelcoming to people of color. In the end, she seemed to make everybody angry. She hadn’t been proactive enough for those who thought Silent Sam needed to go. And her takedown of the statue’s pedestal angered the system’s board, though several Chapel Hill trustees said in a statement that they backed Folt’s action.

On Tuesday morning Folt said she planned to stay through graduation, in May. Two hours later, the system’s board announced that she would be out of a job in two weeks. Folt said in a subsequent statement that she was “disappointed” in the board’s timeline.

Harry L. Smith Jr., the board’s chair, stressed that the decision to expedite Folt’s departure was not a retaliatory move; it was in the best interests of the campus. But he didn’t mince words in describing her decision to remove Silent Sam’s pedestal, calling it “draconian.”

Smith said board members had been working “tirelessly” with UNC leaders to figure out what to do with Silent Sam. Folt, he said, just didn’t allow the process to play out. “From my perspective,” he continued, “we never gave UNC a reason to do this.”

Many Legacies

Some professors, though, aren’t angry with Folt. They say they now have a fuller appreciation of the environment in which she was trying to do her job. And they’re confident that, in the long run, her tenure will be defined by her action to take down Silent Sam’s pedestal, which they see as a brave move given the circumstances.

“That will change her reputation,” said Frank Baumgartner, a professor of political science. Folt often didn’t inspire the confidence of the faculty, Baumgartner said, and she wasn’t always a vocal advocate of academic freedom. But he and many of his colleagues “are pleasantly surprised and impressed.” He also noted that Folt apologized last fall for the university’s historical role in supporting slavery.

Ted Shaw, a professor in Chapel Hill’s law school and director of its Center for Civil Rights, said Folt had grown as a leader during a trying time. “I can’t imagine her five years ago saying and doing some of the things that she’s doing now,” Shaw said. “In all probability, in time,” he continued, “her tenure will look better and better.”

She had exhausted the options for compromise, said Michael Harris, an associate professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University and a UNC graduate. “It was probably going to take something this dramatic,” he said. “The fact that she was willing in the end to do that — that’s what people will remember from a legacy standpoint.”

On the one hand, said William Sturkey, an assistant professor of history at Chapel Hill, it was “irrational” for university officials to have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars protecting Silent Sam in the year after a deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. But on the other hand, he said, it’s not fair to judge Folt as a leader without taking the board into account, as well as the threats that she felt related to Silent Sam. “She has not felt, clearly, that she has had the freedom of speech to openly advocate for its removal,” he said, because she felt her job was at risk.

Some critics say the jury’s still out on Folt. One Chapel Hill Ph.D. student wrote on Twitter: “Folt’s tenure can be best described as ignoring the well-being of students, particularly black and brown students, while placating rich donors and white supremacists.”

Smith, the history professor, said Folt should have taken an even stronger final stand. “Great leaders have to be willing to risk it all,” he said. He wishes she had simply removed the pedestal and waited for the board to fire her: “She would’ve been regarded as a martyr.”

Still, he said: “She will be remembered more fondly now, having done the courageous thing and removed that pedestal on her way out the door, than she would’ve been remembered otherwise.”

Now that Folt is leaving, faculty members are fretting that the best higher-education leaders won’t even consider coming into such a fraught environment. They worry that Folt and Spellings will be replaced by people who are tools of the board. “Now the question is, Does the Board of Governors see that as an opportunity to get even more pliable people,” Baumgartner asked, “or do they recognize that maybe they’ve pushed a little bit too far?”

In the meantime, there will be a leadership vacuum. In the coming months, UNC will have to simultaneously conduct searches for the system’s president, the flagship’s chancellor, and the chancellor of Western Carolina University.

And then there’s Silent Sam, which continues to be stored in an unknown location away from the Chapel Hill campus.

At this point, UNC’s board is still on track to meet a March 15 deadline to figure out a plan for Silent Sam, said Smith, the board chair. And William L. Roper, who was tapped in November to serve as interim president of the UNC system, has already started calling potential candidates for the Chapel Hill job, Smith said.

Steve Leonard, a professor emeritus of political science at Chapel Hill, said he’s concerned about the “collateral damage” of Folt’s sudden departure — specifically that it could make UNC governance even more dysfunctional. “The removal of Silent Sam was a foregone conclusion,” he said. “The Board of Governors needed some time to get the legislation altered or to find a legal remedy, and Carol Folt’s resignation may have compromised that process.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.