MICHAEL C. BEHRENT

The bold print of UNC-Chapel Hill’s decision earlier this week to build a $5.3 million museum for “Silent Sam,” the controversial Confederate statue, was bad enough. But as people have had time to read the report released by the campus’s Board of Trustees on Monday, December 3, it has become apparent that the fine print is at least as troubling. Buried in the report’s appendices lie recommendations for aggressive university security measures, including a “mobile force platoon” that would support campus officers in preventing or responding to “civil disorder and violence at future campus events.”

As appendix A-2 of the report explains, security was one of the university’s main concerns in determining how “Silent Sam” would be disposed of. The UNC Board of Governors, the Republican-dominated body that governs the seventeen-campus UNC system, explicitly charged the campus board with addressing security concerns. The campus board assigned this task to a Safety Panel consisting of a “who’s who” of prominent police and military officials: Jane Perlov, formerly of the NYPD and, more recently, chief of police in Raleigh, North Carolina; Louis Quijas, a former assistant director at the FBI and police chief of High Point, North Carolina; Johnny Jennings, the deputy chief of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police; and Edward Reeder, a retired major general in the US Army Special Forces Command and, currently, the CEO of Five Star Global Security.

The Safety Panel determined that if the statue was returned to its original location on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus, the result would be a high level of violence, civil disorder, and property damage. This conclusion was reached after the panel “researched the backgrounds of individual protestors,” who, it noted, had “acted aggressively and unlawfully at recent protests.” It added that “the majority [of the protestors] are not associated with the University and are unlikely to have the best interests of the University and campus safety in mind.”

The Safety Panel further observed that “[o]ver the last few years the nature of college campus protests has changed dramatically.” The panel consulted with Sue Riseling, the Executive Director of the International Association of Campus Law enforcement Administrators, who told them: “Campuses often have demonstrations, sit-ins, marches. That’s not uncommon on college and university campuses across our country. What’s different is when a group comes with all of the baggage and all of the edginess and all of the willingness to use violence to further their political goal.”

Based “on media posts and patterns of past events centered on the Monument,” the panel recommended not returning “Silent Sam” to its original location, as it would “literally be under siege.”

Moving the statute to a different location would, the panel argued, help to mitigate the “risk” of protests and the violence that, it maintained, the monument would inevitably attract. But, it went on to say, the nature of protests are, at present, such that campus police departments are ill-equipped to handle them. And it seems unlikely that local police forces are in much of a position to help.

Consequently, the panel specifically recommends that “the UNC Police acquire greater capabilities in the area of crowd control, protest management and intelligence gathering.” To this end, the panel calls for, as a way of addressing “large protests that involve unlawful behavior,” a “mobile force be developed at the UNC System level (to be shared by all System institutions).” In short, the panel—endorsed by the Board of Trustees—favors the creation of a special police force that could be deployed at any of the seventeen UNC campuses when they face significant protest activity. The panel recommends that this mobile force consist of forty officers and estimates that it would cost $2,000,000 annually and require $500,000 for equipment costs.

The report also refers opaquely to “recent decisions of some Orange County [North Carolina] judges,” which, in the panel’s view, “add to the security risk.” This may refer to the recent dismissal by a judge of charges against a UNC faculty member who had been involved in the “Silent Sam” protests and had been charged with assault.

Thus while the “Silent Sam” decision seemed, at first glance, to be a fairly craven response to pressure from the Republican-dominated Board of Governors, it is apparent, upon closer examination, that it is far more insidious: it uses the protest movement that the statue generated (and which was supported by many  faculty) as a pretext to militarize university campuses. The creation of a special police force across the UNC system, intended to be used primarily to respond to protestors, has very troubling implications for protecting First Amendment rights on campuses. The notion that politically active students—and presumably faculty—would be thought of as requiring “crowd control” and necessitating “intelligence gathering” hardly seems compatible with any traditional idea of the university. And it is mind-boggling that a report by a university governing board would characterize the decisions of local judges protecting citizens’ rights as a “security risk.” In this age of extremes, universities do need to think about how to satisfy the legitimate safety concerns of their constituents; but to use a groundswell of outrage against a racist Confederate monument as a pretext for militarizing the university and disparaging protestors is yet further evidence of the corruption of the university’s mission by those who now lead us.

Michael C. Behrent

Vice President, North Carolina AAUP Conference