BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT
The ongoing controversy surrounding the Confederate statue known as “Silent Sam” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has raised many issues relating to inclusivity and free expression. But as administrators have sought over the past month to find ways to lay the issue to rest, the controversy has spilled over into the realm of university governance as well. In particular, efforts to resolve the “Silent Sam” debate have cast doubt on the willingness of university administrators, in these highly politicized times, to find acceptable and legitimate solutions, using inclusive and consultative methods, for addressing contentious campus issues.
A lack of sure-footedness is most evident in recent decisions by UNC-Chapel Hill’s administration. After protestors toppled the monument on August 20, the University of Carolina’s Board of Governors—the body that runs the seventeen-campus UNC system—charged UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor Carol Folt and the campus’ Board of Trustees with formulating a plan for the disposition of the statue. On December 3, Folt and her board proposed building a $5.3 million museum to house “Silent Sam.” This plan, they hoped, would satisfy both student protestors (since the monument, associated with white supremacy, would not be returned to its original place at the heart of campus) and conservative state legislators (as this decision would conform with a North Carolina statute that prohibits the removal of historic monuments from public property).
In trying to please everyone, Folt satisfied no one: the plan was immediately panned, even triggering calls for a grade strike among teaching assistants. At a meeting on December 14, the Board of Governors rejected UNC-Chapel Hill’s proposal: instead, it appointed a Board task force to work with the chancellor and the trustees to find a more acceptable solution to the controversy.
What this entire process reveals is how difficult it is, in the current environment, for administrators to reach consensus-based decisions on emotionally charged matters. Chancellor Folt knew that many students and faculty had long regarded the monument’s presence on campus as offensive and opposed the statue’s return to campus in any form. In October, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Faculty Council called for the statue’s permanent removal, endorsing a statement in this vein that had been signed by many Black faculty.
Yet at the same time, the chancellor realized that she also had to satisfy the Board of Governors. In recent years, the UNC Board of Governors has transformed itself into an overtly partisan body, seen, by some, as an extension of the Republican-dominated—and heavily gerrymandered—state legislature. For instance, the Board shut down a poverty center whose director was outspokenly critical of the legislature’s policies, and severely limited the activities of a civil rights center run by UNC-Chapel’s law school. When Folt declared in late August that “Silent Sam” had no place “at the front door of a safe, welcoming, proudly public research university,” the Board’s chair, Harry Smith, replied that he was “very disappointed” with the chancellor’s “strong statements” about the monument’s relocation.
In sum, while Folt and the UNC administration may have preferred to have faculty and student support for their decision, they felt they had to please the Board of Governors. Due to the Board’s history of political intervention and close ties to the legislature—its 28 members include a posse of former Republican legislators and lobbyists—university leaders had no appetite for a fight with the Board (for instance, by challenging the law that limited the campus’ ability to remove the statue from campus). The resulting awkward compromise—placing the statue in an expensive museum—was a fairly transparent effort to placate the Board and the legislature (by keeping the statue on campus), which the chancellor tried implausibly to dress up as a recognition of the statue’s association with racism—despite the fact that many students and faculty had made it clear that any solution that kept the statue on campus was unacceptable.
The chancellor’s clumsy compromise was rejected by the Board of Governors. Yet the Board itself seems unlikely to succeed where campus administrators failed. True, the Board has taken some measure of the outrage that fuels the anti-“Silent Sam” movement, despite the fact that some Republicans still believe the statue should be returned to its original place of prominence. But rather than acknowledge the principles at stake—in particular, the belief that the monument’s association with white supremacy demeans students and faculty of color—the Board dodged the issue, rejecting the chancellor’s proposal on more innocuous grounds. “The $5.3 million is, I think, pretty tough for a lot of us to swallow,” Board chair Harry Smith explained. He also said: “When you hear the students speak about fear and safety and concern, it’s pretty real.” What the Board “heard,” in short, were concerns about cost and safety. On the issues that lie at the heart of the controversy—racism and inclusivity—the Board had precious little to say.
The entire process has, moreover, given short shrift to shared governance. Folt’s plan ignored a Faculty Council resolution that had called for the monument’s permanent removal from campus. In demanding a new plan, the Board did not embrace a process that would be open and participatory. The Board called for a “task force of board members to work with the UNC-Chapel Hill trustees to devise a new plan for Silent Sam.” Despite a Faculty Council resolution calling for direct faculty participation in future decision-making about the monument’s disposition, Folt, meanwhile, has signaled only that she plans to engage faculty and students in “conversations” in the coming weeks. She has adopted no clear mechanism for the faculty to provide meaningful input.
The Board’s history of politically motivated interference makes it unlikely that its recommendations will be viewed as neutral. Of the five Board members appointed to the task force, one is a former Republican state senator, while another is an insurance executive who has hired two state legislators. That said, the Board did include a graduate from one of the system’s historically minority-serving institutions, as well as a member who has bucked the majority on some of the Board’s more controversial decisions. Yet while the harsh criticism with which Folt’s plan was received may have knocked some sense into the Board, the prospect that it can reconcile its own agenda (and that of its sponsors in the legislature) with the concerns of student and faculty seems dim.
If one had any doubt as to what administrators really thought about the “Silent Sam” protest movement, one had only to consult the appendices of Folt’s decision: even as she sang the praises of inclusivity, her report called for the creation of a system-wide anti-protestor police force—a force that could handle the “threat” posed by students demanding a more inclusive campus environment. This may be one of the issues on which the Board’s task force will weigh in when it delivers its proposal on or before March 15.
The crisis in university governance that the “Silent Sam” controversy sheds light on is, at the end of the day, a crisis of trust. Many students and faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill have lost confidence in their chancellor’s ability to hear their concerns. Meanwhile, the Board of Governors worries that rowdy students and faculty might pressure the chancellor to support policies that are contrary to the interests that prevail in the legislature. Finally, the partisanship exhibited by the Board makes it difficult for many in the university community and in the broader public to see it as an honest broker. The reasons for this breakdown of trust are legion: the politicization of the university’s governing board; the advent of a class of career university administrators, more concerned with burnishing their resumés and earning glowing performance reviews than with representing their campus’ interests; and the complexities of campus politics in polarized times. But more than anything, the abandonment of a robust system of shared governance has deprived the university of an effective and legitimacy-producing mechanism for building trust across campus constituencies.
Michael C. Behrent
Vice-President, North Carolina Conference of the AAUP
UNC-Chapel Hill’s AAUP chapter provided significant input for this post
