UNC is taking steps officials say will make the campus more welcoming to minority students in the wake of student protests.

Chancellor Carol Folt sent a message to the campus community on Wednesday afternoon saying she wanted to make it clear “no member of our community is less important than any other.”

The letter comes out about two weeks after a Town Hall on Race and Inclusion on the campus was interrupted for nearly 30 minutes by protesters reading a list of demands.

Folt pledged after the meeting to speak with staff and release this letter with a more concerted idea of efforts that would be put forward to make the campus “more welcoming to all members of our community.”

Folt said in the letter that no one on campus “should be made to feel – in our classrooms, libraries, or laboratories, or in our offices or residence halls, or in any public or private place – that our presence here is anything other than an achievement rightly earned.”

She went on to say that no student, faculty or staff member should feel reluctant to speak freely about their beliefs, or be excluded from the responsibility that each of us bears to make the campus more inclusive and achieve the university’s mission.

The letter puts forward seven initiatives with the goal of making the campus more welcoming to all students:

• A group will be convened to coordinate the multiple efforts to foster inclusion that are underway and to fill gaps in those plans.
• A series of opportunities will be created for the campus to learn more about how to understand and counter systemic and personal racism and other forms of bias.
• The retention working group will increase efforts to foster academic success and enhance graduation rates for all students.
• The university will locate a space for black students on campus – much like spaces that already exist for American Indian, Latino and LGBTQ students – that fosters social interaction and community-building.
• The university will increase its efforts to recruit and retain more faculty and staff of color and to explore naming opportunities for scholarships, fellowships, and programming.
• A new campus-wide climate survey will be used to further inform the ongoing work.
• A singe online resource will be created where the campus community can see and learn more about what is being done to foster diversity and inclusion.

Folt said she is confident these steps will make a positive difference.

The letter was signed by every member of the Chancellor’s cabinet and by every dean at UNC.

This action comes after a rally was held at UNC to show solidarity with students at the University of Missouri, who feel as though African – Americans are not welcome on campus.

Other actions at Carolina have included Silent Sam, the memorial to Confederate soldiers who left UNC and died fighting in the Civil War, being spray painted and blindfolded.

The UNC Board of Trustees voted in May to “correct an error” in the namesake of what is now Carolina Hall. The building was previously known as Saunders Hall, named for William L. Saunders, who was a Colonel in the Confederate Army before serving as North Carolina Secretary of State. When deciding to name the building after Saunders in the 1920s, Trustees touted his leadership in the Ku Klux Klan as qualification.

Folt met with a coalition of students from the group that read a list of demands at the town hall on Wednesday afternoon.

The Daily Tar Heel is reporting the group had prioritized five demands:

• Cluster hiring within each university department to increase the number of black faculty
• Revoking the 16-year freeze on renaming university buildings and monuments and renaming Carolina Hall to Hurston Hall
• Creating a Ph.D. program in the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies
• Creating a mandatory Black and Blue Tour for new UNC students
• Publishing admission and graduation data of minority students on the UNC website homepage.