“This Is At The Heart Of Being Able To Do Our Job”

CHAPEL HILL – On the UNC Campus, charges of sexual assault and the honor court’s handling of them have put pressure on the school and the Chancellor.

***Listen to Part IV of the Interview***

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“I think chancellors have struggled over the years with the Honor Court and its independence,” says UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp in a WCHL News Special end-of-term interview with Jim Heavner. “It’s one of these areas where you can’t win, because if something goes wrong in the Honor Court, the public is expecting that the chancellor can intervene and correct that, but all of the sort of former student attorney generals and honor court golden-fleece crowd who love the Honor Court and think it’s this sacrosanct thing don’t think that the chancellor should intervene.”

While the accusations and reports to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights come on the heels of NCAA investigations and investigations into the African and Afro-American Studies Department, UNC is not the only campus dealing with this issue.

Chancellor Thorp says with all the attention paid to sexual conduct at UNC, he still hasn’t spent enough time and resources on it.

“I felt I spent too much time working on athletics; I don’t feel that I’ve spent too much time working on this,” Chancellor Thorp says. “There’s no such thing as spending too much time on this. This is at the heart of being able to do our job.”

And he says some of that focus needs to be on the students’ role in University governance.

“Just as the Knight Commission crowd is upset with me for saying things about how we govern intercollegiate athletics, I think there are certain folks who are uncomfortable that I’ve been saying these sorts of things about the Honor Court,” Chancellor Thorp says. “But again, I think this is one of these things that need to come out into the open and people need to discuss.”

The interview will be played in its entirety Saturday and Sunday.

To read about and hear part three, click here.