Improving race relations and creating a welcoming environment for all students has been one of the biggest storylines on university campuses around the country and at UNC in recent months.

High-level administrators, including Chancellor Carol Folt and Provost Jim Dean, met with student activists Friday to continue the discussion surrounding diversity at UNC, according to Carolina Connection.

Folt has sent multiple messages to the campus to lay out plans moving forward to incorporate student group ideas of how to improve the sometimes-tense relationship between the university and minority students. A group of students stopped a Town Hall event on campus last year to read a list of demands.

A task force responsible for “developing a comprehensive approach to curtaing and teaching the history of the University” was created in September 2015.

The task force is looking at projects including McCorkle Place, home to the oft-defaced Silent Sam statute that serves as a memorial to UNC students who died serving in the Confederacy during the Civil War. The group is also working on a permanent solution for Carolina Hall, which saw the Board of Trustees change its name from Saunders Hall last year. The building’s former namesake, Williams L. Saunders, was a Colonel in the Confederate Army and purportedly the leader of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina. While records do not exist that clearly name Saunders the leader of the KKK, the Board of Trustees touted that as a qualification for the building to be named in his honor in the 1920s.

Carolina Connection is the radio news magazine produced by students in the University of North Carolina School of Media and Journalism. You can hear Carolina Connection Saturdays throughout the semester at 8:30 on WCHL, immediately following the Chapelboro Week in Review.

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