A group claiming to be made up of 17 senior faculty members at UNC say they will hold off on an ultimatum issued to university leadership regarding the future of the Confederate monument known as Silent Sam.

A Twitter account set up claiming to represent the 17 faculty members posted a message at halftime of the Miami-UNC basketball game Tuesday night that they would “stand down for the present” due to a message they say came from the chancellor’s office. The faculty members said they were acting “as a sign of good faith” after they say they received word from the university’s administrative office that UNC Chancellor Carol Folt was preparing to ask Governor Roy Cooper to petition the North Carolina Historical Commission for “an urgent ruling on whether UNC may relocate” the statue of a Confederate solider.

But UNC spokesperson Joanne Peters said in an email to WCHL Tuesday night that she could not confirm that Folt would be making that request to Cooper.

“We do not know who is behind these statements, and have not been in communication with any such group,” Peters said.

The group anonymously sent a letter to Folt saying that the university leadership had until midnight on March 1 to move Silent Sam or else the faculty would “remove the statue ourselves.”

While the university confirmed receipt of the email, officials said they could not confirm the authenticity of the letter. The faculty sent the letter to the student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel as well. DTH staffers said they met with one faculty member who confirmed the group’s existence, but no faculty members have gone on the record with any outlet as of Tuesday night.

Cooper previously told UNC leadership that the statue could be moved, if the administration felt it posed a public safety threat. Folt and other UNC officials have maintained that a request to remove the statue would have to come from the UNC System Board of Governors rather than the Chapel Hill campus.

Cooper’s office has petitioned the historical commission to relocate three Confederate monuments from the old Capitol grounds in Raleigh.

That state body is scheduled to meet this spring to discuss a committee report on options for removing Confederate monuments. The Republican-led General Assembly passed a law in 2015 barring the removal of “objects of remembrance.”

The Silent Sam statue has been a point of protest for decades. The momentum calling for its removal has been consistent since a protest on the first day of the fall semester last August. That rally came after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a counterprotester was killed.