UNC – Chapel Hill Chancellor Carol Folt and the campus Board of Trustees are working toward developing a plan for the “disposition and preservation” of the Confederate monument on the Chapel Hill campus known as Silent Sam.

Folt said at the Board of Trustees meeting on Thursday that the consideration of the monument’s future is part of the larger contextualization going on across the campus.

“We are in a long-term conversation about the history of the university and contextualizing that history,” Folt said.

Protesters pulled the Silent Sam statue down from its pedestal on McCorkle Place at a rally on August 20. There have been three subsequent demonstrations bringing opposing groups to the campus. Over the course of the four events, there have been more than two dozen arrests.

The UNC System Board of Governors has charged the campus leadership with developing the plan for the monument’s future. Folt said the remaining base of the monument will be involved in that planning process.

Board chair Haywood Cochrane said they are looking for additional feedback from the public.

“We not only want your help, we need your help,” Cochrane said. “We need your creative ideas.”

The university established an email address last week to receive public comment. Folt said that new ideas were continuing to come in.

She added it would be important for the board to be flexible in order to consider all of these ideas and finalize a plan ahead of the November 15 deadline.

“You don’t do all your listening, then all your planning, then all your deciding,” the chancellor said. “We need to do things all along the way. So, when we have ideas, people have to start looking at feasibility as they come forward.

“And, I’m an experimentalist, so I love the fact that as a campus we are experimenting with doing things fast.”

The chancellor said there would be a series of conversations on the campus to solicit feedback from students, faculty and staff, but no plans have been publicly announced.

One of the main challenges, Folt said, was that there were so many strong feelings about the monument, which makes consensus building more difficult.

“What we’re doing is going back to what I think we do best, which is try to bring people together in collaboration,” she said. “Let’s talk about what the goal is, let’s talk about the obstacles, let’s think what are the values that we share. And then let’s figure out the idea.”

Folt said it was too early to know if the university would submit one plan to the Board of Governors or a series of options.

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