UNC – Chapel Hill alumnus and North Carolina 4th District Congressman David Price said it is “sad and regretful that it’s come to this” after the UNC System Board of Governors voted to accept the resignation of Chancellor Carol Folt on an accelerated timeline.
The move by the system board came after Folt announced Monday that she was ordering the removal of the base of the Confederate monument known as Silent Sam from the Chapel Hill campus. She simultaneously announced that she was going to be stepping down as chancellor at the end of the academic year. But the Board of Governors vote on Tuesday moved that timeline up to January 31.
“The Confederate monument at the gateway to the campus should’ve been removed a long time ago,” Price said in an interview Tuesday afternoon.
Folt told WCHL on Tuesday that the campus “can feel safer” after the removal of the monument.
Price described the history associated with the statue that was erected in 1913 as “sad and difficult and divisive.”
“I regret that the Board of Governors has never understood that and that they’ve stood in the way for months, now years, of a solution to this challenge,” he said. “And, of course, Chancellor Folt has been caught in this.”
Price went on to call the issue a “preoccupation” of Folt’s chancellorship. But Price said that he felt the chancellor did was she thought must be done.
“I commend her for doing that,” the congressman said. “It was difficult, still is difficult. But the Board of Governors has been distinctly unhelpful.
“And now – to do what they’ve done with respect to her tenure personally – I’m very, very sorry to see this. I think it’s a sad day for the university.”
The UNC System and UNC – Chapel Hill will now soon be without permanent leadership. System President Margaret Spellings announced late last year that she would be stepping down from that role two years before her contract was up. Dr. Bill Roper is now serving as the interim president while Spellings remains on the payroll and on call through March 1.
“I appreciate Margaret Spellings’ tenure,” Price said of the former secretary of education under George W. Bush. “She also didn’t get all the support she should’ve had from the Board of Governors in a time that was challenging.”
Price said he felt the UNC System was in a “difficult” place.
“I know Bill Roper and admire him and wish him well,” Price said. “I’m glad he’s available to take over in this interim role at this point. But thanks to the Board of Governors and the political polarization that they represent, this is not an easy time for him or for anybody else who cares about the university.”
More than the Board of Governors, Price placed the blame for the tumultuous time at the UNC System on those who appoint the board – North Carolina lawmakers.
“There’s the overarching reality of declining support for the university form the Republicans over in the General Assembly,” Price said. “They’ve not done UNC or the UNC System any favors in terms of overall support at a critical time for higher education.”
While most of what David Price says here is arguably defensible, I expected (though I am still disappointed) that he would turn this into a matter of political tribalism. It is what politicians do.
(Full disclosure: I have no party affiliation — my family has a very long history of opposition to the dangers of political parties — but I always vote Democratic [when a good third party candidate is not running] only because I usually find that they are the least-bad choice. And I should note that I am not only a constituent of David Price, and that I voted for him in every election in which he ran. But the operative point here is that least-bad is not necessarily good.)
Two facts are relevant in this matter of bad governance at UNC:
1. This has been a problem since 1804 when UNC founding father William Davie warned about partisan control of the University. In the years since then, when Democrats had political control, they did nothing to alter the structural corruptions of UNC governance, and indeed, on many occasions they made it worse. But don’t take my word for it: just look at what Bill Friday said when the system was consolidated back in the early 1970’s, and that is only one example of complaints about Democrats overreaching. So it is simply disingenuous of Price to try to insulate the Democrats from blame for the problems of University governance. That brings us to the second point:
2. When the monuments legislation was passed out of the NC Senate, every Democrat (yep, every single one) voted for the law. Then when it went to the House, the efforts of the Democrats to amend the damn thing never even mentioned the University, even though faculty leaders had warned of the potential for chaos the law could pose for the campuses. But again, don’t take my word for it: you can look up the history of the monuments law yourself. It’s all right there on the Legislature website. So, not only is it disingenous of Price to exempt the Democrats from culpability in bad governance, it is also misleading (dare I say, mendacious?) to exempt them from culpability in the passage of Senate Bill 22.
‘Nuff said.