UNC – Chapel Hill Chancellor Carol Folt and the university’s Board of Trustees are coming up on a deadline next week, which has already been extended once, to present a plan for the future of the Confederate monument on the campus known as Silent Sam.
Protesters pulled the statue down from its pedestal on McCorkle Place in August. The UNC System Board of Governors then directed the campus to develop a plan for the disposition and preservation of the monument.
UNC System President Margaret Spellings said Wednesday she was confident the campus was developing a thorough plan.
“They’ve done a lot of good homework in terms of assessing the security issues, getting input and thoughts from lots of constituencies,” she said.
Spellings wrote to Folt in August 2017 that “Texans are smarter,” after the University of Texas president ordered the removal of Confederate statues from the campus after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to a counterprotester being killed. The situation in North Carolina was complicated, in part, due to a 2015 law preventing the movement of object of remembrance.
Spellings said the layers of governance proved to be obstacles to finding a solution to the issues presented by the monument in Chapel Hill.
“We’ve got a Board of Trustees and a chancellor and administration and a president and a Board of Governors and a Historical Commission and a legislature,” Spellings listed. “So, there’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen.”
While ultimate authority on what could happen with the monument could rise to the North Carolina General Assembly, whether a decision could be made before reaching that point “remains to be seen,” Spellings said.
The system president said Wednesday that she felt she needed to respect the process in place and allow the campus to develop a plan rather than voicing her opinion on the monument.
“It would’ve been wrong for me to opine on what I thought should happen to Silent Sam while we have given Carolina the option to go, please, have a process,” Spellings said, “consider these issues, consider security, consider the options.
“For me to preempt that would’ve been presumptuous.”
The campus leadership has until December 3 to submit its recommendation to the Board of Governors, who are then scheduled to discuss the plan at a meeting on December 14.
Spellings was speaking with reporters on Wednesday as she is preparing to leave the role as president early next year. UNC Health Care CEO and dean of the School of Medicine Dr. Bill Roper is set to take over as interim system president.
Do we condone destruction of property? Not returning Silent Sam will be approval of more destruction.