CHAPEL HILL, N.C. _ The UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty and community members tasked with addressing campus safety say they are outraged by the process used to resolve the Silent Sam Confederate monument controversy last week.
While they're pleased the statue isn't returning to campus, they say the university's $2.5 million payment to the North Carolina chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans poses a threat to campus safety. Some also argue that it shows that UNC sympathizes with white supremacists.
Members of the UNC Campus Safety Commission discussed the settlement and lawsuit against the UNC System Board of Governors at its monthly meeting Wednesday.
"It's good to get (Silent Sam) off campus, but it's bad because it sends a message that seems to be university support for these white supremacists and that poses further threats to the safety of the people on campus," said Larry Grossberg, professor of communication studies and cultural studies. "There are bigger issues here that are not about safety ... but about trust in the administration more broadly."
Grossberg said faculty members are outraged at the way this settlement was handled, the fact that it was done in secret and announced on the day before Thanksgiving and that it reproduces a solution for a building that was rejected soundly by the university community.
On Nov. 27, the UNC System reached a settlement with the N.C. Sons of Confederate Veterans, though the terms of the agreement had been approved before the lawsuit was filed. The deal turned over ownership of the statue to the Confederate group and offered $2.5 million for the organization to transport and preserve the monument, as well as build a facility to display the statue.
The Board of Governors members who were tasked with finding a solution never held a public meeting to discuss the statue or what options the board was considering. No proposal was publicly presented to the full board or to UNC-Chapel Hill leaders.
Kim Strom-Gottfried, a member of the UNC Campus Safety Commission, said this resolution is at the heart of their mission of rebuilding trust and they should've been consulted. She said the settlement preceding the lawsuit, in addition to UNC's handling of the recent report of federal Clery Act violations and settlement of the anti-Semitism case, is concerning.
"I am very cynical and demoralized about being set forth on a mission when in one month we had three instances that to me seem to put us in a compromised position to meet that mission," Strom-Gottfried said.
In a letter to SCV members, Kevin Stone, commander of the group, said the negotiations were kept confidential and called the settlement with the UNC System a "major strategic victory" all at the expense of the university. He also said the money would contribute to a new division headquarters.
Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor and chair of the safety commission, said Wednesday, "There is no disincentive for white supremacist organizations to come to campus when they're treated this way where we're going to build them a new headquarters. It's beyond just giving something away. ... There's sympathy with the cause of the Sons of Confederate Veterans."
Strom-Gottfried, a professor in the School of Social Work, said the settlement "emboldens" the group. Charles Streeter, former chair of the UNC-CH Employee Forum and a member of the commission, said it "calls into question our own ethics and integrity as a university."
UNC law professor addresses SCV suit
While there's anger over the terms of the settlement and how it was done behind closed doors, some also are questioning the validity of the SCV lawsuit itself.
According to UNC law professor Eric Muller, the lawsuit wouldn't have stood a chance in court. Muller said the lawsuit relies on the assertion that the N.C. Sons of Confederate Veterans own the rights to the Silent Sam statue, which goes back to the origins of the monument in the early 1900s.
The statue was built in a collaboration of efforts between UNC and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (U.D.C), who requested that a monument to Confederate soldiers be erected on campus. It was considered a gift from the U.D.C. to the university, though UNC alumni raised the majority of the money for it.
At the monument's dedication ceremony in 1913, a leader of the U.D.C. said this monument would stand "forever." That one word in that speech is at the crux of this lawsuit.
Fast forward 105 years to when the Silent Sam statue was pulled down by protesters in August 2018, then former UNC-CH Chancellor Carol Folt ordered the removal of the base of the monument.
The moment that monument was hauled off campus, ownership of it instantly reverted to the U.D.C. because the condition of the gift was broken, the lawsuit argues.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy handed over the property rights to the N.C. Sons of Confederate Veterans days before the lawsuit was filed. Without those ownership rights, the N.C. Sons of Confederate Veterans wouldn't have any legal leg to stand on. And Muller argues even that wouldn't have been enough to win the suit.
"There is absolutely no way that a court would conclude that one word in a speech at the dedication had the meaning or the legal significance that this agreement ascribes to it," Muller told the News & Observer. "No way."
Muller said the law demands that the condition be stated very clearly and explicitly in writing and more importantly it articulates the consequences of the break of the condition. He said if UNC had wanted to contest the ownership rights, he's confident they would have won.
"Why did we decide to settle a claim that was so transparently invalid," Muller said at Wednesday's meeting. "Then have to sweeten the deal with a $2.5 million payment on a claim that was so transparently groundless?"
Muller said if a board of directors of a corporation were to settle a lawsuit against the corporation for millions of dollars on the basis of a legal theory that was "bogus" and that the corporation could easily have won on, that would look like a breach of fiduciary duty to the institution.
"We need explanations," said Muller, who's working on a draft of an official statement from the commission.
The UNC System lawyers have failed to offer an explanation as to how or why they reached this settlement with the Sons of Confederate Veterans that gave the group ownership and $2.5 million to preserve and display the statue.
De'Ivyion Drew, a sophomore at UNC who's been active in the Silent Sam protests and a member of the campus safety commission, said the money is "way worse" than the statue being put back up.
"There's a lack of perspective from a person of color, particularly black people, who would prefer to have the statue back up than to have the Sons of Confederates or any white supremacy group get $2.5 million dollars," Drew said at the meeting.
Drew said the settlement is sympathy toward white supremacy. She urged that the commission's statement or letter illustrate how the money poses a hazard to campus safety because there is no promise that white supremacist groups won't return.
The UNC Undergraduate Student Government said the decision was discouraging.
In a letter published the day after the announcement, the executive branch said the "charitable trust will fund the relocation and maintenance of the monument, continuing to perpetuate the ideals student activists fought diligently to remove from campus."
The Executive Board of the UNC Campus Y, the university's hub for social justice and innovation, was also dissatisfied with the decision on Silent Sam.
The group sent out a statement Monday saying UNC is funding "the white nationalists' agenda, further demonstrating the university's alignment with the Confederacy's violent legacy." They said UNC's $2.5 million payment is an act of violence, especially while UNC students face daily threats from white supremacists.
"The work did not end when Silent Sam came down and it does not end now that it will not return to campus," the statement said. "UNC-CH must address institutional racism present in our classrooms, our workplaces, and our broader communities."
They called on the community to donate to anti-racist activists and to email the Board of Governors to "express disgust with their actions."
Student activist groups, including the UNC Black Congress and the Black Student Movement, have planned a campus protest for Thursday afternoon on the theme that "'Silent Sam is not 'Resolved.'" The protest is about "UNC negotiating with and investing in white supremacy," the group said on its Facebook page.
Professor cites 'culture of fear' at UNC
The settlement was announced when relatively few students or faculty were on campus because of the Thanksgiving break. This week, both students and faculty are preoccupied with final exams and closing out the fall semester.
Assistant professor William Sturkey, who specializes in the history of race and the American South, said Wednesday in an interview with the News & Observer that even if there had been more people on campus when the settlement was announced, and even if they were upset about the terms, few faculty or staff members would have felt comfortable speaking out.
"We live in a culture of fear," Sturkey said of those working and studying at UNC.
"Look around," he said, gesturing toward the campus outside his office. "A lot of the people who talked about Silent Sam are not here anymore," including former UNC Chancellor Carol Folt and former UNC System President Margaret Spellings.
Sturkey said the secrecy of the process around the disposition of the statue was alarming and frustrating.
"Our motto is 'light and liberty,'" he said. "We are not supposed to do things in the dark."
Sturkey, who wrote an op-ed piece on the settlement for the New York Times, said he was speaking out because, "I'm tired of the culture, of all these deals going on behind closed doors."
Sturkey said he came to UNC in 2013 because he felt it was the best place in the country to study the history of the South. In recent years, he said, he has repeatedly asked the university to endow a professorship in the Department of History for a specialist in the history of slavery, in part to research the university's own connections to slavery.
Each time, he said, he has been told UNC couldn't afford to fund such an endowment, which Sturkey said would cost about half the amount that has been pledged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans through the Silent Sam settlement.
Researchers know that slave labor was used in the construction of university buildings. Sturkey said he does not expect the Sons of Confederate Veterans to mention that fact anywhere in the building it constructs with the $2.5 million it secured through the settlement.
Sturkey said he also doesn't expect the SCV to note that in the year before the start of the Civil War, most of the students enrolled at UNC came from wealthy families, and all but a handful of them owned slaves.
In a three-sentence statement sent to the campus last week, interim UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz thanked those who crafted the settlement with the SCV for resolving the issue. But Sturkey said the issue is far from resolved.
Through the cash payment, Sturkey said, "We're funding white nationalism, an idea that people have been discrediting for hundreds of years. That is remarkably demoralizing."
P. Brooks Fuller, director of the N.C. Open Government Coalition and an assistant professor in Elon University's School of Communications, questioned Thursday the legality of the process through which attorneys for the university and the Sons of Confederate Veterans and members of the Board of Governors arrived at the settlement. At the very least, he said, there should have been a closed session of the board in which members could consult with counsel, followed by a public report of the terms of the settlement in open sessions.
"Instead, this came out of nowhere," he said.
Further, Fuller said in an email with the News & Observer, "The settlement involves a huge expenditure of capital from the University's budget. In involves a dispute that has garnered the attention and the concern of North Carolinians of all stripes. Though the BoG's individual members may have been at liberty to discuss the Confederate monument outside of open session, it was bad policy to do so, and they were not at liberty to take official action in private.
"The University community and concerned citizens have a right to hear and to be heard, especially when their flagship university seeks to spend millions of dollars on such a controversial plan," Fuller said. "I am troubled that students, faculty, and concerned North Carolinians were not able to voice their concerns or hear the BoG's response in an open, public forum like they deserve."
