Letter: ​Chancellor Folt, what’s good?

TO THE EDITOR:

Let me be perfectly clear, the safety and well-being of the student body is most certainly not a “debate.”

This is not about differing “opinions” on how to best represent our past. This is about the lived realities of current students who feel actively unwelcome on this campus.

It is not a student’s job to create for themselves a safe and supportive learning environment. 

That’s what we pay money for, Carol.

I see that you are under a lot of pressure; I can understand that. 

What I cannot understand is the lack of action taken by the University Administration (that’s you, Carol) to contextualize the blatantly racist monuments on campus and to interrupt the actions of a white supremacist group that comes to defend them.

The University took action to silence the People of Color Takeover the Quad this past Friday. And yet, a rally celebrating white supremacy isn’t interfered with whatsoever?

In a message you sent out to the University community just two days before the racist/xenophobic group from Alamance County was set to arrive on our campus, you called the statue of Silent Sam a “Memorial to Civil War Soldiers of the University.”

Carol, if you cannot even call the statue by its name, if you cannot call it what it is (which is a celebration of white supremacy) you are actively participating in the creation and re-creation of an unsafe campus environment for your students.

So no, this conversation will not stop at your “freedom of speech” cop-out. 

We are not powerless to these words, and they do not give the University a pass when it comes to jeopardizing the safety of its students.

Because I wonder, Carol, how would you react if this was a group of black and brown people putting the lives of your white students in jeopardy? 

Where do you draw the line? 

#WhatsGoodCarol?

Jen Myers

Senior 

Women’s and gender studies