Opinion: Students have waited enough for Saunders renaming

“Wait,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “has almost always meant ‘never.’”

So this board fears is the case with the UNC Board of Trustees, who have decided to further delay announcing a decision on renaming Saunders Hall.

The board announced March 25 that it was not yet ready to issue a judgment on the building named for William L. Saunders, a man who all parties involved agree was recognized as the head of North Carolina’s Ku Klux Klan when the building was named.

Invested students, sensibly recognizing that the University need not choose to honor a man with an abhorrent ideology, are almost uniformly supportive of the renaming.

In the absence of substantial disagreement about Saunders’ ties to the Klan, why the delay?

Perhaps the Board is working quietly to build up support among university stakeholders for changing the name; maybe it is working, as it claims, toward a “comprehensive” solution to help it adjudicate future naming disputes.

Yet we fear it plans to simply outlast this wave of activism — one led primarily by seniors who will leave campus soon — and announce an unsatisfactory decision this summer.

Upperclassmen will recall that it need not be this way. In November 2012, the board unexpectedly, came out in support of gender neutral housing.

Though gender neutral housing was later crushed by pressure from conservatives, the actions of the board on that day provide us with hope that this Board might yet do the right thing and rename Saunders.