A little over a month after activists met with administration in early December to discuss their five demands for change on campus, the possibility of these demands becoming a reality is still up in the air.
Rumay Alexander, special assistant to the Chancellor, said the demands are still being discussed.
“We’re saying all those are possibilities for dialogues, but I can’t talk about feasibility until we’ve had a true time for a thorough assessment and bringing the right groups together to have the conversations we need to have in order to have collaboration,” she said.
The five demands, condensed from a list of 50 presented at a November town hall meeting, are: cluster hiring within each University department to increase the number of black faculty; the revoking of the 16-year moratorium on changing University buildings’ names and the renaming of Carolina Hall to Hurston Hall; a Ph.D. program in the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies; a mandatory Black and Blue Tour for new UNC students; and published data on the home page of the UNC website displaying the admission and the graduation rates of minority students.
Alexander said the demand for hiring more black faculty requires a lot of collaboration.
“These are all very complex issues that are going to require coordination with a number of different departments in the University that are related to hiring,” she said.
The Board of Trustees renamed Carolina Hall in May and instituted a 16-year freeze on renaming any campus building, memorial or monument.
Dwight Stone, chairperson of the Board of Trustees, said the board believes 16 years is an appropriate time frame.
“The board's resolution on the freeze noted that the new education and curation initiatives would require a period of time to take effect,” Stone said in an email.
