TO THE EDITOR:
To the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees:
We are a group of proud alumni of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and the Gillings School of Public Health.
We received an outstanding education at one of the nation’s leading universities and have been successful in our careers, applying the knowledge and practical skills we learned during these formative years in Chapel Hill. We also apply the values we learned at UNC in our professions — the values of justice and equality, “to improve society and to help solve the world’s greatest problems.”
So every year when we get calls from enthusiastic undergraduates to donate to our university, we should be the ones willingly writing checks. But each time we get that phone call, we pause. We pause as recent actions of the University put it at odds with its students and its mission.
The controversy around Saunders Hall is an example creating concern. After brave and intense student, faculty and staff protests, the building, named after a founder of the KKK in North Carolina, was eventually renamed. Yet despite requests from members of the UNC community to rename the building to recognize African-Americans at UNC — one suggestion was to name the building Hurston Hall, after Zora Neale Hurston, who attended classes at UNC — the Board of Trustees picked the bland name, “Carolina Hall.” Even more remarkably, at the same time the Board unanimously passed a 16-year freeze on renaming buildings at UNC.
Both actions seem disrespectful to students and to the women and people of color who the University purports to serve, but whose structures and monuments do not recognize. We feel conflicted when we consider giving back to an institution whose leadership not only seems unwilling to engage with UNC’s complicated history, but is unwilling to engage with its students. Another example that gives us pause is the Silent Sam monument, commemorating the Confederate dead from UNC. In her article about the statue, Julia Craven writes how at its dedication, the president of North Carolina’s United Confederate Veterans stated that Silent Sam was to represent the Confederate soldiers who fought to preserve “the very life of the Anglo-Saxon race in the South” and represented “the purest strain of the Anglo-Saxon.”
We stand in solidarity with students and many others, who have noted, this type of memorial is not appropriate for a campus with UNC’s mission. Yet again, UNC leadership seems unable to empathize with students for whom a monument to Confederate soldiers is a daily, structural reminder of subjugation and slavery.
Knowing what we know, giving back to UNC becomes challenging. But we’re not willing to give up on UNC. We ask that UNC leadership, including the Board of Trustees, make the following changes, to demonstrate its commitment to its own stated values:
