Carol Folt, trustees, governors and legislature: bless your hearts.
'Tis the season for predictions of the future. Here is a snarky one.
The proposal Folt and the Board of Trustees conveniently offered up at the end of classes (wow, are students and faculty busy then!) gave the administration just the required amount of political cover needed to look like reasonable compromisers, even if that compromise is not particularly thrifty. Predictably, the Board of Governors rejected the compromise proposal and formed its own committee that also (shocker!) has its proposal deadline scheduled over a break in classes.
As our Board has written before, it seems that cowardice in scheduling public decisions knows no political party or ideology; it just takes political hacks. These particular hacks must be avid theatergoers, because this turgid, cynical piece is sublimely scripted.
Folt and the Trustees, with their proposal, keep their comfortable center-left credibility. The mostly Republican-appointed Board of Governors get to crack the whip from a distance on those rabble-rousing students and faculty. Above all, these actors perpetuate the status quo that keeps them in their comfy chairs, meeting after meeting after meeting.
We as a Board try to place calls to action. Given where we think Sam is going, here is one, laced with a bit of indulgent sarcasm: Chancellor Folt, Board of Trustees, Board of Governors and State Legislature, we are tired of this drama. Just announce that Sam is going back to its original location on June 21, conveniently a date right in the middle of summer, between SSI and SSII, and also the summer solstice!
Development staff will have the longest day of the year to hustle the inevitable neo-Confederate celebration caucus dancing around Sam, because we can never have too much ideological diversity amongst our donor class, and every grubby little dollar helps with the current campaign! We could even ask the original protestors to come back in a ceremonial role every year recreating their initial protests and arrests, as a way to further "contextualize" the monument and "display living history."
If those opposed really care enough about this as a community, protesters could just pull the thing right down again the night before Fall 2019 classes, and Fall 2020 and Fall 20… Silent Sam's fall and rise can become an annual kabuki theater show, maybe even becoming as central to UNC ritual as drinking from the Old Well the first day of the semester.
We would love to say the above is a completely sarcastic prediction, but everyone on this Board is wise enough to recognize sarcasm, even if hostile and bit immature, is also a vehicle for truth. Sarcasm is certainly a better vehicle for truth than our administration. We are theatergoers too, and have seen the form, if not the content, of this play all too many times before.
