TransparUNCy, a student group which was started last year, is continuing their work to educate students and community members about the inner-workings of the UNC administration.
Members of the Affirmative Action Coalition at UNC and UNC March for Our Lives came together last spring to form the group following the announcement that Lee Roberts would serve as interim chancellor. Roberts was elected as permanent chancellor earlier this month.
“A senior class graduated last year, and a freshman class has come in the fall, right there a quarter of the student body has turned over, and it's new,” TransparUNCy organizer Toby Posel said. “And so all the education we did, all the awareness raising we did, all the agitating we did, all the research and publishing that we did last semester, that challenge begins again.”
TransparUNCy has led "teach-ins," about higher education issues, posted social media series providing commentary on University policies and began TransparUNCy Press, an independent online publication that posts opinion pieces and commentary. The group is made up of 11 core members.
Alexander Denza, a TransparUNCy organizer, said he helped start the group after learning that Roberts was serving on the board of Variety Wholesalers, Inc., a company led by Art Pope, a conservative donor and member of the UNC System Board of Governors.
Denza, Posel and three other students wrote an op-ed in The Daily Tar Heel last February, calling out Roberts for his affiliation with the company and conservative donor. While serving on the board Roberts had received a director’s fee, however, while serving as interim chancellor, said he would not accept the money.
“He has reached out to the students in TransparUNCy on multiple occasions and made it clear to the group that his role on the corporate board had no bearing on his work leading the university,” Senior Director of Media Relations, Kevin Best, wrote in an email statement to The DTH.
“It is my assumption that now that he's been elected to the the full time Chancellor, that he'll resign from the board, but we haven't spoken about it,” Pope said. “We don't have a board meeting pending, so it's an academic question.”
In his statement, Best said that Roberts stepped down from the board of Variety Wholesalers when his position was made permanent and that he has not spent time on Variety Wholesalers or been compensated since beginning the interim position.
