North Carolina university leaders depart amid culture war

Folt said she acted to protect public safety because the pedestal remained a focal point of passionate protests, both pro and con. The statue nicknamed "Silent Sam" had stood on a prominent plaza named for a slave-owning educator since 1913, when it was dedicated with a white-supremacist speech by a former Confederate.

The episodes are fresh evidence that, more than 150 years after it ended, the Civil War remains a cultural fault line for many Southerners.

But the ousters also represent the revenge of conservative Trump voters against university academics who seem culturally alien, said Jay Schalin, policy analysis director at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a Raleigh-based conservative think tank. Their representatives, who dominate the state's legislature and university system's board, told Folt and Spellings to leave weeks earlier than they planned to go.

"We are essentially seeing the national culture war being played out in a local arena," Schalin said Thursday. "We are seeing a new dynamic in America, in that many of the people who have not had a voice are now getting a voice. And it's being played out in the UNC system and on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus."

Similar skirmishes have taken place at public universities in Nebraska, Iowa, California and Alabama in recent years, but they go back decades — at least since the blowback against teaching evolution and long before 1960s campus radicalism.

Most Americans think the country's higher education system is headed in the wrong direction, a Pew Research Center survey last summer found. About three-quarters of Republicans objected to professors bringing their political and social views into the classroom. About the same proportion thought there was too much concern about protecting students from views they might find offensive.

Spellings resigned after friction with the public university Board of Governors. Board members second-guessed her choices to name chancellors who run campuses and her own safety concerns about "Silent Sam" after a violent 2017 white-rights march in Charlottesville, Va.

Folt's standing with the governing board was unclear before her surprise move. The former biologist who left the Ivy League's Dartmouth College for Chapel Hill had overseen a fundraising drive that raised more than $2 billion as of last summer, half of its ambitious goal. The university's research funding had grown by 13 percent to $883 million under Folt.

She received the largest raise among state campus leaders in December 2017, three months after board members criticized her not taking a hard line against post-Charlottesville demonstrators demanding "Silent Sam's" removal.

But last summer Silent Sam was ripped off its base, and Folt got no bump to her $633,000 salary three months later.

Folt's campus trustees and several big fundraisers have said this week they support her.

"Since arriving at Chapel Hill, Carol Folt has stood strong for the university. We are much better for the work she has done. However, during her tenure, increasing pressure from Raleigh and the Board of Governors has put politics ahead of the best interests of education, research and patient care. Silent Sam came to embody it all," 20 former UNC-Chapel Hill trustees wrote in a statement Wednesday.

"Regardless of one’s view on Silent Sam, the Confederate monument had become a lightening rod for violence and intolerance on this campus and had to be removed. We realize taking it down quickly was controversial. It is our hope that we will not have to continue fighting the Civil War by trying to resurrect it elsewhere on campus," the statement said.

Most professors probably felt it was best for Silent Sam to go, but even more agreed the issue has festered for too long and needed resolution, said North Carolina Central University law professor David Green, who heads the group representing faculty on all 17 campuses.

Schalin said he believes the public university governing board will continue setting a more conservative course for the system's presidents. It's time to encourage teaching broadly shared cultural values, he said.

The "culture of academia is very strongly in conflict with a great deal of the country," Schalin said. "The campuses cannot remain one-sided and expect to get funding and be treated with respect by everybody."

But demanding conservative orthodoxy would threaten the Chapel Hill school's top reputation, said Stephen Trachtenberg, president emeritus at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the university is to foster exploration and debate by weighing both the conservative and the revolutionary, he said.

"It's the kind of university that you'd want to work at, the kind of university you'd want your children to go to," said Trachtenberg, who has consulted on recruiting top academic positions. "But it's not the kind of university that you would go to as a leader, because the board doesn't understand that there's a job of the trustees and the job of the chancellors and the presidents."

Chuck Duckett, vice chairman of the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees, said Friday he's concerned that the way Folt left will make it harder to attract top-notch candidates to succeed her.

"We’ve got a lot to do," Duckett said following a three-hour closed-door meeting with trustees and Roper. "It’s a great state. It’s a a great university."

Duckett was one of three current trustees to issue a statement supporting Folt shortly after she announced her resignation Monday. He dismissed the notion of a rift between trustees and the Board of Governors.

"These are tough times," he said. "It’s tough things for all people involved. There are a lot of different opinions here."

But the former trustees made it clear in their statement that that they believe politics is nor running the UNC system instead of the "common good."

"At this nation’s beginnings, the leaders of our state understood the value of educating its citizens and chartered a university with access for all. Now, it is our collective responsibility to govern for the common good, rather than based on individual political preferences," the statement said. "We are proud of Folt’s leadership in making Carolina a better place and, in doing so, making North Carolina better. We ask now that those charged with governing UNC put aside divisiveness so we can implement our shared, core mission for the people of this state."