The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees voted Wednesday to end its 16-year moratorium on renaming campus buildings, allowing the names of people who backed slavery or promoted segregation to be erased from campus.
The 11-2 vote means that trustees will now set guidelines for how to proceed with renamings, trustees Chairman Richard Stevens said.
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"We have a very elaborate process for how buildings get named, but we don't yet have a full process in place" for removing names, Stevens said, noting that the board will try to adopt guidelines at its July meeting.
Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said officials will look at whether "names really compromise the university's mission and values and how these individuals align with the values of Carolina."
In 2015, the Board of Trustees voted to rename Saunders Hall, which had been named in 1992 for William Lawrence Saunders, as Carolina Hall. Saunders was an alumnus who served as a Confederate colonel in the Civil War and also founded the Ku Klux Klan in the state, and the trustees called it "an error" that he was considered for the honor of having his name on a campus building.
After Saunders Hall was renamed, the moratorium was set in place, sending a message that no other buildings could be renamed.
"This is an ongoing process but certainly a timely one and, we felt, an extremely important one we felt to take at this time," Stevens said in explaining the move.
Protesters toppled the "Silent Sam" Confederate monument on campus two years ago, and other monuments nationwide have come under harsh criticism in recent weeks as tributes to racism and white supremacy.
Anne Mitchell Whisnant, adjunct associate professor of history and American studies, has compiled a list of more than two dozen campus buildings named for figures linked to white supremacy.
"I think this removes a pair of handcuffs that had been put on the university community to have a meaningful discussion," Whisnant said. "Students have been critical to this conversation for decades – decades. Over and over again, student activists discover this information. They do research, they learn about the history of the campus, and they are moved to do something about it.
"I think the reason that we are having the conversation is really because of that," she added. "Scholars know a lot of this material, but it really came to public attention and, I think, public consciousness because student activists got out there and made us pay attention."
De’Ivyion Drew, a rising junior, also credits student efforts to repeal the moratorium for Wednesday's vote.
"The momentum begins with the students and their demands to not only change the building names but also to create opportunities to learn about the white supremacist history that is at Carolina," Drew said.
Seeing the names of racists on campus buildings is "demoralizing," she said.
"It’s burdensome. I feel like that’s really the word. But after today, with the moratorium [over], there is motivation for moving forward and really trying to build the Carolina – the liberated Carolina – that can transpire from this movement moment."
Faculty joined the call to rescind the moratorium with a petition in February that called it an effort to protect white supremacy.
"This has just struck me from 2015 as a regressive step, sort of anti-intellectual step," said Eric Muller, a professor at the UNC School of Law who was one of the petition organizers.
"The idea that a university campus, which is supposed to be about research and conversation and truth, would stifle conversation about something for 16 years, struck me as a bad idea from the get go," Muller said. "I’m very very gratified that the board has seen the wisdom of rescinding the action that they took in 2015."
He cited Ruffin Residence Hall as one building that needs a name change. The dormitory is named for Thomas Ruffin, a former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court who was a slave trader and authored "an utterly brutal" court opinion that "authorized slave owners to have complete control over the bodies of enslaved people, even to the point of shooting them in the back," Muller said.
Stevens said no buildings have been identified to act on first.
"As a scholar, I believe any of these changes that we would make should be on the basis of careful study," Muller said. "I don’t favor the willy-nilly, just pulling names down left and right without reflection."