By Jay Schalin
Monday, January 21, 2019
Carol Folt’s tenure as chancellor of the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill came to an abrupt end last week, thanks to her
failure to grasp political realities and her defiant support of the school’s
radical social justice crowd. She challenged the system’s governing body, the
Board of Governors, by having the pedestal of the Civil War memorial known as
“Silent Sam” removed. In response, the Governors gave her a couple of weeks to
clean out her desk instead of letting her finish the spring semester as she
intended.
It should hardly surprise anybody that Folt ran afoul of
the university system’s ultimate authority to promote the social justice
agenda. After all, she has always sided with the radical diversity agenda
against more prudent interests; there is ample evidence from her days as
provost and interim president at Dartmouth College as well as her time at UNC.
Once the Confederate statue known as Silent Sam was
pulled down by a howling mob of protesters in August 2018, Folt’s end was
inevitable. It was obvious that the mob’s action had official imprimatur, with
police from the campus and the city of Chapel Hill “standing down” while the
bolts connecting the statue to its pedestal were removed, the ropes were
attached, and the statue was yanked to the ground. Emails showed that Chapel
Hill’s police indeed had orders to turn away from the protest once the actual
vandalism commenced.
One question that remains is with whom the decision to
stand down originated. Standard procedure is for the city police to follow the
lead of the university police during campus incidents. And, in a matter of such
national importance as the violent destruction of a highly visible monument by
a mob of hundreds, the decision is generally made at a higher level than just
the campus police. While we the public may never know the precise details of
Folt’s involvement, we know she closely followed the event blow-by-blow through
text messages. She was in charge of the campus and she knew what was happening
in real time, so the buck stops at her desk.
With the foolish decision to yield to the mob, Folt was
as good as gone. Perhaps she thought that, if the statue were pulled down
outside of her visible control, the problem would just go away by itself.
Instead, the situation’s volatility increased: Folt had placed herself in the
middle of a highly charged tug-of-war between the campus and the rest of the
state, with no possible solution that could please both sides. There were those
who wanted the statue off the campus and those who wanted it restored, with no
common ground between them. Her suggestion in December that the school erect a
$5.3 million building to house Silent Sam (with annual operations of $800,000)
was derided by all factions and officially shot down by the Board of Governors.
Having completely fumbled her earlier handling of the
statue protests, she doubled down with her more recent order to remove Silent
Sam’s pedestal and plaque—without the Board’s knowledge or approval.
That audacious act was both within character and
predictable. Back at Dartmouth, Folt deliberately stoked a controversy that
began with a small group of gender radicals taking over the stage at an
orientation program for admitted high school seniors. The radicals, who called
themselves “Real-Talk Dartmouth,” shouted, “Dartmouth has a problem” and
presented a scenario of the campus as an ominous sexual battleground filled
with violence and intimidation to the stunned future freshmen.
Which, of course, was silly; Dartmouth is far safer than
most places on earth, and the protesters represented just about nobody else on
campus. But instead of regarding the incident as a teachable moment about civil
discourse and handing the protesters a minor punishment for interrupting a
campus event, Folt poured gasoline on the fire, turning it into a raging
altercation. She gave an inflammatory speech in support of Real-Talk Dartmouth,
in which she condemned campus society as repressive beyond the pale. (Without
irony, or perhaps, without a clue, she said her talk was about “opening the
door to civil debate.”) A week after the orientation session was disrupted, she
shut down classes for a “campus wide ‘diversity and inclusion’ training day” to
further the protesters cause.
Folt’s complicity with the radical agenda did not stop
once she came to Chapel Hill. She supported a task force on sexual assault
convened by Holden Thorp, her predecessor. She turned the task force’s findings
into school policy, even though the new rules eliminated the due process right
of the accused to face his or her accuser, and introduced the absurd
“affirmative consent” standard (in which each step in the act of seduction
requires verbal agreement). Folt also hired additional Title IX investigators
to pursue complaints of sexual discrimination, harassment, and assault.
Much of the focus on sexual violence at Chapel Hill at
that time was driven by a pair of activists, Annie Hall and Andrea Pino, both
former UNC students who claimed to be victims of campus rape. Neither woman
reported her assault to police, so timely investigations using modern
techniques were never conducted to ascertain or disprove their claims. Pino’s
tale, in particular, seems dubious and started breaking down once it was placed
under the national microscope. Brooklyn College history professor K.C. Johnson
and National Journal contributing
editor Stuart Taylor, who had previously debunked the Duke lacrosse hoax, wrote
in a new book on campus rape that “Pino’s credibility has continued to
unravel.”
Yet Folt consistently supported Hall and Pino. She appeared
in campus forums with them and, in 2014, when the new sexual assault policy was
announced, praised them effusively:
The students from UNC and others
who have been advocates and activists have actually had a very important role
in moving this conversation forward … So I give them full credit for it. I look
at them as trying to contribute in extremely productive ways at an issue that
is of great impact for all of us.
In 2015, at the height of the Black Lives Matters
protests, Folt initiated a campus “Town Hall on Race and Inclusion,” with
liberal syndicated columnist Clarence Page as the moderator. As the event got
underway, a chanting mob of 40 student protesters bursts into the auditorium,
holding signs saying such things as “F— Whiteness.” They took over the stage
and berated the audience, then read a list of 40 demands, most of them
ridiculously impractical. The group’s spokesman concluded with the threat that
“Gone are the days where we ask for what is past due to us: we are here to take
what is ours. Tear it down, or we shut you down.”
Folt stood meekly on the side of the stage while the
protesters raged, even though campus security stood ready at her command to
restore order. (One wonders whether the protest was a staged event, with Folt
knowing ahead of time that the event would be disrupted?) In her closing
remarks, she expressed what appeared to be support for the protesters (and the
more aggressive audience participants). “We couldn’t have heard more strongly
that we need training,” she said, most likely referring to “racial equity
training,” which one participant suggested should be mandatory for university
employees.
When the Silent Sam controversy arose in 2017, Folt made
numerous comments indicating that she was on the side of the protesters and
wanted the statue removed. In September of that year, she said that “I do
believe that as long as Silent Sam is in its current location, it runs the risk
of continuing to drain energy and goodwill that we worked so hard to maintain
on our campus, and truly does distract us from reaching the important goals we
all share.”
A couple of months later, Folt sent a message around
campus saying that the school would move the statue for safety reasons “if we
had the ability,” but stating that they were prevented by state law from doing
so.
So, with such a track record, her impetuous removal of
the pedestal was to be expected. She gave the Board no choice but to demand
that she leave campus by the end of January instead of sticking around until
May. Who knows what mischief she could have done to the school in her final
semester, with no worries about salary raises or continued employment to temper
her sympathies for radical politics.
The Carol Folt saga should herald a new era in Chapel
Hill. The days when the powers-that-be could appoint a standard left-wing
academic like Folt to head a major public university and expect everything to
run smoothly are over. On today’s campus, friction is to be anticipated; strong
leadership is needed to keep the discourse civil. Also necessary is an open
mind to listen to all sides and common sense for making fair, rational
judgments. Ivy League elitists steeped in the left-wing academic tradition,
such as Folt (Dartmouth), Duke’s Dick Brodhead (Yale), and Brodhead’s successor
Vincent Price (Penn), no longer fit the position.
For reality is dictating change. Much of the country is
catching onto the seriousness of the cultural transformation being conducted on
college campuses. Whatever one’s feelings about Silent Sam the statue as a
symbol of racial division, there is the deeper question of Silent Sam the
cultural metaphor. His demolition represented not just the physical act of
pulling down a particular artwork, but the symbolic act of tearing down the
rule of law and due process, tearing down respect for our own history and
culture and tearing down our spiritual contract with both past and future
generations. Silent Sam, like him or not, now represents a free, orderly,
stable society; the mob represents, not justice, but chaos or tyranny.
It’s time to get UNC leadership that shows respect for
all the people, not just for the angry, noisy ones who want to tear everything
down. The choice of Carol Folt for UNC-Chapel Hill was an all-too-predictable
mistake. Campus controversies will be unavoidable in the near future; it’s time
to select leadership who can handle them on a higher plane than yielding to the
mob.
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