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Four students were arrested and removed from Tuesday’s UNC Board of Governors meeting in Chapel Hill after ignoring several requests from officers to stop chanting and disrupting the meeting.
What started as a standard meeting quickly became a scene of chaos as police were forced to intervene when demonstrators interrupted the meeting to protest the hiring of UNC System President Margaret Spellings, who was hired in late October amid controversy over the unexpected removal of former president Tom Ross, and the Board in general for what they considered harmful practices that have continued for years.
The meeting began with a formal message from the protesters to the board in which they demanded the removal of Spellings as system president as well as an democratic and transparent re-appointment process.
The meeting proceeded in typical fashion until a vote calling for the discontinuation of a Bachelor of Arts program at Eastern Carolina University.
The present members of the board gave their affirmative “yays only to be drowned out by the protesters’ emphatic and unsolicited “nay”. The vote itself was of little interest to the protesters, but served as an opportunity to voice their frustrations over Spellings and general Board of Governors activities.
The students further disrupted the meeting by grabbing board member’s microphones and knocking their name placards to the ground. They ignored requests to be seated and continued to chant against the Board with chants such as “No justice, no peace” “When our system is under attack, stand up and fight back” and the vulgar “F*** the BOG.”
Several protesters were then removed from the chambers by police officers who had trouble restraining some of the students. Screams of frustration and police misconduct were heard as students were led out into the hallway.
Zack King, president of the Association of Student Governments which is the student-led organization that represents the students of the UNC-System to the Board, condemned the adversarial approach to enacting change used by the protestors.
“I think having protestors there is good — for students to have their voices heard — but when they’re behaving like this…I don’t think it’s effective at all,” King said. “The concerns of the protestors are shared by members privately so I do think that there is a lot of room for understanding and getting protestors more informed.”
King said that he was caught off guard by many of the claims made by the protestors which gave him the impression that they put their passions before the facts. One example was their claim that students pay the Board’s salary, when in fact the board is made up by volunteers who receive no stipend or salary.
Spellings was appointed in late Oct. 2015 and is slated to take office on March 1 in what has been a rocky transition from former president Tom Ross who was asked to resign last January.
System constituents like those who protested the meeting on Tuesday fear Spellings’ association with for-profit universities such as the University of Phoenix as well as her corporatized approach to higher education.
In a survey conducted by Faculty Forward NC, 70 percent of UNC system faculty reported feeling that higher education in North Carolina is going the wrong direction.
“We have absolutely no confidence that Spellings will turn that around,” said Zach Robinson, a professor of mathematics at Eastern Carolina University and member of the Faculty Forward Network.
Spellings has been on the receiving end of of several attacks questioning her support of higher tuition as well as her history of anti-LGBT statements.
“Margaret Spellings is going to turn the UNC system into a joke,” said Madeleine Scanlon, a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill majoring in Women and Gender Studies and who was among the students arrested at the meeting.
With forty police officers stationed at the meeting, the Chief of Police said that such a large protective force was not standard.
The unusually large police presence in addition to the surprising behavior of the protesters raised questions about the board’s expectations for the meeting. The board had known about the protests but hoped that they wouldn’t turn violent. Students claimed that the police officers acted excessively in the removal of Scanlon.
“All the actions of my officers were the result of the actions of the protesters,” said Larry Smith, Interim Chief of Police of the Chapel Hill Police Department.
