Carolina has a long history of social and political activism. If you were on campus during the Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War, you know it well.
Carolina also has a unique history of protest focused on community and campus events – not only those gaining national attention. We saw that as far back as the 1960s during the Speaker Ban and more recently with the toppling of Silent Sam in 2018.
Still, protest on UNC’s campus is not an everyday occurrence. So when students choose to leave their social media feeds behind to gather in person, the administration would be wise to take note.
That happened last week when several student organizations banded together to speak out against the administration’s decision to hide the findings of the School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) report.
The Daily Tar Heel’s video reporting of the campus protest can be viewed here.
It’s encouraging to see the students engaged – and they are not the only ones demanding answers and transparency. Calls for the SCiLL report to be released to the public are not going away. They are only growing stronger and more frequent.
On April 10, several media outlets, including The Daily Tar Heel, WRAL and The News & Observer, filed a lawsuit seeking the public release of the report.
During an April 17 UNC Faculty Council meeting, the council passed a resolution calling on the administration to release the report and another resolution calling for greater transparency into SCiLL’s operations.
The public deserves to know what the report found. With more than $1 million invested in getting answers and over 400 pages of findings, there are certainly lessons to be learned and information that would be ethical and reasonable to share with the public.
Public dollars continue to flow into SCiLL, and there is no assurance that any of the widely publicized issues with SCiLL’s leadership, its mismanagement and its general disfunction have been resolved. If anything, the shielding of the report suggests there has not been accountability.
It’s time for the administration to listen to the students, the faculty, the media and the public and release the report.