'Time will only tell': How Guskiewicz's new history commission stacks up to Folt's

Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz formally announced the members of the new Commission on History, Race and a Way Forward last week.

Former Chancellor Carol Folt had a similar initiative with her Task Force on UNC-Chapel Hill History. Launched during fall 2015, the task force was created after the Board of Trustees renamed Saunders Hall to Carolina Hall in May of that year — and enacted a 16-year freeze on renaming buildings. 

“When the trustees voted to change that name, they also asked the Chancellor to undertake a series of different projects that would help the community better understand the University’s history and better ways to tell it,” Cecelia Moore, former University historian and project manager of Folt's task force, said. 

Moore said the task force’s responsibilities included inventorying historical names and places around campus, establishing an exhibit inside Carolina Hall and developing contextualization markers for historical objects on McCorkle Place. 

“We faced the challenges of time itself because both the Chancellor and her senior staff, as well as the trustees, wanted us to work fairly quickly,” Moore said. “It’s very hard to do some of that stuff quickly because you have to do a lot of historical research.”

Moore said people’s hope that the task force would move quickly did not always work with reality, especially since Silent Sam and the Unsung Founders Memorial were among the objects they were attempting to bring historical awareness to. 

“It was hard to talk about University history without the Confederate monument being the center of every conversation,” Moore said. “And, as time went on, until August 2018, that just only intensified.”

Especially after the University’s recent $2.5 million Silent Sam settlement to the North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans, some are hoping Chancellor Guskiewicz's new commission can work to reconcile issues within UNC’s history.

“This is such an important issue and has become so vexing on this campus, so I think time will only tell if this commission can contribute to the resolution — if that’s the appropriate word — for some of these deeply rooted issues,” W. Fitzhugh Brundage, professor in the Department of History, said. 

Brundage said he hopes University administrators will develop an awareness and appreciation of the issues that the commission is addressing, since he said the previous administration failed to do so.  

"This is going to be a big, broad collaborative effort," Jim Leloudis, co-chairperson of the commission and Honors Carolina dean, said previously in an interview with The Daily Tar Heel. "It is not going to be 15 people working in a room doing it all by themselves. A big part of our charge is about engaging and mobilizing the entire community in this work." 

Richard Stevens, chairperson of the Board of Trustees, said the commission will build on the work done by the task force. He said they will be able to explore history for as long a time as they need. 

“From a Board perspective, we try very hard not to micromanage,” Stevens said. “When we have a commission like this, we will wait and listen to them once they finish their work and not try to anticipate what they are going to do or how they are going to do it.”

Stevens said he hopes the commission will be able to follow its name and develop ‘A Way Forward,’ especially noting the Chancellor’s commitment to diversity and understanding the University’s history.

"There are universities elsewhere that are so much further ahead, and their administrations have been so much more invested in this than ours," Brundage said. "There can’t be the excuse that somehow this is a really difficult issue that is not easily resolved.” 

Stevens said the commission will be able to make recommendations to the Chancellor, and that the Board is prepared to take action as necessary at the end of the process. 

“It’s going to be very useful to have a commission that isn’t working on a shortened time frame like a task force does,” Moore said. “I think that some of the political issues around UNC’s history — and its history especially around white supremacy and discrimination — have not gone away, but it’s a different atmosphere now because the Confederate monument is gone.”

University staff writer Rachel Crumpler contributed reporting. 

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