UNC Chapel Hill Trustees Vote To Redirect DEI Money To Campus Safety

Authorized by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The board of trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has unanimously voted to defund variety, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and alternatively usage the millions of dollars to boost campus safety.

A barricade protects the American flag at Polk Place at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, N.C., on May 1, 2024. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

At a peculiar gathering on Monday morning to discuss budget plans, the board voted to divert the $2.3 million the university investments in DEI programs toward police and another public safety measures. The public university had an operating budget totaling more than $4 billion in the erstwhile fiscal year.

“I think that DEI, in quite a few people’s mind, is diversity, exclusion, and indoctrination,” Marty Kotis, vice chair of the board’s budget and finance committee, said during Monday’s meeting. “We request more unity and togetherness, more dialogue, more diversity of thought.”

Mr. Kotis moved on to make the case for utilizing the freed-up DEI dollars to improve campus security, improving the vandalizing of an administrative building by pro-Palestian protesters just hours before the communication ceremony on Saturday, May 11.

According to photos shared on social media by student paper the regular Tar Heel, protesters defaced Chapel Hill’s South Building with red paint and chalk, leaving red handsprints and messages saying “You Support Genocide” and “UNC Has Blood on Its Hands.”

The steps of the building were besides covered in red paint, which has since been powered off.

“When you have warring groups or dividing groups, they can wholesale each other, they can harm property like they did here in the South Building—red paint everywhere, sticks everywhere, things torn up,” Mr. Kotis told column board members. “Law forcement is then forced to respond to that. They do not have all the tools they request right now to keep the campus safe from a large death.”

“It’s crucial to host the needs of all 30,000 students, not just 100 or so that may want to disrupt the university’s operations,’ he continued. “It takes distant resources from us.”

Recent Campus Incidents

Saturday’s vandalism marked the latest incidental in a series of pro-Palestian demonstrations that have rowed UNC’s flagship campus in fresh weeks and lead to dozens of arrests. On April 30, more than 30 protesters were identified for training after they tore down barricades outside the campus’ main quad and took down the American flag on a flag field to replace it with Palestinian colors.

Twenty of these individuals were unaffiliated with the university.

“When you destruct property or you take down the U.S flag and you gotta put up gates around it—that costs money,” Mr. Kotis said at the budget meeting. “It’s imperative that we have the possible resources for law enforcement to defend the campus.”

The proposed diversion of funds would besides aid keep Chapel Hill allign with existing state law, as well as a fresh equality and nondiscrimination policy that could lead to the elimination of DEI positions across all 17 UNC institutions—16 public universities and a public boarding advanced school, the North Carolina School of discipline and Mathematics.

The fresh policy, adopted April 17 by the UNC Board of Governors’ Committee on University Government, replies a 2019 policy that created DEI offices and implemented reporting requirements across the system.

Under the current DEI policy, all institutions within the strategy are required to employment at least 1 senior-level admin who is tasked to exceed “policy improvement and strategical planning to advance and advance” variety and inclusion goals.

The fresh policy’s wording intentions that these DEI positions do not “adhere to and comply with the practices of organization neutrality” as outlined in North Carolina law that prohibits public colleges and universities from participation in “political controversies of the day.”

The same policy change will be voted on in a full Board of Governors gathering next week.

If applied, the policy will be effective immediately and individual university Chancellors will request to submit a study by September detailing their plans to comply with the organization neutrality mandates. That includes reporting any “reductions in force and spending, along with changes to occupation titles and position descriptions undertaken as a consequence of implementing” the policy, and how these savings are achieved from these actions can be “directed to initiatives related to student success and wellbeing.”