As student protesters continue to wreak havoc at public meetings and expand their list of complaints against the University of North Carolina system’s leadership, they will do nothing but hurt their chances of being taken seriously, said student Zack King, outgoing president of UNC’s Association of Student Governments and ex-officio member of the Board of Governors.
Those demonstrators, who have attended every BOG meeting since October to contest the controversial hiring of new UNC system President Margaret Spellings — causing chaos at some points — now have added environmental complaints, concerns about UNC’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and outrage over the General Assembly’s recent passage of House Bill 2 to their list of issues.
Enacted March 23 by a special session of the General Assembly, H.B. 2, known as “the bathroom bill,” overturned a Charlotte nondiscrimination ordinance that would have allowed transgendered individuals to use the public bathrooms and changing rooms of the sexual identity they chose.
Under the new legislation, public schools and agencies must offer single-sex multiple-occupancy bathrooms, and students are required to use those facilities based on their biological sex, rather than their self-proclaimed gender.
Spellings, who has been at the center of heated protest since her election last year, on April 5 released a memo stating that the university would comply with H.B. 2, an announcement that fueled outrage among students and faculty alike.
While King said he sees problems with H.B. 2 — and supports peaceful, organized protest from students — he doesn’t think that students who interrupt meetings or yell expletives at members of the board are being smart or effective.
“[Students] need to focus their protest at the right people,” King said. “I mean the people doing the funding decisions. The only criticism that [students] could protest about is Spellings, but when they throw out all of these other [issues], and they become violent in some cases, that kind of action is misrepresentative of the larger student body. Unfortunately, those louder voices control the narrative.”
King, who will this summer relinquish his role on the BOG to incoming ASG president Madeline Finnegan, was present for an April 15 board meeting during which students staged yet another disruptive protest.
The interruption began during a speech from Spellings, when several students in the back of the room stood up and began to chant, drowning out her voice.
“You can’t stop the revolution!”
The shouting continued for several minutes until board members called a recess and security officers asked the students to leave. The students initially refused, but then complied, yelling vulgarities as they exited the meeting room.
“One, two, three, f— the BOG!”
The meeting soon reconvened, but protests continued outside, with students yelling loudly enough to cause continued disruption.
In an interview with Carolina Journal, protester Femi Shittu, a senior from UNC Greensboro who was arrested during a January demonstration against the BOG, said that her fight is about the protection of students against a system that refuses to listen to those it serves.
“We’re here … to show that students oppose H.B. 2 — as well as [to continue] to demand the resignation of Spellings,” Shittu said. “Margaret Spellings announced that she will be upholding H.B. 2 in the UNC system, and that is something that goes blatantly against the UNC system and its nondiscriminatory policies.”
But outrage over H.B. 2 is misdirected, and only confuses the issues that protesters say they want to impact, King said.
“[These students] don’t have a message,” he said. “They don’t have a focus. They’re very uninformed. … I understand their passions — but where are their facts? I was the same way before I got involved in student government from a more diplomatic angle. There is absolutely a role for advocacy and protesting peacefully, because then that pushes the topic onto the issue stage. That’s basic political science. And then once it’s on the issue stage, and once it is an issue, we can come in as diplomats and mediate that, hopefully, and make progress,” he added.
“Any sort of violent, vulgar protest … is not productive at all,” King said.
In an effort to encourage civil dialogue, future BOG meetings will include a public forum where individuals can voice concerns or complaints directly to the board, said board Chairman Lou Bissette.
“The problem now is, these [students] out there are not advancing their cause, because they’re out there screaming,” Bissette said. “They’re screaming vulgarities. It would be a lot better, it seems to me, if they came in and said, ‘these are our issues we’d like to talk about.’”
Bissette said he is skeptical about whether such a conversation actually could happen with groups like Shittu’s, but hopes that an understanding can be reached. A part of that understanding, he said, must be for protesters to recognize that the BOG isn’t responsible for passing H.B. 2, and therefore cannot do anything to change the law itself.
“The university system didn’t have anything to do with this. We didn’t have anything to do with the Charlotte ordinance being passed. We didn’t have anything to do with the General Assembly. Yet somehow we’ve been thrust into the middle, and I don’t think that’s fair,” Bissette said.
“As far as I’m concerned, when the university finds out what the law is, we’re like you,” Bissette said. “We have to obey the law. And so I hope that reason will prevail and we’ll all work our way out of this.”
But protesters say that, given the board’s failure to heed their demands, they will continue to voice their complaints using the same tactics they have over the past several months.
“I want people to realize that if Margaret is still here in two years, this will still be happening in two years,” Shittu concluded. “The students will not let up. We are educating each other. We are making sure that we have a base that will stand.”