Shared and Delegated Power at UNC
“After meeting with student and faculty leaders over the weekend, I am announcing a Wellness Day for our students on Tuesday, Oct. 12, as a step in addressing mental health.”
The UNC administration has a nasty habit of implying student concurrence in their decision-making when students simply don’t agree with them. As a member of the UNC Undergraduate Senate, I qualify as one of these so-called student leaders, and my peers and I have recognized a pattern. Occasionally, we are consulted on the decisions the University makes. We are often united in our concerns and will advocate for a policy collectively, the one we know to be best for the student body and the best for ourselves. We will pass these concerns on to Lamar Richards, the Student Body President, who will in turn pass them on to the University administration in his capacity as a member of the Board of Trustees or in his meetings with the Chancellor. The administration will hear our concerns, converse among themselves, and choose a policy that directly opposes the interests we have expressed. Then, we’ll get an email with an excerpt like the one above, which heavily implies we are on board with or even the original designers of the policy. This is simply not true.
Student leaders are consulted not to have any input in the decisions of the University, but so that they can be used as a rhetorical device to lend credibility to the administration’s decisions. This would be expected, and maybe even tolerable, if the University made it clear that they are acting against the wishes of the student body, but this is hardly ever the case. We are tired of being used.
The most egregious example of this boils down to blatant manipulation of these student leaders. After the mid-October weekend earlier this semester, in which three students ended their own lives, the student body called for mental health days. These days would ideally help ease the stress of classes and give students a chance to catch up on sleep and assignments in the busier times in the middle of the semester. After granting us one day off after the loss of our classmates, the administration discussed the issue and came back with a choice for the student leaders. At a Joint Leadership meeting (a policy spearheaded by SBP Richards that allows the leadership teams of the three branches of Undergraduate Student Government to meet and discuss issues that affect all the branches) we were presented with four equally (and perhaps intentionally) terrible options. We could change the academic calendar with very little notice rather than the 2-5 years of notice that are typically offered. We could come back from Winter break early, graduate later, or distribute part of our Spring break across the semester to “make up” the days for our mental health days. These options were all untenable since much of the student body has already secured flights that cost money to cancel or internships that cannot be moved, causing students to choose between their classes and other obligations.
These options felt ridiculous, like the administration was intentionally offering us options they knew we couldn’t and wouldn’t take, making us look wishy-washy and whiney for not accepting the mental health days we demanded. This may seem like a dramatic interpretation of events. After all, I mentioned four options, and so far have only presented three. You may be less skeptical of my interpretation when you consider the fourth option presented at the Joint Leadership meeting:
If we were hesitant to move around essential dates like the start and end of our breaks, we could gain access to the mental health days by giving up some of our reading days before finals. The days that students use for studying for the exams that account for anywhere from 30-50% of our grades were one of the best options the administration presented to us to accommodate our mental health.
Of course, the administration claims these trades are the only possible way to meet accreditation standards. This may be true, but this was not a concern when the administration greenlit the paper classes that caused accreditation issues to begin with.
The impression this left on the “student leaders” in the room was clear; while we were certainly consulted, we had no real power in this interaction, and that was why we were permitted to even have this conversation. This is what public policy analyst Sherry Arnstein would categorize as a “degree of tokenism” in her seminal essay “A Ladder of Citizen Participation.” Only some members of the public are deemed valuable enough to interact with, and this interaction is contingent on their implicit agreement to uphold the system that keeps them from accessing real power. This dynamic is frustrating at best and dangerous at worst; had students been able to influence the decisions of the University, Silent Sam would have been removed far before 2018 and could have been viewed by the broader public as a more legitimate decision rather than a criminal act. This may have prevented armed neo-nazis from patrolling campus in protest of what they viewed as the University refusing to hold students accountable for their crimes, and could have maintained a safer learning environment as a result.
This is not to say that total student control, the final step of Arnstein’s Ladder of Participation, should be the end goal for Carolina, but rather that the administration should exchange more power with students rather than pretending they have power and using them as a rhetorical device when it is convenient.
