Update: about six hours after this post went up UNC-Chapel Hill reported 135 new cases and is running out of room in its quarantine dorm. The administration announced that the university will switch to remote learning and reduce the campus population starting Wednesday.
Writing ledes for newspaper stories for decades upon decades can make it difficult at times to start writing anything else.
It makes you hyperaware about every tiny piece of real estate up top in a story, about how much you can cram in to those first few words and not overdo it.
Reporters play games with ledes — shortest, longest, weirdest — and in most newsrooms they’re the kind of thing you kick around like a new band, a batting stance or the balance of garlic in a red sauce.
Trouble is, that’s not the way people talk.
You don’t walk up to someone and start with a condensed, powerful, gripping sentence that draws them into the story. Even if you have a story to tell, your lede is going to be more like “Hello, how are you? Oh, that’s great. Me? Well, the damnedest thing happened. . .”
So, please forgive my awkwardness as I swim out past the breakers and try to get started.
Anyway, the damnedest thing happened here in Chapel Hill last week. The University reopened in a pandemic. It is hard telling how many people are actually back in town. The official count says the residence halls are 60 to 70 percent full, but it certainly looks as packed here in town as it would be if things were going full tilt.
As of this morning, one week after opening, there are four COVID-19 clusters in iconic spots scattered around our lovely, historic campus and an emergency WTF meeting of the faculty set for this morning.
No one seems to know what’s really going on. In the meantime, we’ve got a dashboard and a roadmap. Yay! Vroom! My guess is that we’re a few more clusters away from a general strike.
If you want to follow our nightmare in real time, I can’t think of a better place to do so than the Daily Tar Heel, which is doing great work and under new editor Anna Pogarcic is starting to realize the vision of becoming the community’s main source of fresh reporting. If you followed the monuments story last year, you already know this. This year, Anna is out to fix some stuff and so is the DTH.
The DTH editorial this morning included a blistering note to the administration on the utter predictability of the outbreaks and clusters we’re seeing on campus now. “We all saw this coming,” the headline reads and below it is as honest a subhed that you can have in these times: “clusterfuck (n) : a complex and utterly disordered and mismanaged situation.”
Several paragraphs of fire later it concludes: “One thing’s for sure — this roadmap leads straight to hell.”
A week or so before, on the paper’s opening day in print for the semester it issued a studied warning about what was to come.
“Student activists and University employees are risking so much to fight for our collective safety, while those in positions in relative power largely remain silent. And the consequences are higher than ever.
All of these issues are intersectional — and it’s the same story every time. And when this incomplete, selfish, negligent plan inevitably results in death and suffering, the University will be to blame.”
Other good follows for this story as it unfolds are Joe Killian at NC Policy Watch and Indyweek reporter and DTH alum Sara Pequeño, who is a prolific tweeter. Her feed is as close to a real-time aggregator you’ll find.
Don’t blame society
When it all comes crashing down, I have no doubt that a lot of people are going to buy the idea that it was the carelessness of youth that destroyed a perfectly good reassembly of campus during a raging pandemic.
The reality is that responsibility for the aforementioned inevitable death and suffering belongs to the people at the top who set the plan in motion. But it does not stop nor should it stop at the university administration or the UNC System.
The path of decision making at UNC appears purposefully murky. One day, possibly, someone will make the right public records request and we’ll know more about what really happened. Complicating matters is an unstable set of relationships at the very top, including an incoming president and a highly politicized Board of Governors that’s prone to infighting and led by a new chairman clearly interested in consolidating his power.
One thing I learned from my days studying state government at Pauli Murray Hall is that when it comes to the university system and its campuses, the buck stops at the legislature. North Carolina’s constitution gives the General Assembly alone the authority to establish and set up the governance of the public universities. Article 9, Sec. 8 of the state constitution puts responsibility for a public system of higher education solely in its hands.
“The General Assembly shall maintain a public system of higher education, comprising The University of North Carolina and such other institutions of higher education as the General Assembly may deem wise. The General Assembly shall provide for the selection of trustees of The University of North Carolina and of the other institutions of higher education, in whom shall be vested all the privileges, rights, franchises, and endowments heretofore granted to or conferred upon the trustees of these institutions. The General Assembly may enact laws necessary and expedient for the maintenance and management of The University of North Carolina and the other public institutions of higher education.”
The public university system the legislature set up and modified over the years still tightly holds that control. The legislature elects members of the board of governors and along with the BOG controls the entire membership of all the boards of trustees.
For a while, the legislature allowed the governor to select a few members of each campus board of trustees, but that authority was one of several that the legislature stripped away in a post-election session in December 2016 just ahead of change over in the governorship from Pat McCrory to Roy Cooper.
Although Cooper won some of his challenges to the legislature’s actions, the board of trustees issue was not among them since authority of the legislative branch over the UNC system is well established.
The General Assembly, the body that put the people in charge at UNC in office, has oversight responsibilities and the power of the purse when it comes to public higher education in the state. So far, we’ve heard nothing from Jones Street publicly, but we know the leadership is intent upon seeing as much of the state reopen as possible. What they’re saying to the UNC leadership behind closed doors as the cluster count rises will have a major influence on what happens next and what people in this town and all the other college towns in the state can expect in the critical days ahead.
I’ll be following the story here on the new substack blog thing and on twitter.
Programming note: I intend to make Letter from Chapel Hill an occasional feature. If you have any questions you’d like answered please send them on. I haven’t the foggiest idea of what I’m doing rn.
Confused. Is this same pattern occurring at other campuses in the UNC system? How about Duke? If its not, then there have to be reasons other then the BoG/BoT, no?