In a unanimous vote Friday, UNC’s Board of Governors made Kevin Guskiewicz UNC-Chapel Hill’s twelfth chancellor. He starts immediately with a salary of $620,000.

“He’s an outstanding researcher, innovator, and strategic thinker,” BOG interim president Bill Roper said. “He has demonstrated highly effective leadership as interim chancellor. … Simply put, I believe he’s the right individual to lead Carolina forward in the future.”

Guskiewicz has served as the school’s interim chancellor since February, when former Chancellor Carol Folt was ousted from her position early after ordering Silent Sam’s pedestal be torn down. He has received praise and criticism alike from the UNC student body for his own handling of issues surrounding the Confederate monument over the last year.

While he maintains that the monument should not return to UNC-CH’s campus, he approved the decision to hand Silent Sam to the Sons of Confederate Veterans and create a $2.5 million trust for the care and protection of the statue.

On Thursday, Guskiewicz wrote a letter to Roper detailing his concern that the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ might use the trust for a new headquarters. The letter was brought up in today’s Board of Governor’s conference call by BOG member W. Marty Kotis, who commented that the use of funds goes against what is outlined in the settlement (the details of which are not yet available to the public).

SCV leader Kevin Stone sent a letter to his members detailing the settlement and the potential plans for the trust. The letter says the money would be used to care for the statue, purchase land on which to “prominently display him” and build a small museum, and build a “comprehensive Division headquarters.”

“It’s a red flag for everyone that the letter that the leader of the Sons of Confederate Veterans sent that expanded and said that the funds could be used for a variety of different things,” Kotis said Friday. He was then told by Roper that this would be best discussed in closed session.

Roper declined to take any questions from reporters after the meeting adjourned.

Protestors were allowed into the facility for the first half of the open meeting, although security at UNC’s Friday Center only allowed forty people to enter. The visitors were told at the beginning of the meeting that if anyone spoke out of turn, they would be subject to arrest.

In other Silent Sam controversies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation decided to pull a $1.5 million grant it planned to give the university due to the recent settlement, WRAL reported.

Eric Muller, a distinguished professor at UNC School of Law, tweeted Thursday night that this isn’t the only thing the UNC could lose.

“Here’s a thing that I’m not sure it is fully enough understood at @UNC in this moment: we *will* lose many of our Black faculty colleagues and students. And find it *very* difficult to recruit others,” says Muller.

Contact digital content manager Sara Pequeño at spequeno@indyweek.com. 

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