Pirate's Cove

Here’s a good idea: punish students who paid money in some manner to a North Carolina state funded university over politics

UNC faculty seek voice in Silent Sam’s future as teaching assistants’ strike grows

A faculty group called Friday for UNC leaders to drop a plan to keep the Silent Sam Confederate statue on campus and asked that a faculty committee be included in any future planning for the statue. (snip)

The meeting came as a growing strike involving UNC teaching assistants and instructors threatened to withhold thousands of students’ final grades from the administration.

At least 79 teaching assistants and instructors have joined the strike to protest UNC’s proposed $5.3 million history center to house the Silent Sam Confederate statue, activist leaders posted online Friday morning.

Nearly 2,200 grades and counting will not be released until the UNC Board of Trustees withdraws the plan and the governing board of the UNC system holds “listening sessions in good faith with the campus community,” activists said.

Sure seems like “at least 79” employees of a taxpayer funded university should be terminated for saying they will not do the jobs they were hired to do. Granted, the plan for Silent Sam is a dumb one, which would see millions spent to build a center to house the statue which would have all sorts of history and context and stuff, and could cost as much as $800,000 a year to operate. No, really. No one really understands why it would cost so much, other than Government.

Now try and tell your boss that you won’t do a report until the company makes some sort of change. See how that works out

Graduate students and instructors expressed the same demands early Friday in a meeting called by Blouin and Kevin Guskiewicz, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, according to #StrikeDownSam Twitter posts.

In a letter requesting the meeting, the men warned that instructors who fail to release final grades expose the university to lawsuits and threaten students’ ability to graduate and get military commissions, scholarships, grants, loans, jobs and extended visas.

The letter, posted to Twitter, also warns instructors against using their role in the classroom to recruit student support for the strike. Students and parents have complained to the university, Guskiewicz and Blouin said.

“Such actions have been interpreted as coercion and an exploitation of the teacher-student relationship and in fact are a violation of students’ First Amendment rights as well as federal law,” they said.

“We trust that our instructors will not act in a way that harms the interests of students and their families, and that these instructors meet the legal, ethical and moral responsibilities for which they have been contracted. Please consider that your failure to meet your responsibilities to your students, including timely submission of final grades, will result in serious consequences.”

The big question is, if grades are withheld will UNC take action? It doesn’t matter what your opinion is of the statue. You still have to do your job. And, after all, it is just a statue.