The Side of Chancellor Folt They Don’t Want You To Hear About

WAIT A SECOND, don’t skip over this article yet. I know what you’re thinking. “Oh my goodness, ANOTHER school sponsored article about all of Carol Folt’s wonderful accomplishments and how fantastic she is going to be as our new school Chancellor.” Well, as you may have already guessed from the title, this is not another typical article about our new Chancellor.

            Carol Folt has an extensive list of success on the collegiate level; she received a bachelor and master degree from University of California Santa Barbra and a doctorate from University of California Davis. After that, she spent about 30 years at Dartmouth College under the title of a research instructor and, since 2007, an endowed professor of biological science. She quickly shot up the ranks at Dartmouth and joined their administration in 2001 as Dean of Graduate Studies and Associate Dean of Faculty. Starting in 2004, she moved through Head Dean of Faculty, Acting Provost, Provost, and as you might expect, President in 2012. Chancellor Folt’s time as President of Dartmouth College is what I mainly wish to expound upon in this article.

            You see, Carol Folt saw quite a bit of action during her short year as President of Dartmouth, and one instance in particular exposed her agenda as President of Dartmouth and presumably, her agenda here at UNC-Chapel Hill.

            On April 19^th, 2013, Dartmouth was having an orientation session known as Dimensions for incoming freshman on campus and a student-acting group was performing a skit for the students. What happens next is available for viewing on YouTube, and was covered by media outlets all across the area. A group of radical, left-wing students known as Real-talk Dartmouth barged into the building while the skit was being performed and began protesting with signs and chanting “Dartmouth has a problem”. The reason behind the protest was to show the “multi-faceted nature of the Dartmouth experience”.

The protesting group was angry about the amount of sexual assault and domestic violence that had been unaddressed on campus. Through an open letter, Real-Talk Dartmouth explained that their goal “is to not scare prospective students away, rather to give a holistic and realistic prospective to counterbalance the flawed advertising that takes place during Dimensions [annual events for admitted students]”. Yeah….right. Your goal was to not scare students away by stampeding into a room full of accepted students screaming, “Dartmouth has a problem”, and holding signs that have statistics on them regarding sexual violence on campus. Sounds like Real-Talk Dartmouth needs a new public relations manager. To make matters worse, a few students at Dartmouth began to post hateful comments about Real-Talk Dartmouth on an anonymous campus blog called B@B, which is a poorly attended chat room with very few actual posts…. Anyway, what exactly happened on that day is not very important. Students at UNC should be concerned about how Carol Folt blew this little fiasco out of proportion.

Our new chancellor thought that it was in everyone’s best interest to cancel all classes at Dartmouth on April 24^th in response to the protests on the previous Friday, and instead have a campus wide “diversity and inclusion” training day. Now, those of us who are skeptical about anything liberals say already know that “diversity and inclusion” always means bad news. A day of diversity and inclusion training at Dartmouth would most likely mean teaching students there about “tolerance”, “equality”, and “acceptance”; none of which are bad things within themselves, but are always twisted and misconstrued into other things to fit the characteristically liberal Dartmouth agenda.

Chancellor Folt made a speech on the day that classes were canceled where she said things like:

“Today is much more than about a specific protest. If it was just a specific event we would not have taken this step…Today is about opening the door to conversations about civil debate, about respect, and how we can care for each other across difference. Sadly these types of issues have been going on for a long time here at Dartmouth and across the country. Faculty members this morning talked about painful conversations that they’ve been having with their students about alienation going back years, about hateful language anonymously carved into the benches in library meeting rooms years ago, cyber-bullying, terrorizing, no accountability, taking sadistic delight in hurting people, people that you may even know, people certainly your friends know and like, these are people in your classes, on your teams, they live in your dorms. It is incomprehensible to me, it is incomprehensible to most of us. Moreover, as we all know, these threats to one are threats to all of us.

Are students at Dartmouth really that unhappy with their own school? The answer, according to the students themselves is no. A US Department of Education press release states among schools with the happiest freshman, Dartmouth is ranked 23^rd in the nation with 96.5% of freshman saying they were happy at the college. But Chancellor Folt, I thought Dartmouth was full of “ terrible posts, hate speech, violence, or threats of violence… terrible new wounds… alienation… hateful language anonymously carved into the benches in library meeting rooms years ago, cyber-bullying, terrorizing, no accountability, taking sadistic delight in hurting people… sexual assault, violence, discrimination, homophobia, intolerance, social divisiveness.”

Well Mrs. Folt, the undergrads at Dartmouth will tell you that they are extremely happy at the school and they would rather spend their $43,782 of tuition on actually learning rather than being instructed on how to be “diverse and inclusive”. So that begs the ever important question, why did she decide to cancel classes for “alternative programming”?

The answer lies in the way she made her decision. The D (the Dartmouth school newspaper) reported that a number of meetings among administration took place between the protests and the cancellation of classes. The meetings were (according to Folt) open to faculty from the economics, history, and biology departments. However, they were magically only attended by Carol Folt’s inner administration circle, and faculty from the women and gender studies department. Everyone from all the meetings unanimously concluded that there should be a cancellation of classes to hold diversity training. The fact that the decision was unanimous tells the whole story. Folt never allowed for descent in her decision because she didn’t really care what the rest of the faculty said! She knew she was going to pursue her progressive agenda and no one was going to stop her. A number of the faculty in the history, biology, and economics department were contacted and said that they had not even been informed that meetings were taking place!

So, the conclusion that can be safely reached at this point is that Chancellor Folt has an agenda for UNC Chapel Hill, just like she had an agenda for Dartmouth College. Folt decided to cancel classes at Dartmouth not because of one protest, and not even because of all of the “terrible posts, hate speech, violence, or threats of violence… terrible new wounds…” etc. She decided to cancel classes because she wanted an opportunity to have a day where she could propagate her own liberal beliefs on unsuspecting undergraduate students through “diversity and inclusion” training. It is appalling that someone with such a high title at such a prestigious school would do such a thing.

            Fellow Tarheels, please believe me when I say that a war is being waged for your mind; it starts at the very top of our school’s administration, and trickles down to our professors. It is clear that Chancellor Folt had a liberal agenda at Dartmouth, so what makes you think she doesn’t have one at UNC?

See, told ya this wouldn’t be a normal article about Chancellor Folt.

Jackson Valentine

Freshman