Dear Margaret Spellings and Chancellor Sartarelli,
As heads of professional and prestigious institutions, your jobs should be to do everything within your power to make sure that all students who attend the UNC institutions, and UNC Wilmington in particular, to feel as though they are safe while they are paying thousands of dollars into these institutions.
When you make minority students feel as though they do not matter, then your job is obsolete and you should find another line of work. When you make a college a business, the students, the ones that the university is designed to educate, become a financial investment rather than an educational piece. Again, if you cannot represent the issues and the minorities who fight so hard to be in the UNC system, then your job is a farce. Your comments on HB2 were an eye-opening experience for anyone who did not know you histories of employment.
Mrs. Spellings, while on UNCW’s campus you chose not to take a stance on HB2 until a few days after you had left. I have to wonder if that was because you feared a backlash from the students who it affected. I am not surprised that one of the minds that designed and implemented “No Child Left Behind” would have absolutely no understanding of the people it would be affecting. Of course those of us who identify as queer already knew long ago that you “didn’t support our lifestyles” and would have no ally in someone who represents us on such a large scale for every school in the system. You could care less about trans students who are already persecuted across the world and were hoping they could find safety in a place meant for education and acceptance. Instead, your hateful rhetoric will continue to permeate throughout the historically racist and homophobic North Carolina, as it always has. HB2 tells trans students that their identity is invalid because of harmful stereotypes that have poisoned the media for as long as anyone can remember.
Mr. Sartarelli, I met you in the middle of the year when you first began your time here at UNCW. You seemed nice enough even though I knew that you have never had any kind of time on higher education in your life. You came from being a higher-up for an oil company with a very clear stance of climate change denial to being the chancellor of a university with absolutely no experience and only the shady dealings of the very conservative board to vouch for you. I would later learn about your true feelings of the student body. When you were asked about having gender neutral bathrooms on campus so that trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming students could feel safe you said that you wouldn’t participate in that “totalitarian gender bullshit.” It’s good to know that minority students are bullshit to you at least we know where we stand.
The UNC system has become a toxic environment for the students who attend the schools within it. A community is being cultivated by the underhanded higher up’s in the UNC education system to be uninhabitable by lower class minority students. I have to think, sarcastically, that it’s for some sort of “greater good” in whatever warped sense of reality you all preside.
As the former president of PRIDE on UNCW’s campus, I have seen firsthand how the institution reacts to any sort of slightly controversial program when it’s put on by minority students or if it involves some sort of social justice. But when a political student org bring a group of bigots to campus to show false signs with graphic and offensive pictures of abortions that aren’t real, it’s fine.
I know neither of you will read this because student input and opinion mean absolutely nothing to you unless it devalues another human being, so I’m not going to thank you. I would like to reach out to those who connected with this and are just as angry as I am. Watch out Margret and Zito; it’s election season.
Sincerely,
An incredibly pissed off student
