Mellon Foundation pulls $1.5 million grant money from UNC after Silent Sam settlement
UNC-Chapel Hill lost $1.5 million in grant money from a major research donor after the $2.5 million Silent Sam settlement between the UNC System and the N.C. Sons of Confederate Veterans.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation withdrew an anticipated grant to UNC when it learned the university would “allocate $2.5 million dollars to the Sons of the Confederacy to endow a fund to maintain and display the confederate statue,” the foundation’s director of communications, Laura Washington, said in a statement Friday.
Since the spring, the foundation and the Chapel Hill university have been working together to develop a $1.5 million grant proposal for a “campus-wide educational reckoning focusing on historical truth-telling and confronting the University’s entanglements with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and memorialization of the Confederacy.”
“Allocating university funding toward protecting a statue that glorifies the Confederacy, slavery, and white supremacy – whether from public or private sources – runs antithetical to who we are and what we believe as a Foundation,” Washington said in the statement.
While students and faculty have raised concerns over the moral and safety issues with this settlement, the loss of the Mellon Foundation grant shows how the university’s academic and research efforts have directly and immediately suffered.
The news comes as Kevin Guskiewicz was named chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill Friday. The announcement came at a UNC System Board of Governors meeting where students, faculty and community activists protested the Silent Sam settlement.
University officials did not comment further about the loss of the potential grant money Friday.
The Chronicle of Higher Education published a letter to the editor Monday from Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, regarding the decision.
She said the foundation’s higher-education program worked on the grant to UNC-CH for months, but on Dec. 2, they decided not to recommend it.
Their decision was prompted by the university’s announcement that it would give $2.5 million to the Sons of the Confederate Veterans to protect and display Silent Sam, Alexander wrote.
“The news that the university would direct educational funds to re-enshrining a symbol of the Confederacy — erected, incidentally, at the entrance to the campus in 1913, some 60 years after the fall of the Confederacy and toppled by members of the UNC community in 2018 — was and is shocking. From our perspective, with this still-bewildering news that UNC has given a sum that could be spent on so many positive things, including the very work our grant was to support, we decided to stop the grant process. This decision was not easy because we believed in the proposed work that the grant was to support,” the letter said.
Alexander said Mellon is committed to “telling untold and marginalized American stories in space and place” and is now providing support to new grantees, including the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the National Trust for Historic Preservation African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.
“Many members of the UNC Chapel Hill community continue to protest the University’s decision. The cost of venerating symbols of hate is sometimes nothing less than human lives, as we saw, for example, in Charlottesville in 2017,” the letter said. “We are trying with our work to find myriad ways to say that the richness of American history, even when shadowed, can be brought to the fore so we can better confront our past and shape our future.”
This story was originally published December 13, 2019 at 6:11 PM with the headline "Mellon Foundation pulls $1.5 million grant money from UNC after Silent Sam settlement."
