UNC senior Madeleine Scanlon defines herself as a quiet, private person. A Spanish and women’s and gender studies major, and while it may seem like an oxymoron, she also defines herself as an activist.
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To many, she’s known as the student who police arrested on Jan. 26 at a UNC Board of Governors meeting. Police charged her with misdemeanors for resisting and obstructing an officer and disorderly conduct in a public building and a felony for inflicting serious injury on a law enforcement officer.
“I encourage everyone to watch one of the many videos circulating online about that incident, and I want people to realize that I wasn’t really doing anything different than anybody else,” Scanlon said. “We were all chanting. We were all banging on the table.”
Since then, officials reduced the felony to a misdemeanor for disorderly conduct in a public building and resisting a public officer.
By Dillon Deaton
Officials charged the group with disrupting an official meeting and resisting arrest after advocating for social issues. Police charged Scanlon with a felony for assaulting an officer. Authorities have since dropped that charge.
Scanlon is a member of the Real Silent Sam Coalition (RSS), which focuses on racial and social justice issues on campus. When police arrested her, she was protesting the appointment of Margaret Spellings as UNC-system president. The group is opposed to Spellings for her conservative views and past associations with for-profit institutions, among other issues.
Scanlon is required to complete 24 hours of community service, pay a $180 fine and is banned from board meetings for a year, but she said that won’t stop her from standing up for what she believes is right.
“They will never change unless we make them change,” Scanlon said. “Together we can do things. We can make things happen.”
Scanlon became involved with RSS when she learned about the push to rename Saunders Hall, originally named after William Saunders, a UNC alum who also was a prominent leader of North Carolina’s Ku Klux Klan in the late 1800s.
“In 2014 and 2015, a student movement erupted around that. When I found about it, I was outraged,” Scanlon said. “It was horrible for students of color to have to walk through and have class in a building commemorating and honoring the leader of a racist hate group. For decades, there has been a throbbing student push to change the name of the building, but the university continued to ignore it.”
While the university eventually changed the name of the building to Carolina Hall, instead of Hurston Hall as activist groups had hoped, RSS continued to protest and promote social justice issues it finds important.
“In the process of forcing the university to change the building name, I think a lot of us recognized the extent to which the university is complicit to white supremacy and is complicit to institutionalized sexism and racism and a lot of other systemic oppressions,” Scanlon said.
The most recent and prevalent issue, the one that resulted in Scanlon’s arrest, is the appointment of Spellings.
“We see Margaret Spellings and the Board of Governors as a real threat to students of color, the working class and first generation students,” Scanlon said.
But not all feel Spellings will have a negative effect on the campus and UNC-system in general.
Jenna Robinson is the president of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a conservative think tank in Raleigh. She said much of the opposition comes from Spellings’ past association with the University of Phoenix, a for-profit institution and because she identifies as a conservative.
By Dillon Deaton
Scanlon is a double major in Spanish and Women’s and Gender Studies. She is a member of the Real Silent Sam Coalition and focuses on racial and social justice issues on campus.
“I do think that the overwhelming reason that people are protesting is because she is conservative and because she has had an affiliation with George W. Bush, who of course is very unpopular with liberal students and liberal voters.”
She thinks now that Spellings is officially the UNC-system president, protests and displays of opposition won’t be as frequent.
“I think it will depend on what the board members are talking about,” Robinson said. “But when the board or president Spellings is reporting on a contentious issue, I think we will see some protests.”
She does predict that arrests, especially ones as public as Scanlon’s, might affect the number of protests in the future.
“Now that arrests have occurred, I think it will deter some students from showing up,” Robinson said.
But Scanlon said her arrest isn’t stopping her from making noise about racially-charged issues.
“I can’t go to any other Board of Government meetings for the year, but I can do social media,” Scanlon said. “I can work on statements, I can support and encourage other students.”
Note: UNC Media Hub reached out a spokesperson from UNC for comment. As Scanlon’s charges are for crimes against Chapel Hill police, a UNC spokesperson said it wasn’t directly a university issue and declined to comment.
