At UNC, Lee Roberts shut down a protest, but deepened division | Opinion

Lee Roberts, interim chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had his first big test of leadership last week.

He didn’t score well.

Roberts’ first error was having police from various UNC campuses clear an encampment of students who want Israel to stop its attacks on the Palestinians in Gaza. Israel is acting in response to the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by the terrorist group Hamas that killed 1,200 people and resulted in the taking of 240 hostages. Israel’s retaliation, supported by U.S.-supplied arms, has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Roberts entered the campus fray over Gaza directly on Tuesday. Accompanied by police, he marched to a flagpole where protesters had lowered the American flag and raised the Palestinian flag in its place. Roberts personally helped put the American flag back up.

“The (American) flag represents all of us,” he said. “To take down that flag and put up another flag, no matter what other flag it is, that’s antithetical to who we are, what this university stands for, what we have done for 229 years.”

Roberts continued, “That flag will stand here as long as I am chancellor.”

That may be a long time. By getting tough with student protesters, the interim chancellor showed the compliance that could win him the job permanently. Republicans on the UNC Board of Governors and in the state legislature want a chancellor who will not only disperse protesters, but will push back against the university’s liberal culture overall.

The flagpole scene took another turn when protesters tried to put the Palestinian flag back up and a group of Pi Kappa Phi fraternity brothers stepped in to protect Old Glory. Images from that defense led an outsider – not to be confused with an “outside agitator” – to launch a GoFundMe drive to give the fraternity members a thank you party. That appeal brought in more than $500,000.

Protesters were wrong to take down the American flag and put up the Palestinian banner. The flag should always be treated with respect. Doing otherwise invited the reaction it got and took attention from what the protesters want Americans to focus on – the carnage in Gaza.

But there was no need for the university’s leader to personally get involved. He could have asked a worker accompanied by a few of the many cops on hand to put the American flag back up. In the midst of a bitter campus conflict, Roberts placed the weight of his office on one side and inflamed a situation he should have been deescalating.

Student protests against the continuing assault on Gaza were largely under control until the president of Columbia University in New York called in the police to placate her Republican critics in Congress. That predictably led to wider and more intense protests.

As the protests expanded to campuses across the nation, university leaders had two options: send in the police, or agree to consider the protesters’ demands by reviewing university investments and programs involving Israel.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott took a hard line, immediately sending in state troopers to clear protesters at the University of Texas at Austin. Seventy-nine people were arrested. Scores of other campuses also had arrests. Meanwhile, Brown University, Northwestern, Rutgers and the University of Minnesota saw their pro-Palestinian protests end or remain peaceful after administrators agreed to consider the protesters’ demands.

At UNC, the peaceful option was available, but UNC went the way of Texas.

The American flag is flying again at Chapel Hill, as it should be, but the values it represents – freedom of speech and assembly – have been as battered as the protesters. Roberts’ crackdown and flag dramatics appeased his sponsors and drew praise from conservative politicians and media, but it has created a tense and divided campus that he has lost the ability to unify.

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com