the emperor is all filler, the university has already fallen

by Saanet

Among myths that UNC-Chapel Hill benevolently offers is that this quad is for the people. 

Does it get more prestigious than manicured lawns? 

Does it get closer to the American Dream than The expanse of green at The Oldest Public University? 

Where hard-thinking academics can gather, rest, and share ideas?

Let me unsettle you. 

Enclosed by ivory towers and brick paths, within clean lines, tightly controlled, obsessively maintained, an invasive and stifling monoculture; this quad is a status symbol.

Those peripheralized struggle to make rent, and the university ‘owns’ this land to use as nothing but an ornament, 

a green carpet, 

imitation European pleasure grounds.

And as the oldest public Settler university yearned to emulate its colonizing forefathers, it multiplied unthinkable violence. And so it settled.

Spreading itself audaciously across a manicured green space, this quad is the centerpiece of The Colonial University.

As for this mythical place of ‘shared rest’: 

There was no rest for the land taken or the labor forced to build this school. 

This quad welcomes no rest for groundskeepers who maintain it today.

This quad is an illusion of peace close to home, predicated on violence in Palestine. 

When the university upholds genocidal investments in israel, students continue showing up in protest. 

On this quad, they sit in and they walk out. They march, have moments of silence, die-ins, and read the names of martyrs. They make art and imagine new worlds.

In the face of suppression, beloved ‘diversity of thought’ is a farce. UNC values civic life and leadership¹ until students call out profit. 

This academic institution itself is an invasive and stifling monoculture.

Continuously repressed, students eventually learn how tents can destabilize that monoculture. 

They place stakes in the ground and refuse to uproot themselves

In interrupting the lawn’s purity, we make visible the university’s demons to passing tour groups,

And they cannot hide in the South Building, at the head of the quad, where they conduct their six-figure crimes and print out copies of Facilities Use Policies,

when the people amass in the hundreds, pounding on their door.

And when we slept under the stars, we asked ourselves: what have these trees witnessed over the years? 

I wonder if students building shanty towns, protesting investments in apartheid South Africa, felt a new love for that space like I did in those moments.

There is no clearer stance on genocide than replicating violence: these trees then witnessed pepper spray and blood seeping into the grass.

This university sicced police on protestors at dawn, 

and then it did once again,

after hundreds gathered in protest, only hours later

Raising the Palestinian flag high above the quad

at the oldest settler university in the nation.

To punish their quad for being home to an undesirable diversity of thought, action, and existence,

They locked it away behind military-grade barricades, hiding the desire lines and taped accessibility paths evidencing our presence.

We were sanctioned for damaging landscaping, when

perhaps it was the police, dragging students by their hair that did it

or the counter-protestors kicking and beating a student that killed it 

or the pepper spray deployed that suffocated it. 

You see, if the colonial institution is the lawn, 

to kill the institution, 

perhaps we must just exist on this lawn for a bit longer, 

at the wrong times, with the wrong bodies. 

Perhaps one might uproot the lawn

and plant a native garden next time

———

Postscript: 

The most enduring legend associated with UNC is its founder’s namesake tree: Davie Poplar. As long as it remains standing, the university will thrive; if it falls, the university will crumble. 

Here, I implore you to look beneath the surface. 

Just as the israeli hen is pumped full of steroids from settler colonial institutions, Davie Poplar, too, has been pumped chock full of cement.

1.  In Jan 2023, the UNC Board of Trustees (BoT) unveiled the upcoming School of Civic Life and Leadership, a new school at UNC funded by conservative donors. It deliberately carries a politically conservative agenda, thinly veiled by neutrality and increasing ‘representation’ of conservatism on campus
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