On the night before the start of Fall 2025 semester, facilities workers at UNC-Chapel Hill boarded over and subsequently removed a student- and community-created mural in Hanes Art Center. The mural was initiated and created by several students in the undergraduate course Studio Art 490: Art as Social Action, with help from other students across campus. No Art Department faculty were consulted before the mural was covered and removed, and no one has taken responsibility for this censorship.

The American Association of University Professors North Carolina and the UNC-Chapel Hill chapter of the AAUP call on Chancellor Lee Roberts and Interim Provost Jim Dean to restore the mural and publicly explain how the decision to remove it was made and by whom.

See the full UNC-CH AAUP statement on mural censorship at UNC.

AAUP North Carolina and the UNC Chapel Hill chapter of AAUP stand in solidarity with the professors and students whose academic freedom and free speech rights were violated by the cover-up, removal, and destruction of the student-created mural "I told you I loved you (Gaza Solidarity)."

The campus community is invited to print T-shirts and posters bearing the quote from poet June Jordan that appears prominently on the mural:

I told you I loved you and I wanted genocide to stop.

Meet outside Hanes Art Center, where the mural was located, at 3pm on Wednesday, September 3. Bring a blank t-shirt if you'd like to screenprint.

UNC-CH AAUP chapter president Michael Palm sat down with 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck to discuss the fight for tenure at UNC. The UNC-CH chapter and statewide NC AAUP and the national AAUP president have called on the UNC Board of Trustees to provide more transparency and a full explanation after an unusual months-long delay in approving tenure applications for dozens of faculty members earlier this year.

Listen to the discussion at Chapelboro.com.

In the 2024–2025 academic year, the School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) established a record that should cause embarrassment to UNC’s leaders. Of the nine Chapel Hill faculty initially brought on board to staff the SCiLL, at least six have already resigned, citing defective leadership, mission drift, and shocking procedural irregularities.

The expansion of SCiLL and the legislature’s design to exclude current UNC-CH faculty from planning and decision-making comes as other programs actually created by faculty and staffed by scholars with genuine disciplinary expertise will probably be placed on the chopping block.

Read more: https://unc-ch-aaup.org/scill