UNC Newspaper Halts Satire and Implements DEI Training After Backlash Over April Fools' Issue
Free speech lawyers say UNC violated North Carolina’s institutional neutrality law.
The Daily Tar Heel, the student-run newspaper at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), announced it would stop producing satire articles for the rest of the semester after receiving backlash from students and school administration over its April Fools' Day issue.
On April Fools' Day, the paper published a series of satirical articles, including one with a subheadline that said the paper had rebranded as The Daily Woke Heel. Others read "UNC brings back DEI—for whites," and "A new way forward for the Dean Dome: a two-stadium solution." Another, published on the website, said "Satire: Trump orders ALE in Chapel Hill to be replaced with ICE agents." The jokes did not go over well with some students, and the paper's editor in chief immediately issued an apology. She wrote that the paper heard students' "critiques and outrage." She added, the paper's "insensitive decisions and oversights" were "made by a newsroom and leadership team that undoubtedly exist in positions of power and privilege on this campus."
That wasn't the only April Fools' Day attempt at comedy that didn't land with some students. The day before, Hill After Hours, a registered student group separate from the paper, posted a TikTok skit in which a white student walked through the south part of the school's campus flanked by "bodyguards," acting as though it were a dangerous, foreign land. "The sketch is dripping with mockery for the soft bigotry of exoticizing ordinary places," wrote Marie McMullan, an attorney at the Freedom for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Still, some students took offense to this video as well, and it was taken down.
On April 6, Senior Vice Provost James Orr released a statement calling the April Fools issue "highly inappropriate and offensive." He acknowledged that the university had no authority over the independent paper but wanted to be "very clear, however, that words matter and while the pieces were meant to represent satire, they were harmful and we unequivocally condemn them." He also said the school's Student Affairs office would investigate the Hill After Hours incident, "to determine more information about how and by whom the video was authorized and produced as well as next steps needed to address concerns."
FIRE called for UNC Chapel Hill to retract this statement and to end the investigation into Hill After Hours. On Wednesday, the free speech organization noted that aside from chilling student expression, the school's response "raises serious concerns under North Carolina law," which requires "UNC System institutions to remain neutral" on political controversies of the day.
After Orr released the statement, The Daily Tar Heel editors issued a lengthy apology. The editors said the April Fools' Day edition was "a colossal, institutional failure." The editors added, "As a predominantly white newsroom with a documented history of harmful reporting, we should have been thinking more about the communities we serve. We were not thinking of how our audience would be impacted by the issues that don't affect the majority of us. There is no excuse for that."
The apology also listed several ways the paper plans to make amends, including keeping direct communication with the communities "hurt" by the paper, adding a professional news adviser, implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion training, conducting an internal and external review of how the satire edition was produced, and prohibiting any more satire articles for the remainder of the semester. In total, the letter uses variations of the word harm 14 times.
One would hope that The Daily Tar Heel would not have imposed these restrictions on itself independently, but by framing poorly received newspaper articles as acts of immense "harm" and declaring a moratorium on satire, the paper is stifling speech on campus, not encouraging it. Of course, as an independent paper, The Daily Tar Heel is within its rights to respond (or not respond) to student criticisms of its April Fools' issue however it chooses without university interference.
On Friday, the university told FIRE that the administration was not investigating Hill After Hours or The Daily Tar Heel and that it did not mean to "chill the free expression rights of our campus community." Clearly, the administration already has.
