Letter for Chancellor van Noort
My thoughts about the woods, our school and Asheville at large
Dr. van Noort,
The other month I read the Mountain Xpress story about the dispute over the woods. I was glad to see Save the Woods and the Millennial Campus Development Commission get the media attention they both deserve, and I was also glad you shared some of your own opinions about the situation. Even if it’s only a brief remark or two, I think it’s super important that everybody speaks openly about their ideas for what should happen to the woods. I wholeheartedly agree with you that we’ve all gotta put our heads together for a better picture of “what’s actually possible”.
I don’t think you were wrong to tell the Mountain Xpress that UNC Asheville should become more meaningfully integrated with the surrounding town. Honestly, I thought “monastery on a hill” was an amusingly accurate description for our school. I’ve always been a little shocked at how many students still don’t know their way around Asheville after two or three semesters here. Maybe I’m overly judgmental and I expect too much from people, but at the same time I think learning the names of streets shows awareness and respect for where we live. Campus can be like a bubble sometimes, so I’m completely on board with encouraging students to explore a little more.
However, if you do want a stronger bond between our campus and the rest of Asheville, my opinion is that clearing a public forest just isn’t a very smart way to get it. Whenever I walk through those woods, I see people from Five Points, West Asheville and sometimes all the way from New York. It’s got enormous potential to become a spot where students and community members can meet and share an afternoon. Bulldozing it to put up a stadium and another prohibitively expensive coffee shop will effectively trample an easy opportunity to have that “community overlap” you spoke about in the Mountain Xpress. If I were a homeowner in Five Points and you flattened what is functionally my backyard despite me begging you not to, I can’t imagine wanting to see much of you or your students.
In the morning I like to take the Reed Creek Greenway to High Five Coffee, where I read and sometimes see a professor or two from my department. Some afternoons my partner and I buy a bag of taffy for two bucks at Rocket Fizz, then we eat pieces while walking through the Montford District. The other week I visited a friend from the Quaker meeting in town and mixed soil in his garden and pet his dog. To me, integration means finding one’s own way in the greater Asheville area. You can clear the woods and put up a stadium so enormous that it scrapes the property limit, but students wouldn’t even be finding their way off W.T. Weaver. To achieve integration, you don’t need to transform Asheville into a “university district”. You only need to remind students that they live in an Asheville district.
And while I’m sure community and togetherness are important to you, I can imagine you’re more worried about keeping the lights on in our classrooms. It’s no secret that the people in Raleigh aren’t providing UNC Asheville the financial backbone it needs to support itself. It’s also no secret that you’ve got a huge and untouched pile of money in those woods. But no matter how much of a monastery on a hill this place is, no matter how scary the budget’s looking right now, bulldozing it is not a responsible solution to our problems. A responsible solution will require critical thinking, attention to the needs of others, and recognition that a North Carolina that’s flattened, degraded and sealed in concrete is not a North Carolina worth living in. Now’s the time for you to work alongside your community and consider what’s actually possible.
Rory Killian