USC announced Wednesday that the Presidential Search Advisory Committee has appointed Dr. Carol Lynn Folt as the first woman to lead the university as president. She will serve as USC's 12th president, following former president C.L. Max Nikias and former interim president Wanda Austin.
Folt previously was the chancellor of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She resigned in January this year.
But some students from UNC feel that Folt is unqualified to address the scandal-ridden climate at USC.
"I'm honestly baffled as to why USC would choose to replace a president that failed their community with a president who failed her community at her previous job," said Sean Norton, a political science doctoral candidate at UNC. "Folt's legacy at UNC is one of repeatedly failing to protect marginalized communities especially, but also the community as a whole."
Folt inherits a position that has seen several scandals over the past few years, including the most recent national college admissions bribery scandal, in which a senior administrator and two coaches at USC were indicted for bribery.
This is not the first time that Folt has joined an administration already bridled with national controversy: she started her former position as UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor in 2013 following the exposure of long-term athletic and academic fraud involving athletes receiving credit for classes that required no attendance. Folt spent her early years navigating UNC through the ensuing NCAA investigations. In 2017, NCAA announced that it "could not conclude that the UNC violated NCAA academic rules."
Folt dealt with controversies all the way up to her resignation letter released Jan. 14 of this year, which ordered UNC to take down the Confederate statue "Silent Sam" as her final action as chancellor. According to USC Board of Trustees Chairman Rick Caruso, Folt was still the chancellor at the UNC when the committee reached out to her.
Other students commend her actions in removing the statue and are saddened by her departure from UNC. Myklynn Lapoint, a junior studying sociology at UNC, supported the statue's removal.
"Overall, people are kind of upset she's leaving because of how it panned out," Lapoint said. "When the whole 'Silent Sam' thing came out, everyone that I surround myself with was pretty excited about [the statue's removal]. We were trying to get the statue off campus."
"[Folt] brings this incredible flexibility and poise in really stressful situations," Emily Blackburn, UNC student body vice president told Annenberg Media. "I think the struggle you all are going through now will pass. I feel completely confident that she will be able to help navigate through this rough water. She has done it before. She has done it well. She will do it again."
But some are still unsatisfied to her responses to the university's myriad scandals during her time, including the removal of "Silent Sam." While Folt wanted to remove the statue from campus completely, North Carolina law only allows for the relocation of historic monuments under specific conditions. The Board proposed a plan to move the monument to a new building, and students, including Norton, felt this was a move to protect the statue and silence their voices.
A large distinction between the two universities is that USC is a private school. As a result, the stakeholders in Folt's decisions will be slightly different in this new role. Students from UNC recognized that Folt's decisions were largely influenced by university stakeholders in all areas.
"I definitely think that she was stuck between a rock and a hard place a lot of the time," Blackburn said. "Because we're a public school, she had to answer not only to the students but also to the donors who keep our university going and also to the taxpayers in the state of North Carolina and the board of trustees and the board of governors and the system president … that's one person being pulled in a lot of different directions."
Across the board, students have very different feelings about Folt's time at UNC.
"Overall, she seemed like she was always trying to do the right thing but often lacked action," said Tal Harris, a junior studying management and society at UNC. "I think [that] at the end, people either felt bad for her or were extremely thankful she was gone. Again, very convoluted feelings about Chancellor Folt."
Francis Agustin and Lauren Giella contributed to this report.