COVID-19 cases at UNC are ‘cluster@#$%,’ student newspaper says in scathing editorial

BY HAYLEY FOWLER, UPDATED AUGUST 17, 2020 05:20 PM

A growing number of coronavirus cases at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has drawn the ire of students and faculty alike — perhaps none more so than the editorial staff at The Daily Tar Heel. On page three of Monday’s print edition, the student newspaper’s editorial board declared: “UNC has a clusterf**k on its hands.”

UNC-Chapel Hill has recorded four COVID-19 clusters and 130 new cases on campus since classes started last week, prompting university officials to announce Monday that all classes will move to online instruction beginning Aug. 19, The News & Observer reported.

The clusters — defined by the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services as five or more cases — are at three residence halls and an off-campus fraternity, according to The N&O. UNC allowed students to return to campus at the behest of the UNC System Board of Governors.

But according to The Daily Tar Heel’s editorial board, that doesn’t mean campus administrators can shirk responsibility for students’ health and safety. “The administration continues to prove they have no shame, and the bar for basic decency keeps getting lower,” the editorial board wrote, concluding with “one thing’s for sure — this road map leads straight to hell.”

Paige Masten, the DTH’s opinion editor, shared the editorial on her personal Twitter account Monday. It’s been liked 2,700 times and garnered a slew of feedback — mostly positive, so far.Masten told McClatchy News she started writing the piece on Friday after UNC-Chapel Hill announced the first two clusters, and the decision to post the editorial “just kind of happened.”

The online version has a different headline — which was decided on first — that reads “Editorial: We all saw this coming,” followed by the definition of a “clusterf**k.” But the word was “too perfect” to be left out of the print headline, she said.

“I asked Anna Pogarcic, our editor-in-chief, if she would be OK with me running a headline like that, and she said, ‘You know what? Go for it. Print news, raise hell,’” Masten told McClatchy News.

Masten said she didn’t expect the editorial to be so popular, but she said it was important the editorial board use its platform to “amplify” the voices and concerns of “student activists, graduate student workers and university employees who put their lives and jobs on the line to fight for our collective safety.”

She’s not too worried about anyone being uncomfortable with the headline, either.

“Personally, I think that the university’s utter disregard for the safety of students and workers is far more offensive than the word “f**k,” Masten told McClatchy News. “And that’s where we should focus our attention.

The Daily Tar Heel has been a separate legal entity from the university since 1989 and operates as a nonprofit that receives no student fees — “making it both fiscally and editorially independent,” according to the paper’s website.

About 10,000 print editions of the newspaper are published on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and the website is updated daily. The decision to run Monday’s editorial — curse words included — was entirely up to the students, according to Erica Perel, The Daily Tar Heel’s general manager and newsroom adviser.

“I work to train and mentor the student journalists. I don’t have a day-to-day role in overseeing content,” Perel told McClatchy News. “If they seek my advice or ask my opinion about something, I share it. The student media model of journalism education is students learn the best when they are responsible for the choices they make.”

Though the students didn’t ask for her input, she said the DTH and other student publications “have a long tradition of using profanity.” “We’re not bound by a lot of the constraints of being a ‘family newspaper,’” Perel said. “Our target audience is younger.”

Outside of its “colorful language” on the editorial page, Perel pointed to work the DTH staff as a whole has done on public service and accountability journalism in the midst of a global health pandemic. “The role of independent student media has never been more important,” she said.