In 2004, David Clarke, a botanist who teaches in the biology department at the University of North Carolina Asheville, bought a house on Dortch Avenue, on an edge of the Five Points neighborhood that bleeds into campus. The home was still under construction when Clarke set his eye on it, he said, but “there was not a question” of whether he would buy it.

The draw, in large part, was not the property itself but across the street: 45 acres of woods, rare as a forest within the city and as a porous border between the university and the surrounding community. The woods, he explained during a recent walk through them, have long been an asset to both worlds — to professors and students who use them to study invasive plants or learn about carbon sequestration, and to the dozens of neighbors he sees walking their dogs there every day.

At every turn in the footpaths, Clarke pointed out some detail. Little red flags and shiny buttons affixed to trees marked research plots. A couple of depressions in the earth — one local historian had told him — could be the spots where horse thieves were buried centuries ago. White splotches on ivy meant a great horned owl nested somewhere in the canopy above.

But there were also features that had appeared more recently and, to Clarke and hundreds of others, disturbingly. He gestured to new paths torn through the undergrowth, to mounds of earth where machines had bored soil for testing.

These were the result of a land-assessment process UNCA launched in January. The university hadn’t publicly announced its plans, and the heavy machinery’s arrival caused alarm. Neighbors were aghast at what was in their view an assault on their natural haven, and some students and faculty complained the work disrupted their research sites.

In response to the uproar, UNCA released a written statement assuring the public that “no decisions regarding development have been made” and touting its “commitment to transparency and collaboration.”

Then, with the exception of a brief post on its website in late January announcing the end of the heavy-machinery work, the school went quiet for nearly two months.

In the absence of information, anxiety proliferated. Concerned neighbors, along with some faculty and students, protested and signed petitions. Many coalesced as a group calling itself Friends of the Woods, which has organized community meetings, filed public records requests, pursued historical research on the forest and tried in vain to meet with UNCA Chancellor Kimberly van Noort.

They adopted a rallying cry: “Save the woods.” The information blackout begged a question: Save them from what, exactly?

Nearly two months after work began, van Noort publicly acknowledged it for the first time, in a letter to faculty and staff on March 7, then in an Asheville Citizen-Times op-ed two days later. Both confirmed what many feared: UNCA had quietly, definitively decided to develop the forest.

The school has not decided what will replace the woods, van Noort wrote, floating possibilities including housing, entertainment and sports facilities, and “research industry collaborations.” She discounted the recreational and educational features of the forest.

“We believe there are other potential uses that will provide far more value,” she wrote.

A UNCA spokesperson said van Noort was unavailable to be interviewed for this story. The school provided written responses, attributed to van Noort, to questions via email. Several of them matched word-for-word parts of previous van Noort statements, including the recent op-ed.

Roger Aiken, a financial adviser who serves as the chairperson for UNCA’s board of trustees, said in an interview that the university has no specific plans for the land and that the assessment is strictly exploratory, preparing it to better field outside development offers.

“We don’t have anything on the table in front of us,” he said.

But UNCA’s communications have not assuaged fears about university leaders making decisions in the dark — what Clarke called a “culture of secrecy” under van Noort. 

Those who worry about the woods aren’t concerned solely about the trees and birds, nor the recreational or research opportunities they provide. They fear the university’s approach is symbolic of larger changes — that, after decades of strong community engagement, it is turning away from the people of Asheville; that it’s willing to leave students and neighbors behind in the pursuit of profit.

UNCA hasn’t answered their questions, they say, because it doesn’t care to.

A compromise in 2004

The woods have been through this before.

In 2004, UNCA announced it was considering building a 2-½-acre parking lot on the property. The school had just opened a new residence hall, and it was preparing for what was then the largest freshman class in its history; there was already a crunch on parking, school leaders reasoned, one likely only to get worse.

At the same time, though, it welcomed feedback, setting up several meetings with alarmed neighbors and city officials. And it settled on a compromise: It would build a parking lot, but the site would be a former elementary school it owned adjacent to the woods. Then-Chancellor Jim Mullen announced the decision in a Citizen-Times op-ed headlined: “UNCA will model its growth on ideals taught to students.”

Today, Clarke said, students rarely use the lot, and neighbors still chafe at its chicken-wire fence and 24-7 overhead lights. Part of it has been repurposed as a small skate park. But advocates still count it as a win, one that they said illustrates how UNCA historically engaged the larger community in its decisions.

“Back then, the university was a lot different,” said Heather Rayburn, a neighbor who has organized for environmental causes for decades. “You could call up people at the university and talk to them.”

Mullen vowed that the university would develop a long-term land-management plan for its environs, including the forest, to “keep it available for community enjoyment.” In the following years, it touted its trail system, including the mile of footpaths in the woods south of campus; for a time, it offered a special polo shirt to university employees who logged 100 miles on the trails.

And the opportunity to use the woods for educational purposes has given this liberal arts university something that the state’s larger, more resource-rich research institutions lack, Clarke said. That it’s walking distance from campus saves the trouble of landing transportation for a field trip (“The university’s so broke,” he said, “you wouldn’t believe what it takes to get a van or something”) and the attendant paperwork.

“We can’t compete with big schools for fancy labs,” he said. “We can compete for natural areas.”

Rayburn compared the university’s zeal for development to the 2019 sale of nonprofit Mission Hospital to for-profit HCA Healthcare, under which it has experienced a bevy of problems, including federal sanctions last year.

“I think what this bunch is doing is, they’re hurting their legacy, and they’re hurting their reputation with the community,” she said.

The birth of the Millennial Campus

A turning point for the kind of development UNCA is now eyeing came in 2021, when the University of North Carolina System’s Board of Governors approved the school’s request to designate more than 200 acres, including the woods, as a Millennial Campus.

The special tag dates to 2000, when state legislators created it to give schools an exemption to the Umstead Act, a nearly century-old law meant to keep governmental institutions from competing with private businesses. 

The Millennial Campus designation allowed schools to carve out land where they have more leeway to develop for or with private industry. As of 2023, according to a state report, the state had more than 5,600 acres of Millennial Campus property spread across 10 institutions. Some of them have leased space to — and forged research partnerships with — private labs, software companies and healthcare providers. Others have inked deals for on-campus hotels and privatized student housing.

This arrangement has drawn criticism from parties ranging from the environmentalists hoping to preserve UNCA’s woods to the right-libertarian James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, which in 2017 decried the “mission creep” of business dealings into the schools’ “three-part mission of teaching, research, and service.”

But proponents, such as Aiken, argue that Millennial Campuses unlock badly needed revenue streams for public schools that can no longer depend on tuition and state dollars.

“We see that funding model changing,” he said. “It has changed over the past 10 to 20 years, and it’s going to continue to change over the next 10 to 20 years.”

Even some of the woods’ staunchest supporters acknowledge UNCA is in a difficult position financially. For years, it saw the worst enrollment declines of any school in the UNC system; as the student population dwindled, so did its tuition coffers and allocations from the state. 

When one-time state payments and COVID relief grants ended, it found itself facing a financial crisis. Enrollment stabilized last year and has grown slightly since then, the school has said, but the student body is still about three-quarters the size it was a decade ago. This spring’s retention rate was the school’s highest in a decade, van Noort told The Watchdog. Using identical language to that posted on UNCA’s website, she said the university aims “to have a sustainable enrollment of 3,800 to 4,000 students” by 2030.

“I really feel for the university right now,” Rayburn said. “I know that they’re hurting financially, and I know that it’s a really tough time. They’re facing a hostile state legislature that does not appreciate education.”

Asheville’s soaring cost of living ratchets up the pressure. Aiken said he’d like to see Millennial Campus land considered for affordable student or workforce housing. Clarke acknowledged the same need. When he bought his home two decades ago, he paid $190,000. A nearby house is now on the market for $1.4 million. He used to tell his students to go live off campus, that they needed to learn to cook and clean and pay bills. Now, he recognizes, many can scarcely afford it.

A futile request to meet with the chancellor

One night last week, about 75 people piled into a room in a Montford community center to hear about the woods. The weather was warm and the windows were open, and the mood was agitated but upbeat, like a birthday party bludgeoning a pinata. 

Kerry Graham-Walter, a Friends of the Woods organizer with a beard, a bun and a “Save the Woods” hoodie, noted the crowd’s size: There was “a lot more energy and concern,” he said, in the wake of van Noort’s op-ed, which had been published a few days earlier.

He gave an update on a batch of public records requests he’d submitted to UNCA, which had gone six weeks without being fulfilled, and on the group’s fruitless efforts to contact van Noort. After a few activists showed up at a board of trustees meeting in February, he recapped, Aiken had offered to broker a meeting with van Noort, but now Aiken had stopped responding to messages. Van Noort’s office was likewise unreceptive.

Among the crowd was Asheville City Council Member Maggie Ullman, a UNCA alum, who said she’s cherished the woods for two decades — learning to forage for mushrooms, playing with her kid on the set of exercise bars tucked beside a bend in the footpaths. There was likely little the city could do, since the woods are on state-owned property, she said, but she wanted to advocate for them. But she was running into a similar wall.

“I’ve asked for a meeting with the chancellor and haven’t heard back,” she said. “Sounds like the same with others.”

Van Noort told The Watchdog she was unaware of unfulfilled meeting inquiries from Ullman or any other public official.

“I try to respond and provide opportunities to connect with local community members,” she said, “though it can be challenging to accommodate requests as quickly as some would wish.”

In mid-February, The Watchdog requested several public records related to UNCA’s land assessment. Nearly a month later, after several follow-up requests, the university’s general counsel, John Dougherty, provided a copy of the 2021 Millennial Campus approval; a link to the school’s 2050 master plan (which, he wrote, “may no longer align with Chancellor van Noort’s vision for potential development of the Millennial Campus properties,” because it was approved by a previous administration); and a set of contracts, totaling $87,700, for a boundary survey. 

There were no documents related to tree removal or soil assessment, and Dougherty did not respond to follow-up questions about whether such documents existed.

Graham-Walter, who is still awaiting a response to a similar request, has told the university that he believes it’s violating a legal precedent that prohibits long delays in fulfilling records requests in North Carolina. He said he thinks UNCA is giving itself plausible deniability for the delays by taking the unusual step of routing records requests through Dougherty, who, as the school’s attorney, has other duties to attend to.

“I think there’s an element of capriciousness,” he said. “Whether they want you to have the records certainly plays into it.”

Van Noort denied that Dougherty is serving as the school’s public records custodian and said he “routinely provides legal review of proposed responses to public records requests.”

Asked about the school’s handling of communications around the woods and whether she’d do anything differently in retrospect, van Noort said only that UNCA officials “continually evaluate all of our strategies to determine their effectiveness.”

Van Noort has been an administrator in the UNC system since 2016. In early 2023, she became UNCA’s interim chancellor, and she was appointed to the role permanently later that year. Facing a $6 million deficit, she abruptly cut staff, told adjunct professors their contracts wouldn’t be renewed and, in June, announced the elimination of four academic programs and the curtailing of a fifth. The firings created “a whiff of terror” among faculty and staff, Clarke said.

Though the woods remain open to the public, UNCA has shown recently that it’s willing to flex its ownership to keep anti-development voices out. Last week, a local music therapist’s plan to organize a “community song circle” in the forest was met with an email from Dougherty, ordering that it be canceled.

“This property is not designated for nor compatible with public use,” he wrote. “Due to fallen and unstable trees and branches, it presents potential safety hazards.”

As Graham-Walter noted, sharing the email with reporters and City Council members, most of the woods’ trails are clear.

“This denial of community access to the urban forest is an unprecedented and concerning development as UNCA administration simultaneously makes their intentions to steamroll over any expressed dissent known,” he wrote. “The stated concern is laughable on its face.”

A few trees, felled during Helene, do remain down, particularly on one path curling toward the southwest corner of the woods. Still, Clarke easily navigated it during his morning walk last week, pushing his way over trunks and toward a clearing. On the far side of it stood a series of signs: “PRIVATE RESIDENCE NO TRESPASSING.”

The woods end here, giving way to the Janice W. Brumit Pisgah House, the 6,333-square-foot home that UNCA built in 2010 with $2.9 million of donor money. This is the chancellor’s residence — but as Clarke passed, he mentioned it was unlikely van Noort was there. She and her husband own a home on about 25 acres in rural Orange County, according to property records. The Pisgah House was dark. (Van Noort, citing her “personal privacy” and safety, declined to answer questions about how often she stays in the home.)

Clarke gestured at the fence surrounding the house. A segment was broken, the wood splintered, the wire bent.

“She blames it on activists or something,” he said with a slight smile. “But the bears come.”

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Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Jack Evans is an investigative reporter who previously worked at the Tampa Bay Times. You can reach him via email at jevans@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s local reporting during this crisis is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

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