Using Collective Power to Unveil & Fight Injustice

Chelsea Lundquist-Wentz, NCSU’s Campus Community Alliance for Environmental Justice (CCAEJ) Founding Member

In December 2023, as Poe Hall’s closure sent classes online and ousted faculty and graduate students from their offices, I was desperately trying to finish my final papers for the semester, trying to buy Christmas presents for my two kids, and looking forward to a much needed winter break. My office was over in Withers and I didn’t really know what PCBs were. I missed more than one message from my fellow union members about our statement on toxic campus working conditions. I thought I would get back to it later. Surely someone else would figure out what to do in the meantime.

Three months later, my environmental history class was discussing Warren County and the people who laid their literal bodies on the ground to stop the construction of a PCB dumping ground in their community. They birthed the environmental justice movement that I was now reading about on the NC State campus, just a few hundred yards from Poe Hall. I now knew that it had been shuttered because high levels of PCBs were identified in the building and I had seen the news stories of people coming forward with diagnoses of cancer and autoimmune diseases.  “Wait, what’s up with Poe Hall again? Is anyone doing something about this?,” we collectively wondered. Alongside my classmates, I set out to answer those questions.

Chancellor Woodson and the NC State administration claim that their investigation and discovery of PCBs first occurred in August and September of 2023, and that the university acted “proactively” by closing the building in November 2023. However, based on numerous reports in the Technician and WRAL and in the testimony of Poe Hall faculty, workers, and alumni , this is far from the truth. Employees expressed written concerns about Poe Hall to NC State’s Environmental Health Department as far back as 2010. NC State’s own testing in 2018 confirmed PCB concentrations exceeding EPA limits in Poe Hall and D.H. Hill Jr. Library. In 2021, NC state faculty and graduate students documented the air contamination in Dabney Hall themselves after people reported feeling sick in the building. NC State is botching the management of the environmental disaster in Dabney Hall, which contains high levels of hazardous materials, including PCBs, asbestos, lead and mercury. As of this writing, the University plans to move forward with Dabney’s “occupied renovation” despite the College of Sciences’ request to relocate the department before construction, meaning that students, faculty, and staff will remain in the building as hazardous materials are stirred up during the removal process. And I ask, have you learned nothing, Chancellor Woodson? The second I stopped listening to you, I learned the truth.

In the six months since my “Poe Hall wake up call,” I now know just how critical it is that we all become involved in widely sharing accurate information about the toxins running rampant on our campus. NC State administrators and lawyers have tried desperately to push the “story” of Poe Hall out of the news cycle and out of the courts. I talk to people weekly who think the situation is resolved because of Woodson’s bogus ‘Poe Hall Updates’ and others who are hearing about it for the first time. Even fewer people understand that the problem of PCBs and environmental hazards very likely extends across multiple campus buildings that are being actively used to this day. People’s lives have been forever changed or lost because they worked and studied in an NC State building and our administration’s response? Denial, obfuscation, and heartless ‘updates’ that seek to keep the campus community in harm’s way permanently. But I know that the reality of toxic chemicals in multiple buildings on our campus cannot be swept under the rug. That is why I helped form the Campus Community Alliance for Environmental Justice, a coalition of students, campus workers, faculty, alumni, and other community supporters who are determined to spread awareness and hold NC State University accountable for harm done.

The University controls and owns our campus buildings, and to date they have hoarded the power of whether or not to manage them responsibly. But we have the power of community, which is an infinitely greater and more precious thing. I have been asked why I care about Poe Hall when I have never stepped foot in the building. Through the work of CCAEJ, I have found the true NC State Campus Community. It is not the administration, the buildings, or even the sports teams. It includes but does not end with the people studying and working on campus today. In the absence of University transparency and communication, we have found each other, coming together through professional connections and friends of friends. We attend a conference and a fellow panelist says, after being introduced, “oh, N.C. State… have you heard about Poe Hall?” On LinkedIn, Facebook and over email, we share news articles that contain information we never received from NC State administration. We flip on WRAL and see former classmates talking about their diagnoses, reach out to them to see how they are doing, and call other classmates to make sure they know. We are graduate workers who decide at our union meeting to use our collective power to help address the health and safety concerns of every person who has ever worked and studied on campus. We are faculty who stand behind the College of Education’s vote of no confidence in Woodson and Provost Arden. The NC State Campus Community, the one that exists in the past, present, and future, on campus and off, understands that people are the center of NC State.

We demand that NC State University: contacts everyone who may have been exposed to PCBs in Poe Hall since the building was constructed in 1971; compensates these individuals for relevant short and long term health screenings; commissions and publicly posts an independent review of the faulty Geosyntec report; establishes an independently run environmental reporting system for the campus; tests all campus buildings, including dormitories, for environmental contaminants; and keeps Poe Hall closed until proven safe by a verified, independent tester. The NC State University Chancellor Search Advisory Committee and Board of Trustees should seek a true leader for the next Chancellor of our University, someone who is ready to stand with the NC State campus community and uphold these demands. For they will soon meet us: the hundreds of people who have already received life-altering diagnoses, the thousands of faculty, students, and staff who may be exposing themselves to those same toxins now, and the endless well of community supporters that stand at our backs.