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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been mired in crisis after crisis, which many people attribute to the politicization of its governing boards. A new coalition wants to do something about that.
Can it? That’s a tricky question.
The Coalition for Carolina — which includes UNC-Chapel Hill faculty members, alumni, and a former board chair — hopes to start by building public awareness of how the UNC system’s Board of Governors and the Chapel Hill campus’s Board of Trustees are, as the group sees it, damaging the university.
The coalition debuted on Thursday with an eye-catching ad in the Carolina Alumni Review that asked: “What the hell is going on in Chapel Hill?”
One of the group’s top concerns is that the leadership and faculty on the Chapel Hill campus are, the coalition believes, effectively unable to make the decisions they feel are best for the university if state lawmakers and board members disagree. UNC-system board members are elected by the state legislature, controlled by Republicans. Of the 13 campus trustees, eight are chosen by the system board, four are picked by the legislature, and one is Chapel Hill’s student-body president.
UNC-Chapel Hill is among a number of public universities racked by political tensions in recent years. But Chapel Hill has played host to some of the most striking clashes between higher education and state politics, including over Silent Sam, a Confederate monument, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of “The 1619 Project.”
This fall, Chapel Hill leaders have said they are unable to require students and employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19 because of directives from the UNC system.
“It’s eroding morale on campus, and making it very difficult to understand where decisions are being made,” said Mimi V. Chapman, the Faculty Senate chair at Chapel Hill and one of the new coalition’s founders.
The current environment, Chapman said, puts Chapel Hill leaders in a position where they’re afraid to do anything that could anger state lawmakers because they fear it could jeopardize the university’s budget and derail spending on needs like faculty raises and scholarships for low-income students. “These things become trade-offs,” Chapman said. “But we’re trading off our values.”
In a statement provided by a spokeswoman, Chapel Hill’s chancellor, Kevin M. Guskiewicz, stressed that the university’s partnership with the state legislature was “critical.” A UNC-system spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Not Seeking to Be a Politically Partisan Group
As the coalition’s founders see it, Chapel Hill’s problems stem from a decade of changes in how the board members are selected and how they act once they take their seats.
Roger Perry was a member of the Chapel Hill Board of Trustees for eight years, and served as chair from 2007 to 2009. Today the boards are “operating at a much lower altitude,” Perry said. “Rather than playing a role of advice and consent, they’re more inclined to get into the day-to-day operations of the university.”
When Perry was appointed to the Board of Trustees, in 2002, “your politics were not a significant contributing factor in whether or not you were on a board,” he said. The dominant criteria were past service and experience, and affinity for the institution.
Even if one party controlled the legislature and the governor’s office, those leaders traditionally appointed a few people from the other party to the UNC system’s Board of Governors. Today the Board of Governors and the Board of Trustees are dominated by Republicans, even though North Carolina has a Democratic governor and voted only narrowly for Donald J. Trump in 2020, 50 percent to 49 percent.
“Politics and partisanship were simply not part of the discussion or the actions of the board,” Perry said. Today’s board members, in contrast, are more likely to make decisions based on their ideological perspectives.
The governor used to appoint half the members of the UNC system’s board. The legislature took away that power just before the current governor, Roy Cooper, took office, in 2017.
The new coalition has tall tasks ahead of it: Changing how the university’s boards are chosen will require persuading the legislature to sign off. And the group will have to explain to North Carolinians why they should care.
Perry said the group would try to exert influence on the lawmakers who control board appointments, without being overtly political. “Our goal is not to become a politically partisan group,” he said. Instead, he and others will focus on educating people on how important the university is to the state’s economy, health-care system, and stature, and how political interference threatens that.
Perry would like to see a return to a UNC-governance structure in which administrators collaborate with the faculty on university decisions and strategy, with members of the two boards acting as close advisers — not policy makers.
If the status quo doesn’t change, Perry said, he’s concerned about a resulting brain drain in Chapel Hill. “I worry that we are going to have some of our best and brightest faculty just take the attitude that, well, gosh, I don’t need to put up with this. I don’t need to put up with people who seem to want to tamper with my ability to do my job.”
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