ECU trustees violated their trust. They should be removed.

On July 12, 2019, the day Phil Lewis and Robert Moore were sworn in as new members of the East Carolina University Board of Trustees, Interim Chancellor Dan Gerlach outlined his goals and priorities and presumably set an agenda that the trustees would share. One prominent item: Improve ECU’s image.

That didn’t quite work out. Less than four months after the meeting, Gerlach resigned after videos went viral of him drinking and dancing at student bars near the Greenville campus and then getting in his car and driving off.

Now, trustees Lewis and Moore are caught up in a controversy over their efforts to secretly offer financial support to a potential candidate for student government president in an effort unseat the board of trustees chairman. The student government president is a voting member of the 13-member board, which supported the election of ECU Board Chairman Vern Davenport by a 7-6 margin. Lewis and Moore hoped the new student president could flip the majority in favor of their candidate for chairman, Angela Moss.

Davenport learned of the plan and sent a letter to the UNC System Board of Governors about Lewis and Moore saying, “They are advancing their personal political agenda ahead of the best interest of the university.” The board’s University Governance Committee will consider how to respond at a special meeting in Chapel Hill on Wednesday.

There isn’t much to decide. Lewis and Moore should be removed. They seem not to understand that the fundamental part of being a trustee is trust. An institution relies on its trustees’ judgment and integrity. Plotting against the board’s leadership and meddling in student government elections are the opposite of what Lewis and Moore took an oath to do. Leaving them on the board would only let the mistrust fester.

That said, this latest fiasco in Greenville isn’t limited to Lewis and Moore and won’t be resolved by replacing them. The problem is broader and deeper and extends to the UNC System Board of Governors and General Assembly. Between them, the two bodies appoint the ECU Board of Trustees, with the exception of the student representative. But the appointment process has been skewed to fit a conservative Republican agenda in which ideology — and campaign contributions — weigh far more than qualifications and competence.

As recently as two years ago, then-Chancellor Cecil Staton declared of ECU: “We’re going to become America’s next great national university.” Now, thanks in part to meddling by members of the Board of Governors, it’s becoming a great embarrassment. Staton was forced out in May. Gerlach resigned last October. Ron Mitchelson, ECU’s provost and senior vice chancellor of academic affairs, was named interim chancellor on Oct. 31.

It’s a measure of how much rot has set into the UNC system that the Board of Governors, which is supposed to clean up the follies in Greenville, is itself rife with incompetence and intrigue This is the board that ran off Staton, the then-UNC System President Margaret Spellings and the then-UNC Chancellor Carol Folt. It worked in secret to give $2.5 million to the Sons of Confederate Veterans to take the Confederate statue called Silent Sam after it was toppled on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. Its political and personal meddling in campus decisions has intimidated administrators and alienated faculty.

The University Governance Committee can help steady ECU on Wednesday by recommending the removal of ECU’s two errant trustees. But ultimately a new legislature in 2021 will have to reassert higher standards for leadership appointments throughout the UNC system and on the board that governs it.

This story was originally published February 4, 2020 at 3:02 PM.