UNC-Chapel Hill trustees hire their own PR firm to joust with their critics | Opinion

The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees apparently knew its conservatism would trigger disputes: Last year, it retained a public relations firm.

David Boliek Jr., the board’s chairman, told me, “We felt as a group that it would be helpful to have consulting in case we needed it.”

The university requested proposals to provide the board with what it described as “advice and consultation in connection with external communications related to governance.”

Eckel & Vaughn, a Raleigh firm which bills itself as a “full-service strategic communications agency,” won the job and a $50,000 annual contract paid with university trust funds, which are not state funds.

Now that the board’s abrupt proposal for a School of Civic Life and Leadership to foster more conservative instruction has provoked an outcry from faculty leaders, the public relations effort has gone into overdrive.

Improving communication is a good thing, but what the board is doing is seeking national conservative support to help it make an internal power grab.

Indeed, faculty members learned about the proposal from a Wall Street Journal editorial that appeared just hours after the board voted on Jan. 26 to accelerate development of the school. The program would have a minimum of 20 faculty members teaching courses already provided by the university. One projection of the cost is $5 million a year.

The Wall Street Journal editorial was followed by Boliek being interviewed by Fox News, op-eds by Boliek and the board’s vice chairman, John Preyer, running in North Carolina newspapers, another Wall Street Journal editorial on the reaction to the proposal, a Journal podcast on the topic and a video interview with Boliek by the newspaper’s editorial page editor, Paul Gigot.

The exposure was impressive, but also bizarre. The board communicated with New York-based conservative media yet it apparently wasn’t able to inform the faculty about its resolution calling for the new school.

It’s unclear what Eckel & Vaughn did to orchestrate the coverage. The company did not respond to requests for comment. But there’s clearly a question about why the board needs to retain its own public relations service. The university employs a legion of communications and marketing employees and it pays Vice Chancellor for Communications Kamrhan Farwell handsomely to get its message out.

Roger Perry, a Chapel Hill developer and the UNC-CH Board of Trustees chairman from 2007 to 2009, said his board let the university’s staff handle its announcements and responses. “We didn’t need a PR firm.,” he said. “We didn’t make any noise.”

Perry is the cofounder of Coalition for Carolina, a group that opposes political meddling in the university’s affairs. Still, he is impressed by the board’s ability to market the proposed school.

“I have to tip my cap to them,” Perry said. “They’ve handled this very adroitly. They shaped the message on this so that I think it plays well on Main Street.”

But that perception, Perry added, misses the high-handedness of the board exceeding its role and disrespecting the authority of faculty and administrators in creating academic programs. “They pretty much hijacked the whole process and ambushed the chancellor and the faculty,” he said.

Preyer said in an email that the board needs public relations firepower to counter critics such as Perry’s group. He noted that the Coalition for Carolina received $122,000 in contributions in 2022’s last quarter and has a budget of $250,000.

“To me, this means that our professional and unrelenting critics are outspending our effort to generate support by a ratio of at least 2.5 to 5 to 1 – not counting their influential backers in the NC news media, of which there are many,” Preyer said.

Mimi Chapman, the UNC-CH faculty chair and a cofounder of the Coalition for Carolina, said the trustees want conservatives to speak freely, but they’re uninterested in what the faculty has to say.

“The irony is that they want civil discourse,” she said, “but they won’t engage in it with the faculty.”

This story was originally published February 16, 2023 at 4:30 AM.