Trustees are making one mess after another at UNC-Chapel Hill | Opinion

Following the election of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper in 2016, Republican lawmakers moved to take full control of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

They took away the governor’s appointments to all the UNC System’s boards of trustees, but the real prize was a complete takeover of the Board of Trustees in Chapel Hill, a campus that Republican lawmakers regard as a liberal bastion. The governor’s four board appointments were revoked and split between the House speaker and the Senate leader. Eight other trustees are appointed by the UNC System Board of Governors, whose members are appointed by the Republican-controlled legislature. The last spot goes to the student body president.

Now, nearly ten years after stripping the board’s political diversity, we’re seeing the results.

It’s charitable to call it chaos.

It’s not that having four members appointed by a Democratic governor would have prevented the board from going awry, but maybe their witness and advice would have prevented some of its misadventures.

Consider where the board has taken one of the nation’s most respected public universities.

A push by several trustees led to the hiring of former New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick as UNC’s new football coach. He’s 73, and is being paid $10 million a year. In his inaugural season, the six-time Super Bowl winner’s team is getting blown out by what should be peer programs. Maybe the board should have left the hiring of the football coach to the Athletic Department.

Another board project – the creation of a School of Civic Life and Leadership – was hatched by trustees without coordination with the faculty. The Wall Street Journal editorial board hailed the new school as an outlet for conservatives, and Republican state lawmakers eagerly funded it. But a year later, the School of Civic Life is riven by internal faculty tension and resignations. An outside counsel has been appointed to review what is hobbling the school’s launch.

Then there is Vimal Kolappa, a UNC trustee who is caught up in a campaign finance law complaint filed by Bob Hall, the retired executive director of Democracy North Carolina. Kolappa has asked state lawmakers for funding help to build a cricket stadium on UNC-CH’s North Campus. He is also part of a group that hosted an event in which House Speaker Destin Hall and Senate leader Phil Berger collected more than $150,000 each in campaign donations.

Hall’s complaint says the group, the N.C. Association of Indian Americans, is not legally eligible to hold political fundraisers and some of the campaign donations may have been improperly recorded to get around contribution limits.

Now comes another board-related fiasco. Former UNC-Chapel Hill Provost Chris Clemens is suing the board for allegedly violating open meetings and public records laws.

Clemens is a professor of physics and astronomy who served as provost for three years before stepping down in May. He says the board met in private to discuss personnel issues, but also spent time considering changes in tenure policy, an issue that’s not exempt from open meetings laws. He also accuses some trustees of hiding their official communications by using platforms that automatically delete messages.

The allegations are particularly remarkable coming from Clemens, who was hired as provost in part because of his conservative credentials.

Roger Perry is a former UNC Board of Trustees chairman and co-founder of The Coalition for Carolina, a group critical of Republican interference in the university. He said UNC-CH is still executing its mission thanks to the faculty and administrators, but no thanks to the board.

Perry said the board has several well-intentioned members, but its high-strung partisans are making a mess of things.

“These people have broken the (public records) law time and time again. They have meddled in affairs of the university in which they have no province and they continue to be an embarrassment and menace to the university,” he said. “Other than that, they’ve done nothing wrong.”

UNC System President Peter Hans issued a memo in January transferring some of the board’s powers to Chancellor Lee Roberts and effectively reminding the trustees to stay in their lane.

But the real fault for the board’s erratic and damaging actions lies with Republican legislative leaders. They set out to bring to heel an institution they consider to be too liberal. But in their pursuit of full control, they created a board that’s gone out of control.

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@newsobserver.com

This story was originally published September 28, 2025 at 4:30 AM.