Secrecy reigns at UNC Board of Governors

It is a sure bet that few of the 32 members of the UNC Board of Governors has much sympathy for the current outcry for “safe spaces” from students at the University of Missouri, Yale and other campuses.

Yet these leaders of the University of North Carolina system want their own safe space, shielded from the prying eyes of the public. They believe they can do the public’s business and spend the public’s money at the public’s university behind closed doors, with no oversight or even revealing what they’ve done after the fact. Like the University of Missouri students initially, they use their “muscle” to keep the cameras out and are offended that anyone might seek to intrude into their cocoon.

Just as the students show that they don’t understand the pluralistic mission of a university, the Board of Governors shows it doesn’t understand that the University of North Carolina is a public institution, not a private corporation.

The BOG met on Oct. 30 in closed session to grant sizable raises to 12 of 17 chancellors. Three days passed before they disclosed what the raises were. Two weeks later, the board still has not publicly released the minutes of the meeting, nor even a summary of the vote.

State law requires that minutes of closed meetings be made public as soon as doing so would no longer “frustrate the purpose” of the closed session. The raises have been implemented, retroactive to July 1. UNC shrugs and says the minutes aren’t ready yet.

It matters not if you are Republican or Democrat, and whether you think the chancellor raises were deserved or not. If you are an N.C. taxpayer, you should be offended that these governors deem the university their private plaything, and you’re being locked out of your own institution of higher education.

Media lawyers and university system lawyers disagree on whether the board broke the law by approving the raises in private. Either way, it is operating with much greater secrecy than is required and in a way that instills mistrust among the people.

Legislative leaders, no models of transparency themselves, ordered the Board of Governors to hand over any and all records from the Oct. 30 session that day. On Friday, two weeks later, the board reluctantly agreed to do so. But it still hasn’t offered that to the public.

So taxpayers don’t know why the board approved $550,000 worth of raises, which will be incorporated into annual salaries going forward, why some chancellors got more than others and why some got none. The decisions may be well-founded. But shrouded in secrecy, the Board of Governors has created unnecessary suspicion and doubt.

This story was originally published November 13, 2015 at 6:30 PM with the headline "Secrecy reigns at UNC Board of Governors."