UNC Board of Governors

The UNC Board of Governors approved a bonus of $451,200 for UNC System President Peter Hans Wednesday, which board members said reflects the “exceptional job” Hans continues to do for the UNC System. The one-time payment to Hans’s Senior Administrative Officer Retirement Account is in line with an incentive scheme under which he was hired in June of 2020.

After six years on the UNC Board of Governors, Leo Daughtry is being moved to the North Carolina State Board of Transportation. It wasn’t a move he requested, Daughtry told Policy Watch last week. But the change, part of a political appointments bill passed at the end of the legislative session, was probably inevitable after Daughtry said aloud something a number of board members privately say they also believe: the plan to move the UNC System offices to downtown Raleigh is expensive, ill-considered and motivated primarily by politics.

More than nine months after a UNC Board of Governors committee refused to reappoint a widely respected UNC Law professor to the University of North Carolina Press Board of Governors, the UNC System has released hundreds of pages of email communications Policy Watch requested in connection with the conflict.

Beginning next year, graduates of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics will be guaranteed admission at UNC System schools. The new policy, approved at last month’s meeting of the UNC Board of Governors, will apply to all Science and Math students applying for first time admission beginning with the Fall 2022 semester.

Two weeks into in-person instruction at UNC System campuses, faculty members at universities small and large are pushing for more flexibility to deal with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, including, in some cases, a temporary shift back to online classes. On Tuesday, Duke University announced new protocols as its campus deals with a spike in infections, largely among vaccinated students. These include giving professors the ability to shift to online-only classes for the next two weeks.

Conservatives on UNC BOG want to remove Prof. Eric Muller, but legal experts say they lack the authority to do so In a high-stakes game of political poker with the UNC Board of Governors, a state statute may provide the UNC Press with a trump card.

BOG member says refusal to reappoint law professor Eric Muller is a message to students, campus leaders and faculty that they "are not in charge of the system" The UNC-Chapel Hill faculty is opposing what they say is undue political influence on appointments to the UNC Press Board of Governors.

Six new members are set to join the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees, changing the board’s demographic makeup but likely not its conservative bent. The new trustees will have to contend with the fallout from the Nikole Hannah-Jones case, which has prompted an exodus of Black faculty and raised questions about the effectiveness of the university’s shared governance structure.

In an exclusive interview, a distinguished Lumbee historian explains her decision to leave UNC-Chapel Hill When renowned historian Malinda Maynor Lowery heard acclaimed journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones couldn’t get a vote on tenure from the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees, she felt sad and angry. But she was no longer surprised.

UNC Board of Governors will not intervene

Nikole Hannah-Jones’s candidacy for tenure has been resubmitted to the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees, Policy Watch confirmed Wednesday. The UNC-Chapel Hill Provost's office asked the school’s Committee on Appointments, Promotion and Tenure to resubmit Hannah-Jones’s name, two sources with direct knowledge of the process. Policy Watch has agreed not to identify these sources so that they can discuss a confidential personnel matter.

Journalism school will instead offer Nikole Hannah-Jones a fixed five-year contract In her career in journalism, Nikole Hannah-Jones has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant.” But despite support from UNC-Chapel Hill faculty and its chancellor, she won’t be getting a tenure-track teaching position at her alma mater. At least not yet.

Two new bills, if they become law, would change the face of the UNC Board of Governors. One would bar members of the  General Assembly and lobbyists from serving on the board. The other measure would directly appoint state lawmakers themselves to the board as non-voting members.

Former State Sen. Joel Ford was elected to the UNC Board of Governors Wednesday, becoming the conservative-dominated board’s only Democrat. The N.C. Senate chose Ford to replace Darrell Allison, who stepped down from the board to become the new chancellor of Fayetteville State University.

Student leaders at UNC System schools are opposing potential fee changes they say could cut funds for student groups and student government while expanding budgets for campus police. At the end of January, student leaders at UNC-Chapel Hill sent a letter to the Board of Governors and UNC System President Peter Hans to express concern over ongoing discussions of the Student Activity Fee.