A Springboard for Trustees

University board positions have always been a kind of spoils, often a reward for a long career in business or politics.

This election could show whether that goes both ways, as two UNC-Chapel Hill trustees are the Republican nominees for council of state positions. Dave Boliek, a lawyer and former prosecutor in Fayetteville, is seeking to be the next state auditor, while investor Brad Briner is running for treasurer.

Historically, politicians have joined UNC System governing boards as they headed toward retirement. Neither the UNC System nor leading scholars could say how unusual it is for trustees, who oversee individual universities, to run for state office. But the UNC System provided estimates for members of the Board of Governors, which oversees the whole system. Since 1972, at least 25 elected officials—including three former governors—have served on the Board of Governors after leaving office.

Only “a few” have run for office after serving on the board, according to the system’s count. N.C. Speaker of the House Tim Moore served from 1997 to 2000. He was elected to the state House of Representatives in 2002. More recently, Board of Governors member and former state Rep. Pearl Burris-Floyd ran for labor commissioner in 2020 while on the board, coming in third in the Republican primary.

The recent campaigns are one more sign of how higher education politics have grown increasingly partisan, both in North Carolina and nationally. Debates over student debt and protests on campuses have dominated national headlines. In the UNC System, some newer leaders have strong political ties without traditional academic backgrounds. The partisan environments have even reportedly scared away prospective students from colleges in some states. 

“Historically, there’s always been politics,” said former UNC System President Tom Ross. “But the politics on the boards, at least in my experience, was much more around campus politics, supporting a particular campus, than it was around partisan politics.”

Boliek said there’s nothing unusual about running for office as a UNC-CH trustee. He compared it to Democrat Josh Stein running for governor while serving as attorney general or Republican Dan Bishop running for attorney general while serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. Those questioning him and Briner for running are the ones politicizing the board, Boliek said. 

“It’s unfair not to realize that I’m a mature adult who’s highly educated, with a degree from Carolina, a law degree, and a master’s in business administration,” Boliek said. “That I can separate political issues that may come up in my campaign and what’s in the best interest of the university.”

A Tale of Two Trustees

Boliek has been at the center of UNC-CH’s most high-profile political conflicts since he became a trustee in 2019. That experience is central to his campaign for state auditor.

“While board chairman, Dave led the fight at UNC to eliminate woke diversity and equity policies and create a new School of Civic Life and Leadership to help bring ideological balance to the notoriously liberal campus,” his website states. Boliek also touts his role in creating a UNC-CH audit committee and balancing the budget.‌ Though he hasn’t emphasized it, he was also one of four trustees to vote against giving journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure in 2021.

Voter interest in his time as a trustee “comes up because it’s newsworthy,” Boliek said. “Mostly in one-on-one conversations, maybe they’re Carolina alums, or maybe they have read stories about it. But it gives voters, and people, a sense of where I stand on certain things.”

Boliek’s central campaign promise has been auditing the Division of Motor Vehicles. His opponent, incumbent Democrat Jessica Holmes, has focused on her work to “put a spotlight on services and programs impacting our most vulnerable residents.”

There’s renewed political interest in North Carolina’s colleges and universities, said Chris Marsicano, a higher ed scholar and director of Davidson College’s College Crisis Initiative.

“North Carolina is a battleground in every sense of the word,” he said. “Because it is purple and moderate, it is a great lab for fighting the culture wars, because other states have already fought these battles and one side has taken hold.”

By engaging in those issues, Boliek has earned wider attention than many trustees. He even appeared on Fox News to champion the School of Civic Life and Leadership.

The son of a political journalist who grew up embedded in North Carolina politics, Boliek was a registered Democrat until June 2023. But he has built deep connections within the Republican Party. Speaker Moore’s PAC and Board of Governors member and Republican mega-donor Art Pope are among those who contributed at least $5,000 to his campaign. In August of this year, Boliek told Donald Trump that he was the only reason Boliek entered politics.

Partisan connections are common among college trustees across the country, Marsicano said. 

“It is very clear, just looking at bios of these individuals, that they are Republican Party loyalists,” he said. “In terms of running for election after the fact, I’m not surprised that we have members who are thinking of that. I think there is certainly a, if not spoken, understood view that a stint on a university board helps one gain the attention of the party that person supports and as a potential future candidate for office.”

Briner, by contrast, hasn’t put much focus on his trustee role in his campaign for state treasurer. There are more financial charts on his website than mentions of his board seat, which is given the same amount of attention as the fact that he’s also a trustee at the New England high school he attended. 

A UNC-CH alum who later worked for the university endowment and still lives across the street from campus, Briner said he decided to become a trustee because he loves the university and was at a point in his career where he could take the job. He joined the board in 2023.

Two months later, the leading Republican candidate for treasurer, John Bradford, dropped out to run for a U.S. House seat instead. 

“The treasurer’s job was wide open nine days before the filing deadline,” Briner said with a wry chuckle. He decided to put his name in the hat.

Briner has promised to overhaul the investment strategy for the North Carolina Retirement System, which he says has done worse than comparable states. His opponent is Democrat Wesley Harris, who has also campaigned on improving pension returns.

The decision to run for treasurer was independent from his decision to become a trustee, Briner said: “Those are very separate paths in my life.”

“People don’t know, and I don’t bring it up,” he said of voters’ take on his UNC-CH role. “It’s not in the top 10 list of issues that people have that they want to talk about.”

Correlation and Causation

Having connections with elected officials has always been important in the UNC System, even for academic administrators, said Holden Thorp, a former UNC-CH chancellor and now editor-in-chief of Science.

“The simplest thing is to ask yourself why I became the chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill at age 43 when I’d only been dean for a year,” he said. “Well, a big contributor was my connections in Democratic politics.”

UNC’s most revered academic leaders, like longtime UNC System President William Friday, succeeded not because they avoided politics but because they were good at it, Thorp said. “To pretend like the university is not a branch of state government is pretty naive,” he added. 

The Venn diagram of people likely to become university board members and people who might have interest in running for office is fairly close to a circle, said UNC-Wilmington professor and higher ed scholar Kevin McClure.

“For a very long time, people who are selected to serve on boards are prominent members of the community,” he said. “They are often successful in business. They are from notable families with ties to the area, ties to the institution. Obviously there’s a lot of correlation there with people who are already tapped into local politics and already primed to run for office.”

Still, the political side of public universities has become more obvious in recent years.

Tea Party activists swept into office across the country in the 2010 elections, and Republicans took control of the North Carolina General Assembly for the first time since 1808. By 2013, university boards had taken on a much starker partisan split. 

Before that, Democrats held a majority of seats on the UNC System Board of Governors, but Republicans still had between a quarter and a third of board seats, said Marsicano, who provided data analysis on the topic to Roy Cooper’s Governor’s Commission on the Governance of Public Universities in North Carolina. Unaffiliated voters had another quarter of the seats.

There was only a single Democrat among the 24 voting members of the board at any one time between 2013 and 2022, according to the commission’s final report. Today, there are two: Joel Ford, a former state senator who often split with his Democratic colleagues and once suggested he may join the Republican Party, and Gene Davis, who has close business ties to Speaker Moore as well as fellow Board of Governors member Reginald Holley. Several board members are unaffiliated.

The boards of trustees at individual universities tend to be more balanced, but still have a growing partisan tilt, Marsicano said.

“They are certainly appointing more Republicans to the flagship institutions like UNC-Chapel Hill or N.C. State,” Marsicano said. “Most of the Democrats appointed to boards of trustees are at places like North Carolina Central or North Carolina A&T—historically Black colleges and universities.”

Boliek and Briner said the partisan split hasn’t caused any issues in the UNC-CH board’s day-to-day work, though they’ve heard the concerns. 

“I don’t see it with respect to how the university is functioning and has functioned,” Briner said.

But even the appearance of partisanship can create difficulties for university leaders, said Ross, the former UNC System president. Because of Republicans’ control over the Board of Governors, incoming chancellors like Lee Roberts at UNC-CH faced a heightened level of scrutiny.

“Lee Roberts seems to be—and I know him a little bit—a fine person who’s bright and wants to do this job well,” Ross said. Even if the search process that led to Roberts’ appointment was unaffected by partisan politics, many on campus felt otherwise. “If it were perceived to be an open process, where the best person came out of it, I think his chances of success would be higher,” Ross said. UNC-CH declined to comment.

Recruiting and retaining faculty is also made more difficult, Ross said: “No matter which party they’re in, they don’t want to work in a political environment.”

To address that, the governor’s commission on university governance suggested a cooling off period before any General Assembly members or lobbyists—defined as those who “make their livelihood dealing with the legislature,” according to Ross, who co-chaired the commission—could serve on a governing board.

The commission did not address the possibility of candidates going the other way, using the boards to launch a political career. But its conclusion, Ross said, was that the state must do what it can to reduce the partisan split in the UNC System.

“The message that our commission was trying to encourage, and that I think is the right message, is to take whatever steps you can to keep politics away from the university, so that it can be a non-partisan engine for growth in North Carolina,” Ross said.

So far, the General Assembly hasn’t acted on that suggestion or any others from the commission’s report. Ross said he believes that’s “because it came from the governor and the other party.”

“I’d be surprised if many in the legislature even read it,” he said.

On that much, he and Boliek agree.

“I believe the commission itself was nothing more than a political move by the Cooper administration,” Boliek said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that former U.S. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy contributed to Boliek’s campaign. It was a different Kevin McCarthy. We have removed the reference.