The governing board of the University of North Carolina system, whose most dominant voices in recent years have been those of lobbyists, former lawmakers, and big-money donors, now welcomes to its ranks a man who is arguably the state’s most influential conservative figure: James Arthur (Art) Pope.
In appointing Pope to the university’s Board of Governors last week,
the Republican-controlled State Senate added yet another ideological partner to a board that, critics say, functions now more as an arm of the legislature than as an independent policy-making body.
Since 2010, when Republicans seized control of both houses of the General Assembly for the first time in more than a century, the university system’s board has increasingly come to reflect the political sensibilities of the legislature.
Pitched battles over academic centers and institutes, which were perceived as bastions of liberalism, and fierce debates over the fate of a Confederate monument on the Chapel Hill campus, have positioned the board as a key player in a larger partisan war over the future and identity of the state.
Adding Pope to the board feels like the culmination of a decade-long reshaping of the university’s governance structure, which conservative critics had long felt was too beholden to the liberal ideals of its Democratic appointees.
Pope served four terms in the state House, ending in 2002, and he was Gov. Pat McCrory’s budget director in 2013 and 2014. Pope’s greatest influence on the state’s political agenda, however, may be through the millions of dollars he has steered into a network of free-market think tanks and foundations that often set the terms of debate in North Carolina.
The network runs on money from the John William Pope Foundation, a grant-making outfit that is supported by Variety Wholesalers, the Pope family business. Grantees of the foundation, of which Pope is chairman, include the John Locke Foundation, a libertarian think tank; and the Civitas Institute, which has the stated mission of “holding elected officials accountable when they support liberal policies.”
Pope isn’t shy about his politics. But he told The Chronicle on Friday that university board members should check their ideologies at the door.
“Once they’re on the Board of Governors, they should be nonpartisan,” Pope said. “I think they have been nonpartisan, and I’m fully confident that I will be nonpartisan.”
The rightward tilt of North Carolina’s board, and the preoccupation that some of its members have had with politically contentious issues, has been a source of growing concern for some in the state, who say the board increasingly interrogates — rather than supports — the university system. Pope’s appointment is likely to feed those concerns.
“I think it will only intensify the partisan nature of the board,” said J. Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College, a private liberal-arts college in Salisbury, N.C. “The General Assembly, since 2011, has been very willing to put their stamp on the state, to mold it in their vision of governance, and one of the major components of state government has been the UNC system.”
Pope was tapped to fill a vacancy on the board after Robert A. Rucho, a former Republican state senator, resigned from the board with a year left on his term.
Jeffrey N. Jackson, a Democratic state senator from Charlotte, said that appointing “the godfather of Republican politics” to the board strips away any veneer of neutrality or partisan balance in the governance of the state’s university system.
“I take it we would all agree that ideally the Board of Governors would be viewed as a nonpartisan governing body, and that has been a major challenge in the last several years,” Jackson said. “I have to believe that the appointment of Art Pope takes any possibility of improving that perception all the way down to zero.
“If we ascribe any value to the perception of nonpartisanship to our university governance,” he continued, “then this was a big mistake.”
Countering ‘Liberal’ Universities
Conservatives will note that the board was dominated by Democrats when that party held power. Even some Republicans, however, see this board’s lack of political balance as a problem.
W. Louis Bissette Jr., a former Republican mayor of Asheville and a nonvoting emeritus member of the board, wrote in a recent column that the absence of any Democrats on the board means it is “simply not representative of our state and of the citizens we serve.”
Bissette also expressed misgivings about the board’s politically charged investigations of campuses.
“Our universities should be held accountable,” wrote Bissette, a former chairman of the board, “but governing boards do not exist to serve as oversight committees for the legislature.”
Surveys show that Republicans tend to hold a more negative view of higher education than Democrats do, and North Carolina’s board in recent years has often seemed at odds with the campuses it oversees. In 2015, not long after forcing out Thomas W. Ross, a Democrat, as the system’s president, the board trained its scrutiny on academic centers and institutes. The board voted to shutter three campus centers, including a poverty center at Chapel Hill that had been led by an outspoken critic of the state’s Republican leadership.
Later, in 2017, the board voted to strip the UNC Center for Civil Rights of its power to litigate, which it had often done on behalf of poor and minority clients.
As those politicized battles have played out, organizations funded by the Pope Foundation have urged greater scrutiny of liberalism and excess in higher education. The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, for example, is frequently at odds with professors, blasting colleges for “shallow and trendy” courses that disparage “principles of justice, ethics, and liberal education,” according to the center’s website. Some professors have balked at the agenda and posture of the center, which was previously known as the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.
The John Locke Foundation was established as a direct response to what its organizers saw as the political left’s stranglehold on higher education, the foundation’s then president told The New Yorker in 2011.
“We set up an answer to what we saw as the liberal establishment,” said John Hood, who is now president of the Pope Foundation. “The conservatives thought the liberals had the universities, so they had to balance that with think tanks.”
‘1950s Men’s Club’
Pope’s approach is sometimes likened to that of Charles G. Koch, a billionaire conservative political donor, who, along with his late brother, David H. Koch, has steered enormous sums of money into higher education, often in promotion of libertarian ideals. But Pope isn’t waging a national ideological battle, as much as he is trying to shape policy in his home state.
“He may think the faculty is too darn liberal, but it isn’t as if he’s an outsider shooting at the university,” said Ferrel Guillory, who spent 20 years as a reporter, editorial-page editor, and columnist for The News & Observer, in Raleigh, N.C., and now teaches courses in journalism and politics as a professor of the practice at Chapel Hill. “His family has been linked to the university for a long time.”
John William Pope, Art Pope’s late father, graduated from Chapel Hill and later served on the campus’s Board of Trustees. Art Pope, who earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at Chapel Hill, has donated millions to the campus, saying that public universities “require and deserve voluntary private support.”
Bissette, the former university-board chairman, told The Chronicle that Pope would be a good addition to the group.
“The board is political and always has been,” Bissette said in a text message. “No one is perfect, but Art is very independent. I think he will be a moderating influence.”
Some of the board’s most divisive figures, however, have ties to Pope-funded groups. Steven B. Long, who led the contentious charge against the civil-rights center, is a former Civitas board member. (Long, a tax lawyer from Raleigh, has said he objected in principle to the center’s ability to sue cities and towns, effectively saddling North Carolina taxpayers with the expense of legal defense.) Tom Fetzer, a former Raleigh mayor who recently resigned from the board, is a former member of the John Locke Foundation’s board, Pope confirmed. Fetzer was criticized as sponsoring a rogue investigation into a chancellor of the university’s East Carolina campus and meddling in a chancellor search at Western Carolina.
Pope’s appointment comes amid a leadership transition for the university, which recently selected as system president Peter Hans, a former Board of Governors member who had led the state’s community-college system. Hans previously served as a consultant to Margaret Spellings, a U.S. secretary of education under President George W. Bush, who announced, in 2018, that she would resign as president of the UNC system before the end of her contract. Her resignation, which followed charges of infighting and micromanagement by the board, was another sign of instability in a university system that has for years been beset with controversy.
As a board member, Pope said, he is not interested in litigating political wedge issues, like the liberalism of professors.
“That’s not why I’m going on the Board of Governors,” he said. “I’m more concerned about dealing with the coronavirus, whether or not we’re going to have students on campus, what the environment’s going to be like. I am more concerned about the potential budget shortfall for the entire state, which will in turn impact the university’s budget.”
Pope’s appointment to the board overshadowed that of Jimmy Clark, the owner of a transportation company and a former chairman of the North Carolina State University Board of Trustees, who was tapped to serve out the final year of Fetzer’s unexpired term.
Pope and Clark, who are both white men, do not add gender or racial diversity to a board that has been criticized as overly homogenous. One former board member, in an opinion column, complained that the board resembled “a 1950s men’s club.”
Harold Barnes, immediate past chairman of the board at Elizabeth City State University, a historically black institution, was nominated but not selected to be on the Board of Governors. Barnes, who is African American, said he would like to see more diversity on the system’s board.
“I really think that a board should be made up of the best of what the state has to offer,” said Barnes, a retired lawyer who stressed that he was speaking for himself, not Elizabeth City State. “It should seek equitable inclusion, and we should hear from every voice throughout the state of North Carolina, which includes Native Americans, African Americans, brown Americans, as well as white Americans.”
David Duke Incident
The selection of two new white members for North Carolina’s Board of Governors comes at a tender moment in the United States, as people take to the streets in protest of racial injustice. Those tensions have brought renewed scrutiny to a racially charged incident, in 1975, when Pope was a student at Chapel Hill. Pope filed a complaint, under the code of student conduct, against Algenon Marbley, president of the Black Student Movement, after Marbley shouted down David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan leader, during a speech on campus. Marbley was acquitted of disrupting the event in violation of university policy.
“I don’t support David Duke,” Pope told The Chronicle last week. “I don’t support the Klan. I think they’re a horrible organization. I do think he had a right to speak.”
“It is more controversial to defend the free speech of those who are condemned by the majority,” he continued, “and I condemn the Ku Klux Klan. But the same rules must apply to everyone.”
Pope joins the North Carolina board at a time when the system is still grappling with the fate of a Confederate statue, known as Silent Sam, that was toppled by protesters on the Chapel Hill campus in 2018. The board’s decision to give the statue to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, along with $2.5 million for upkeep, was widely criticized as a gift to a white-supremacist group.
A judge threw out the deal in February, saying that the group had no standing to negotiate with the university.
Asked about the future of the statue, Pope said, “I will come into it with an open mind about what should be done.”
“I absolutely understand why, to one person, Silent Sam may be an appropriate memorial to those who have died,” Pope said. “At the same time, it can be a very offensive monument — not a memorial, but a monument — to white supremacy and the segregation of the past.”
The debate over Silent Sam, which has dragged on for years, has positioned Chapel Hill in an intensifying debate about racially insensitive symbols on college campuses and in other public spaces. Among the many arguments for the removal of the statues, particularly on college campuses, is that they threaten minority students. That argument does not resonate with Pope.
“I don’t see how an inanimate object is threatening,” Pope said. “And I’m not being flip. I’m being serious. I don’t understand the threatening part. Being disrespectful, I absolutely understand that.”
Pope’s decisions as a board member on politically sensitive issues, including race, are likely to be viewed, at least in some circles, as partisan. But Pope argues that his critics would be less concerned about a politicized governing board if his politics were liberal.
“Opponents of the conservatives want to demonize those who are Republicans,” he said. “If I had the exact same record, but I’d been chairman of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation,” which supports progressive causes, “and I had been a former Democratic legislator, they would be happy to have me on the Board of Governors.”
