UNC Board: Not A Winning Team

This is Brian Thornburg.

I don’t know about you, but I love cheering for UNC.  The way our men’s and women’s basketball teams played this season was enough to make you very proud to be a Tar Heel. In fact, most UNC teams are excellent and usually compete for national honors every season.

But there’s one UNC team that isn’t up for any honors right now. That team is YOUR UNC Board of Governors.

The Board of Governors has made a lot of news in the last couple of months. First came the sudden firing of UNC System President Tom Ross back in January, apparently for no other reason than that he belonged to the wrong political party. Next came your UNC Board’s closing of three UNC centers for QUOTE “cost savings” UNQUOTE, even though the Center on Poverty here in Chapel Hill took virtually no money from the state budget to operate. Most of us believe that your UNC Board closed the center to punish the outspoken center director who dared to speak truth to power and criticize our current governor.

This next item on your UNC Board’s accomplishment list didn’t make as much news, but it’s one that explains a lot of this previous behavior. Just a couple of weeks ago, your State Senate elected eight members of the board to new four-year terms. Now, it’s bad enough that your UNC Board is overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly Republican, and overwhelmingly contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates – but your State Senate elected Thom Goolsby to your UNC Board.

That’s FORMER State Senator Thom Goolsby, who resigned his seat early last August. He had just been banned by the Secretary of State from continuing his business as a financial advisor because customers were complaining about lost money and being kept in the dark about investment strategies. This is the same guy who referred to the weekly Raleigh protests led by Reverend William Barber as “Moron Mondays.” Now Thom will be making policy decisions for your UNC System.

So I don’t know about you, but this team that’s in charge of the UNC System is not one I’ll be doing any cheering for – until they get some better players.