On Friday, the UNC System Board of Governors will select the next chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill. Earlier in the week, the Assembly reported that Lee Roberts, who has served as interim, is one of the finalists.
Roberts is a former member of the Board of Governors who was appointed to that role in 2021 by Phil Berger, the Senate President Pro-Tem. In 2022, Roberts donated $5000 to the North Carolina Senate Majority Fund and $1000 to the North Carolina Republican Party. A year later, he was named UNC’s Interim Chancellor. Previous UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellors have not made political donations in any substantial amount until they retired. (We checked!)
Among the reported income sources on Roberts’ mandatory 2021 state ethics forms is “other type of income” from Variety Wholesalers, Inc., which is owned by Art Pope, one of the most well-known Republican donors in the state who also serves on the Board of Governors. This was first reported by UNC undergraduates, after which Roberts told an online audience he served on the board of Variety Wholesalers. (Unlike other appointments, it is not listed on Roberts’ LinkedIn profile.)
It is not unusual for members of the Board of Governors to donate to politicians. In 2015, Sarah Ovaska reported that the 30 people then-vying for a seat on the University of North Carolina’s Board of Governors had donated more than $1 million dollars to state campaign accounts in the preceding decade.
That analysis is now a decade old, so we decided to repeat it. We looked at every member of the sitting Board of Governors and their close family members, and using publicly available data, analyzed all of their campaign contributions to NC lawmakers over the past 10 years. (Our complete methodology and full dataset are at the end of this post.)
Collectively, they’ve donated over $3.5 million dollars to lawmakers and campaigns over the past decade.
What’s the UNC System Board of Governors?
They are the sitting members of the governing board that set policies, select chancellors, and oversees the 17 campuses in the UNC system.
There are 25 sitting members of the UNC System Board of Governors, including one student representative (who, we’ll note, has never made a political contribution.) The N&O has previously reported on the makeup of the board.
Here’s what we found:
Largest donations went to Republicans
And they’re pretty large.
The North Carolina Republican Party ($479,962.95), Friends of Tim Moore ($309,750) and Philip Berger ($303,700) each received over $300,000 from sitting members of the Board of Governors since 2014. Current Board of Governors members also contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the North Carolina Senate Majority Fund ($158,300) Phil Berger Jr. ($42,850), an Associate Justice on the N.C. Supreme Court; Mark Robinson ($59,450) and Dan Forest ($96,492.55), who ran for governor against Roy Cooper.
Tim Moore is the Speaker of the NC House of Representatives, and has long taken an interest in UNC-Chapel Hill. Phil Berger is the Senate President Pro-Tem and considered the most powerful Republican in North Carolina. Both play a key role in appointing members of the Board of Governors.
As Bob Hall has noted, “Sen. Phil Berger and his Republican caucus use their special committee, called the NC Senate Majority Fund, as an exchange hub – it takes in large donations from senators’ campaigns and then spends the money to help other Senate candidates in tough races.”
Chair Murphy and family have donated over $300,000, primarily to Republicans
Wendy Floyd Murphy was recently elected Chair of the Board of Governors. On donation and state ethics forms, she lists her occupation as homemaker.
Murphy’s family runs one of the largest pig farming operations in North Carolina which has been the subject of NC DEQ investigations. They have made substantial donations over the past decade to Brent Jackson ($39,250) Tim Moore ($35,200), the North Carolina Republican Party ($20,600), the North Carolina Senate Majority Fund ($10,800), Phil Berger ($11,000) Mark Robinson ($14,600) and Steve Troxler ($22,000), the current North Carolina Commissioner of Agriculture.
Largest donors include Pope, Williford, Clark, Bradley, Ramsey, and Sloan
12 members of the Board of Governors have made over $100,000 in political contributions to NC candidates or committees over the past decade.
Kirk Bradley, who chairs the BOG’s Committee on Budget and Finance, and his wife have donated $39,400 to Tim Moore, $34,000 to Phil Berger, $20,400 to the North Carolina Republican Party, and $17,500 to the North Carolina Senate Majority Fund over the past decade. Total donations add up to $307,347.02.
Michael Williford and his wife have donated $66,700 to Tim Moore, $36,700 to Phil Berger, $25,000 to the North Carolina Senate Majority Fund, and $56,700 for state senator Wesley Meredith. Their total donations sum to $470,818.00.
Jimmy Clark, who owns a crane, rigging, and transportation company, and his wife have donated $354,359.30, almost all to Republicans, over the past decade. (His son has also gifted quite a bit; we omitted him from this analysis.) Donations include $56,500 to Phil Berger, $85,000 for the North Carolina Senate Majority Fund, and $11,400 to Phil Berger’s son, Phil Berger Jr. (Tim Moore has received $7,400.)
Art Pope, who was the subject of a 2011 Jane Mayer New Yorker piece and is perhaps the most well known Republican member of the Board of Governors, has unsurprisingly donated the most out of sitting BOG members over the past decade to the North Carolina Republican Party ($280,335.00) . But many of the donations in his household to other candidates have come through his wife, Katherine. She’s donated $10,200 to Tim Moore, $15,400 to Dale Folwell, and $11,600 to Jefferson Griffin, a conservative running for the state Supreme Court.
You can see all of our data here.
Methodology:
We looked up each individual Board of Governors member using their Statement of Economic Interest filed to the North Carolina State Ethics Commission. We then looked up each member and their spouse in the Transaction Search, performing multiple searches if a member used a nickname. We used property records to confirm that results were accurate. We omitted expenses and donations to a member’s own campaign if they ran for elected office and any loans that they gave to their own campaign. Our analysis is limited to August 7, 2014 – August 7, 2024. (There are many donations made before 2014, some of which are visible in the dataset, but we limited completed analysis to a decade.) You can see our complete dataset here. We created pivot tables to perform this analysis, and deleted street addresses before sharing the dataset publicly.
Many Board of Governors members have also made substantial contributions to federal candidates, which can be examined through the FEC. We omitted that for this analysis.
This analysis was performed by John Rees and Melody Kramer.