In 2016, Pat McCrory, the departing Republican governor, signed legislation stripping his Democratic successor, Roy Cooper, of the power to make appointments to campus-level boards, resulting in near-total Republican legislative control of the university system.
The next year, the Board of Governors moved to ban Chapel Hill’s law school from participating in litigation, ultimately voting to ban its Center for Civil Rights from taking on new clients, many of whom were indigent.
The report also blasts legislative meddling in the appointments of university leadership, including what it calls a “highly unorthodox” method for chancellor searches.
It says that political interference played a role in the 2021 selection of Darrell T. Allison as chancellor at Fayetteville State University, one of six state institutions that serve mostly students of color. Mr. Allison, a former school choice lobbyist, was added to the list, the report says, though he was not picked by the search committee and critics said he lacked credentials.
But the report’s most damning criticism involves issues of race.
It chronicles the story of Carol Folt, the former chancellor at Chapel Hill who now heads the University of Southern California. Under pressure from the board to find a place for Silent Sam, which had been torn down by protesters, Ms. Folt announced instead that she was resigning and removing the statue’s remains.
The board then agreed to pay the Sons of Confederate Veterans $2.5 million to build an off-campus site for the statue. One graduate student tweeted that the university was giving the statue “back to the racists.”
The agreement was overturned by a court.
The report also criticized the university’s handling of a job offer to Ms. Hannah-Jones, a writer for The Times Magazine and leader of the 1619 Project, which sought to reframe the country’s history by putting the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the national narrative.