Conservative political donor Art Pope will join UNC Board of Governors

The Senate approved a controversial pick Thursday for the UNC Board of Governors: Conservative businessman and political donor Art Pope.

Senate leaders filed a resolution late Wednesday with their choice to replace former Sen. Bob Rucho, a Republican who resigned from the UNC board earlier this week. Pope owns the discount store chain Variety Wholesalers, and he served as state budget director under Republican Gov. Pat McCrory.

Pope came to the legislature Thursday to answer questions from lawmakers and describe his goals for the UNC System, should he be given a seat on the board. He said he was in the legislature for economic downturns in 1991 and 2001, so he has pertinent experience to bring to the university system now that another budget shortfall is looming due to coronavirus.

“I enjoyed working with people who held diverse views and were committed to the betterment of our state institutions,” Pope said, speaking of his past roles in state government and politics.

Pope’s nomination easily passed a Senate committee Thursday afternoon, and later that evening the full Senate voted to put him on the board, 32-15. All Republicans voted for him, as did a few Democrats.

“I believe Mr. Pope will be an excellent choice to go over there, with his experience in business,” said Sen. Brent Jackson, a Sampson County Republican who sponsored the bill nominating Pope.

In recent years Pope has personally given hundreds of thousands of dollars to state and national Republican politicians and political groups. Other groups linked to him have spent millions more on conservative political goals.

He’s become a bogeyman in some liberal circles, largely because of his work behind the GOP’s successes in 2010, when Republicans gained control of the state legislature for the first time in more than a century.

“You’ve got to be (expletive) kidding me,” tweeted Sen. Sam Searcy, a Holly Springs Democrat, after Pope’s nomination was announced Wednesday. “This is an insult to the UNC system and what we get with a Republican majority bought and paid for by Art Pope.”

Pope said Thursday that despite the vitriol directed his way from some on the left, he thinks he actually has been able to get along well enough with Democrats in the past.

“I would note that most of the critics are ones who have never met me,” Pope said in an interview Thursday. “I always say I get too much credit or blame, depending on your perspective, for various things that happened in North Carolina.”

Sen. Jeff Jackson, a Charlotte Democrat, said that “among all hypothetical scenarios, this is the most controversial pick I could imagine.”

But former N.C. Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr, a Republican, tweeted that Pope is a “really good choice. Art genuinely cares about the greater good of the UNC System and will work hard to help it through these difficult times. Please keep an open mind.”

One of the Senate Democrats who voted for Pope Thursday was Democratic Sen. Dan Blue, the top Democratic leader. They previously served together in the legislature, including during the early 1990s when Blue was the Speaker of the House and Pope was part of the then-minority party.

Pope’s term on the Board of Governors will run through June 30, 2021.

University budget crunch looming

North Carolina state government is facing a more than $4 billion budget hole, due to the economic downturn caused by COVID-19, and it’s unclear if the legislature will have to make cuts in the future to balance the budget.

When Pope addressed the Senate committee Thursday he mostly stayed away from politics and stuck to technical details, like discussing what he thought should be the priorities for construction funding in the near future.

Hinting at potential spending changes in the future, Pope also said that a few universities like UNC-Chapel Hill — his alma mater — have large endowments and other outside sources of revenue, but that’s not true of all 16 UNC System schools.

“That should be taken into consideration when you allocate your general fund dollars,” he told the committee.

Later, in an interview, he said he won’t necessarily suggest cutting some of UNC’s state funding, but “we may have no choice.”

He also said that if universities have to make hard decisions on personnel spending, he would like to see the focus first on helping non-tenured professors, then tenured professors and lastly administrators. Across the state and the nation, he said, university bureaucracies have become overly inflated at the expense of the employees in the classrooms.

“I think priority needs to be given to faculty,” Pope said.

That was in response to questioning from Democratic Sen. Gladys Robinson of Greensboro, who — although she maintained her skepticism of Pope — said she liked hearing him say that.

“This is a very good answer so far,” she said.

Outside the legislature, an online petition was circulating against his being named to the board, laying out various complaints, including his push in the 1970s to stop UNC-Chapel Hill students from banning KKK leader David Duke from campus.

Pope defended his actions in a letter to the Daily Tar Heel in 2017, after the controversy had resurfaced, saying he was simply standing up for the First Amendment.

“I stand by the quote attributed to Voltaire, ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’” Pope wrote.