UNC Chapel Hill Trustee Blames Law Prof for Some Budget Woes

A member of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees blamed a politically outspoken faculty member for the state’s lackluster funding allocation for the university’s infrastructure budget.

The accusation came during a budget meeting Wednesday morning, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported. At the meeting, UNC Chapel Hill CFO Nate Knuffman showed the trustees a chart comparing capital project funding levels by institution within the UNC System between 2011 and 2027. Despite its standing as the state’s premier public research university, Knuffman said Chapel Hill only has the third-highest budget in the System, “less than half of NC State, and about two-thirds of [Eastern Carolina University].”

Although the trustees mulled a range of possibilities for the lower-than-desired budget for building repair and construction—maybe they’re not advocating hard enough at the State capitol in Raleigh, or perhaps< legislators are just ignoring them?—Trustee Jim Blaine, a political consultant and former chief of staff for Republican state Senate leader Phil Berger, zeroed in on one culprit: Gene Nichol, a professor at UNC School of Law who for decades has criticized the state’s Republican leadership.

“There’s a professor at UNC School of Law named Gene [Nichol]. I will lay in the road to defend his First Amendment right to say whatever he wants whenever he wants,” Blaine said. But “we are fools if we do not think that his exercise of his First Amendment rights does not end up representing to the legislature what they think every single person on this campus believes about them.” They see the school as a “bunch of people that hate” them.

Blaine is far from Nichol’s only critic. The professor’s disdain for the political machine that controls North Carolina is so well-known that The Assembly profiled Nichol in 2023, concluding that his tirades against Republicans “come at a price to the university,” while “even some who agree with him wish he’d tone it down.”