The former provost at UNC-Chapel Hill has filed a legal complaint against the school.
Chris Clemens says the University’s Board of Trustees conducted a pattern of open session violations around faculty tenure votes and communicated secretly so as not to create public records.
Clemens’s complaint also alleges he was forced out of his position after telling faculty of the secret Board deliberations.
University officials say they do not have a comment on the complaint at this time.
“The core episode here is straightforward,” reads the complaint. “The Board entered closed session under the ‘personnel’ exemption ostensibly to consider tenure candidates. Once the doors were closed, however, the discussion turned to tenure as a policy— its existential value to UNC, its financial implications, and whether to defer an entire slate.”
“By debating tenure policy in secret and acting on that secret debate, the Board crossed the statutory boundary and violated the Open Meetings Law.”
The Board discussions occurred in March of this year. Instead of voting on the slate of tenure candidates when it came up on the agenda, the Board instead went into closed session and discussed tenure more broadly, including the “existential value and global costs of tenure.” They then did not vote on the tenure candidates in open session and deferred the vote to a later meeting, an unusual step.
Clemens says he informed deans and faculty about the Trustees’ tenure positions after the no-vote meeting.
According to the complaint, Board members then began communicating outside of open meetings, using text messages and Signal, a message app that deleted messages after reading, in an effort to punish him.
It began when Director and Dean Jed Atkins of the School for Civic Life and Leadership relayed Clemens’s comments to the faculty to Board Chair John Preyer through Signal. The complaint alleges that Adkins and Board members frequently use the app to avoid creating public records.
Clemens says he was then forced to resign by UNC-Chapel Hill leadership for “inappropriate disclosure of the closed session discussion.” The resignation was effective on May 16.
Editor’s note: John Preyer is a member of WUNC’s Board of Directors. You can read more here about WUNC’s organizational structure. WUNC maintains editorial independence in all news coverage, including stories involving UNC
