One ECU trustee resigns, another is censured after they meddled in student election
One East Carolina University trustee resigned and another was censured Friday after they were recorded offering to help finance a student body president campaign on the Greenville campus.
Phil Lewis, who had been appointed to the ECU Board of Trustees by the UNC System Board of Governors, offered his resignation. It was accepted effective immediately.
The UNC board voted to censure ECU trustee Robert Moore. It was the strongest action the board could take against Moore because he was appointed to the ECU trustees by the state legislature. The legislature would have to decide to remove him.
“I’m incredibly disappointed,” Board of Governors Chairman Randy Ramsey said during a specially called meeting Friday to address the turmoil among the ECU trustees. “Personally, if I could remove the entire board today, I probably would.”
Ramsey expressed frustration that he and some other UNC board members felt at having to repeatedly address the personal sniping by members of East Carolina University’s governing body.
Ramsey said the Board of Governors would ensure that ECU’s board finds a way to work together on behalf of students, faculty, parents and taxpayers “if we have to replace every single trustee on there.”
“This has got to end,” he said.
Trustees met with potential ECU candidate
Lewis and Moore met with Shelby Hudson in January to gauge her interest in running for ECU student body president for a second time, according to transcript of the meeting. They offered to donate to her campaign and help her win the election in exchange for her future support as a voting member of the ECU Board of Trustees. The goal was to shift the ECU trustee board’s leadership, according to the transcript.
Hudson recorded the lunch meeting and handed it over to ECU’s general counsel, who alerted ECU board chairman Vern Davenport. After discussing the situation with a few trustees and UNC System leaders, Davenport asked Lewis and Moore to meet with them, Davenport said. That meeting didn’t happen. Davenport told them to resign. They refused, so Davenport filed a complaint to the UNC System Board of Governors.
ECU trustees Davenport, Fielding Miller and Vince Smith said Lewis and Moore violated board policy in the “Duties, Responsibilities, and Expectations of Board Members” and possibly the North Carolina State Government Ethics Act. They asked for Lewis and Moore to be removed from the ECU Board of Trustees, a request that was supported by the ECU Faculty Senate and students who signed an online petition.
Moore and Lewis argued that they acted with good intentions and in the best interest of ECU. Moore also said that meeting with potential student government candidates is “business as usual,” particularly when there’s a divided board.
But Davenport and other ECU trustees say the efforts to influence a student government election and trade favors for board votes is a clear violation of policy, ethics and leadership.
The governance committee of the UNC Board of Governors discussed the complaint at a meeting on Wednesday, but deferred action to the full board.
ECU trustees attended Friday’s meeting, along with more than a dozen members of the university’s student government association, including that group’s president Colin Johnson. Johnson was the subject of unflattering remarks by Lewis in the conversation with Hudson, according to the transcript.
Hudson, reading from a prepared statement at Friday’s meeting, recounted the events and said she felt “intimidated” by Lewis.
‘Sick to my stomach’
Also at the meeting, Board of Governors member Marty Kotis III quoted from a transcript of Lewis’s conversation with Hudson and from the UNC ethics policy. After a while, he stopped his recitation.
“I don’t think I can get through the rest of this because I’m sick to my stomach,” Kotis said.
Several other board members weighed in, most in agreement with Kotis.
Board member Tom Fetzer was notably at odds, recommending censure for Lewis and suggesting that the Board of Governors itself was partly to blame for the dysfunction of the ECU board.
Before the board had a chance to vote on Kotis’s motion to remove Lewis, an aggrieved Lewis asked to address the board.
“This has been very, very painful for me,” he said, and then told the board he wanted to “clear up” a couple of things. Despite a Facebook message from Hudson that indicated that he had first reached out to her by text on the evening of Jan. 5, he told the board, “I didn’t set the meeting up. Miss Hudson set the meeting up.”
He also said that Davenport had emailed him on a Saturday morning after learning of the meeting with Hudson and told Lewis that if he didn’t resign in 90 minutes, Davenport would send a letter to the Board of Governors asking that Lewis be removed.
“The due process has been so wrong with this,” Lewis said. “Everybody has been found guilty before you really could find out what the facts are.”
Lewis said that while he felt the complaint about his actions had not been handled properly, he loves ECU and was offering his resignation.
He then addressed Kotis, saying, “One day, if you ever get taped and you get set up, I hope it works out for you.”
(North Carolina law allows a conversation to be recorded with only one party in the conversation agreeing to the recording.)
About a dozen ECU students who attended the meeting said they were relieved that Lewis had resigned as a trustee.
“They took advantage of the entire student population,” said Craig Cohen, a senior from Goldsboro. “It’s a clear violation of the ethics policy.”
ECU student government candidates started campaigning Wednesday, and voting takes place Feb. 19-21. Hudson is not at ECU this semester and is not a candidate.
ECU’s student government is now requiring candidates to report all campaign contributions or offered campaign contributions. Students will be immediately disqualified if they accept a campaign contribution by a trustee. Candidates will also be required to sign an ethics statement.
Previous issue with Lewis and Moore
The incident is the latest display of the deep divide among ECU trustees and the power struggle consuming their board. And it isn’t the first time Lewis and Moore have been accused of violating board policy and ethics guidelines.
The UNC System board’s Committee on University Governance heard about those divisions while questioning the ECU trustees about the incident at a special meeting Wednesday.
“If you ask me why it is that I don’t sweep this under the rug it’s because of the consistency of that behavior,” Davenport said at the Wednesday meeting. “That pattern of that behavior is what’s dividing our board.”
Last year, former ECU interim chancellor Dan Gerlach resigned from his position after photos and videos of him out drinking at bars near campus spread online.
Though the UNC System launched an investigation, Lewis and Moore conducted their own probe into the matter, suggesting that it might be a setup. They also had a confidential meeting with Gerlach before he was interviewed by the UNC System investigators. They also refused to cooperate completely with investigators in providing text messages and other material on their phones.
“If we want a unified board this conduct has to stop,” Davenport said at Wednesday’s meeting, “and we have to fulfill the obligations of adhering to policy and understanding our ethical obligations.”
The ECU Board of Trustees will meet Feb. 14 in Greenville to discuss its search for a new permanent chancellor.
The Board of Governors’ next regular meeting is Feb. 20-21. Ramsey told members they could expect to discuss the ECU board again then.
This story was originally published February 7, 2020 at 11:43 AM with the headline "One ECU trustee resigns, another is censured after they meddled in student election."
