Emily Peek & Jala Davis / GNP contributors
ECU’s Board of Trustees has had its share of drama and ethics challenges.
Take 2020 for example. Two trustees offered to help get a student elected as the student government president because they thought she would vote their way on the Board of Trustees. At ECU the student government president also sits on the board.
When their scheme came out in public, the two trustees resigned from the board.
The Greenville News Project spent the last three months looking into how ECU trustees define ethics and apply ethics in their volunteer work as the university’s top policy makers. Out of 13 trustees, three responded to the GNP’s multiple requests for an interview.
The News Project found that the board has specific processes and training in place to ensure trustees stay on the right side of ethics. The three BOT members say the board takes its ethics seriously.
Cassie Burt, a trustee and the board’s secretary, said she and all the other trustees are dedicated to working ethically.
“First of all, I take my ethics very seriously. That is one of the reasons that I feel like we have such a good group dedicated on the Board of Trustees,” Burt said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen more dedicated people.”
BOT ethics, training
Without ethics, there can’t be a successful governing body, said ECU trustee Vince Smith, who also is chair of the board’s Audit Committee.
Each year each trustee completes state-mandated ethics training, Burt said, adding that it was the first thing she had to do as a new board member.
Burt said she completed the ethics course online, and that the UNC System tracks who completes it and who doesn’t among all the boards of trustees in the state’s public university system.
Any trustee who doesn’t do the ethics training will be removed from the board, Smith said.
Also, since November 2017, an ethics statement has been read before every board meeting. It reminds trustees “of their duty under the State Government Ethics Act to avoid conflicts of interest and appearances of conflict of interest.” It tells them that if they know have or may have a conflict of interest on any matter before the board, they should say so.
Smith said the reading of the ethics statement is an important aspect of every meeting, and trustees with conflicts should recuse themselves from voting on those issues.
If a trustee fails to recuse, Burt said, that member is potentially subject to removal. “It goes straight to the chancellor then to the Board of Governors and would probably assume that you'd be asked to step back,” she said.
The Board of Governors oversees all public universities in North Carolina.
Without people who believe in honesty and truth, government ethics cannot be successful, Smith said.
Defining ethics for government
The GNP reached out to several ethics experts, and one was Allan Tupper, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia. He said government ethics concerns the “most important” policies: conflict of interest.
Tupper said there should be an extent to which public officials should be prohibited and condemned from blurring their public duties with their private and financial duties. “It’s all about the money and the relationship between your wallet as a citizen and your duties as a public official,” he said.
Ethics in local government is essential, and public officials have a duty to serve those who elect them, said UNC Chapel Hill School of Law professor Michael Gerhardt.
Local government bodies—think city councils, school boards and county commissions—typically have their own ethics codes. Elected and appointed officials must adhere to the codes to earn the trust of the public.
The 2020 incident
For ECU’s Board of Trustees, ethics was a problem in 2020. It was apparent when it became public knowledge that trustees Phil Lewis and Robert Moore offered to provide political and financial support to a student if she would run for student government president.
Smith said he is not sure if the ECU board has taken measures to ensure something of the sort doesn’t happen again. He said when it comes to ethics, all of the rules, standards and practices that are in place today were in place in 2020 as well. They were just ignored back then.
“There is a vetting process that all trustees go through to ensure that we're bringing in people of quality and integrity, and with ethics,” Smith said. “When that process is not adhered to, then these kinds of things happen, in my opinion.”
Although the Board of Governors took no disciplinary actions against Lewis and Moore, they both resigned as ECU trustees.
Balance between trustee and student
Trustees keep the university, especially teachers and students, in mind when it comes time for them to make decisions for the university, Burt said.
It helps, she said, to have someone on the board who is both trustee and student. That is the role the Student Government Association president fills as a member of the board.
Current SGA President Ryan Bonnett said being the students’ voice on the board means using ethics to make decisions for students and the university and putting his personal views as a student aside.
Bonnett said that the other trustees look to him when it comes time to make decisions that will best benefit students, and to date, he has yet to run into a conflict of interest.
“It is vital to just always step back and see if you have anything to gain personally or financially from a decision that is made,” he said. “As issues come up, I am able to use my position to advocate for the students' voice.”
Bonnett gives updates about students at every board meeting, Burt said, and makes sure student opinions are heard.
The Greenville News Project made repeated efforts to contact ECU’s roster of trustees. Out of the 10 trustees who did not participate in this story, some replied to the News Project’s invitations but later declined interviews. Others did not respond at all.
Peek and Davis reported this story for the fall 2022 class, In-Depth Reporting.
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