How Phil Berger Shaped North Carolina’s Universities

For 15 years, the North Carolina Senate has been led by a man who cares more about education than just about any other policy area. That may have come to an end Tuesday.

With all precincts reporting, Phil Berger trails his Republican primary challenger Sam Page by two votes. The race may not be called for weeks, but it’s clear that Berger, the state’s most powerful politician since he became majority leader of the Senate in 2011, has lost support from much of the GOP base in his district around Rockingham County. Millions in campaign spending and an endorsement from Donald Trump couldn’t save Berger from a serious challenge.

Higher ed didn’t factor into the primary campaign at all; Berger’s ill-fated backing of casinos seems to have played the largest role in galvanizing opponents in his district. But two of his signature higher education policies, NCInnovation and a new children’s hospital launched as a partnership between Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have received pushback from other Republicans, including his state House counterpart, Speaker Destin Hall.

Whether Berger ultimately wins or loses his primary, his allies and former staffers hold influential roles throughout the UNC System. GOP leaders don’t seem poised to loosen the oversight of universities that has been a hallmark of the Rockingham County Republican’s time as Senate leader. But with his sway over the GOP apparatus weakened, it’s not clear whether his efforts to encourage higher ed’s economic role in the state will receive the same support.

“It’s two different visions of education that are butting heads,” said Jenna Robinson, president of the Martin Center, a conservative higher ed think tank. “One is the really expansive vision that higher education should be very proactive in economic development. And the other vision is that higher education should focus on teaching students and on basic research.”

Berger didn’t respond to a request for comment.

People Power

The first in his family to graduate from college, Berger painted apartments to work his way through law school. That background made Berger especially interested in education, said Pat Ryan, his former spokesperson, who called the university system “the most important piece of North Carolina state government, at least as it relates to the economy and to the workforce.”

Influencing the university’s governing boards is one of Berger’s primary tools for shaping them.

“It always had a focus on not necessarily your run-of-the-mill academic who spent a career writing papers and doing research within an institution,” Ryan said. “They’re people who generally have a business background. And that’s intentional.”

In many cases, the people who ended up in influential positions in higher ed are also Republican operatives and donors—even Berger’s own staff.

Members of the Board of Governors, which oversees the entire UNC System, are appointed by the General Assembly, half from each chamber. Fourteen of the 24 people currently serving have personally donated a collective $327,000 to Berger since 2011, according to an Assembly analysis of state campaign finance data. That figure doesn’t include the $31,500 donated by the family of board chair Wendy Murphy, nor the $52,600 donated by Reynolds American and its political action committees, where board member Mark Holton serves as general counsel.

Over the same time period, 21 Board of Governors members have donated nearly $7 million to North Carolina Republican causes overall. Murphy’s family added an additional $422,000 and Reynolds American an additional $727,500.

“To get appointed, you have got to pass a political litmus test of fealty, an ideological smell test,” said Roger Perry, a former UNC-Chapel Hill trustee and co-founder of Coalition for Carolina, which has objected to Republican “interference” in the university system. 

At least seven former Berger staff members are now in influential higher ed roles as well. One former chief of staff is general counsel for the UNC System, while another is a UNC-CH trustee. Three other staffers are vice presidents.

Even some recent chancellor appointments included political insiders, with former lobbyist Darrell Allison taking charge of Fayetteville State University in 2021 and Lee Roberts, who was the budget director for Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, helming UNC-CH since 2024. Berger’s Senate named both men to the Board of Governors before they stepped into their current roles.

Since Republicans took over the legislature, the Board of Governors and boards of trustees have sought to exert their authority over the universities, prompting fights over staffing, priorities, and academic direction.

UNC System President Tom Ross was pushed out by the Board of Governors in 2015, and Margaret Spellings, who served as George W. Bush’s education secretary before being appointed UNC System president in 2016, was pushed to resign after the board split into factions over her leadership. UNC-CH Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz exited in 2023 after conflicts with trustees and governors.

In 2017, the Board of Governors forced a civil rights law clinic to close. A disagreement among the UNC-CH trustees over giving tenure to journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who authored the 1619 Project about the impact of slavery, became national news. The same board sparked another fight about tenure last summer. And the Board of Governors began rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion policies as Donald Trump and other conservatives turned on such programs.

Berger’s supporters say complaints of interference are a sign that the governing boards are providing oversight and accountability that didn’t exist before.

“Historically, these positions had been a little bit more ceremonial, where people were kind of a rubber stamp,” said Marty Kotis, who Berger appointed to the Board of Governors in 2013 and the UNC-CH Board of Trustees in 2021. 

The appointees that came in after Berger took control changed that culture, he added, saying Berger and former state Sen. Trudy Wade approached him about joining the board in 2013 because they wanted someone “with common sense” who would help run the system like they would their own company.

Quiet Money

Major program cuts at UNC Greensboro and UNC Asheville, plus the UNC System’s efforts to cut hundreds of administrative jobs, led to complaints that the legislature was trying to gut programs, particularly in the liberal arts, that were out of favor.

But higher ed funding has gone up over Berger’s tenure, from $3.7 billion in 2011 to $5.6 billion in 2025, according to an Assembly analysis of data from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. However, North Carolina fell from having the fifth-highest per capita spending on higher ed to the ninth, given increases elsewhere. 

The investments include transformative programs like NC Promise, an affordability initiative Berger championed starting in 2016 that now costs roughly $90 million a year. It slashes the tuition at four UNC System schools to $500 a semester. 

When it was first proposed, liberals balked. The civil rights activist Rev. William Barber II, then president of the NAACP’s North Carolina chapter, said it would “drain and bankrupt” the schools, the AP reported.

Instead, NC Promise was paired with substantial capital investments, turning around struggling regional campuses like the historically Black Elizabeth City State University. 

“In many ways, I believe Senator Berger and the leadership at the General Assembly got it exactly right with NC Promise,” Allison, FSU’s chancellor, wrote in a recent email to The Assembly, saying 80% of the university’s students come from economically distressed North Carolina counties. “NC Promise provides every North Carolinian, regardless of their economic status or zip code, the opportunity to receive a quality UNC System degree at one of its four designated institutions.”

Kotis argued that the targeted cuts at specific campuses and programs have allowed the state to invest in policies like NC Promise while also reducing the percentage of students who take out college loans from 62% to 48%.

“To sum it up in one sentence, the perspective that was missing from the room was the people of the state,” he said. “Sometimes the plumbers and the electricians and the hairdressers that are footing the bill for the university get forgotten.”

But some of Berger’s other pet projects have been deeply controversial among the state’s conservatives. The most serious disagreement has been over NCInnovation, a private nonprofit that received $500 million of state money to try to launch start-ups out of university research projects. Republicans like donor Art Pope and members of the state House opposed it, arguing that it represented government interference with the free market and wasn’t a good use of taxpayer dollars.

Before this year’s budget process stalled, the Senate seemed set to claw back that funding. The Senate would have appropriated NCInnovation $25 million a year and moved $400 million of its funding to another major Berger-backed project, a proposed children’s hospital jointly run by UNC-CH and Duke University. But House Republicans questioned that project, too.

“Duke and UNC have a lot of money,” Speaker Hall said in September. “Our members are asking the question of why is the state sending this money to two entities that already have a ton of it for a project the state may not necessarily need.”

Hall’s budget draft would have moved the money to Hurricane Helene recovery in western North Carolina instead.

At stake in the disagreement is a foundational question about the purpose of higher ed.

While Berger bet big to use universities for economic development, others wanted to limit higher ed funding to traditional educational activities. 

“Business investments should be voluntary choices made by market participants who willingly risk their own capital,” Brian Balfour, senior vice president of the conservative John Locke Foundation, wrote in a Carolina Journal piece about NCInnovation.

Robinson said the two visions of higher education, as expansive economic development or more limited teaching and research, have always coexisted in the Republican coalition. But at a time when conservatives are rife with internal conflict—over immigration, foreign policy, and populist economic programs—the tension may be more apparent. Which means that, should Page’s slimmest of primary victories survive the coming electoral wrangling, it’s not clear whether Berger’s replacement as Senate leader will share his vision of higher ed’s role in the state.

Page, the Rockingham County sheriff known for his anti-immigration stance and cowboy hat, said next to nothing about higher ed throughout the primary. His campaign website doesn’t even mention it.