A lawsuit filed Monday against the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and its board of trustees alleges that UNC broke state laws by hiding discussions about the hiring of football coach Bill Belichick, as well as conversations about potential conference realignment.
The lawsuit, filed in Orange County, North Carolina state court by former university provost Chris Clemens, isn’t solely about Belichick’s hiring or UNC’s conference realignment talks. Instead, it centers around alleged wrongdoing against Clemens, who argues that the board engaged in an effort to “punish him for ‘leaking’ closed-session information” to other faculty members regarding a meeting about tenure, and claims he was asked to resign as a result—which he did in May.
In his complaint, Clemens alleges three instances related to the UNC athletic department that he says demonstrated a “systematic misuse of closed sessions to hide policy debates from public view.” The complaint accuses the board of treating the North Carolina Open Meetings Law and the Public Records Law as “a suggestion.”
Most notably, Clemens alleges that on Dec. 12, 2024, the board called an “emergency meeting” that was illegally conducted as a closed session to discuss and approve of the hiring of Belichick. The board then held a public vote to affirm Belichick’s hiring and the terms of his contract.
The complaint also alleges that in November of 2023, the board conducted a closed session to compare the finances of UNC’s membership in the ACC to potential membership in the Big Ten or SEC. In May 2024, the board again convened behind closed doors “to debate conference realignment strategy and athletics department finances,” Clemens claims.
“Each episode follows the same pattern: the Board invokes a statutory exemption, enters closed session, then discusses broad policy or budget matters that must be debated publicly,” the complaint reads. “The Board compounds these violations by maintaining inadequate general accounts that prevent public understanding of what transpired.”
In a statement to Front Office Sports, UNC board of trustees chair Malcolm Turner called Clemens’s allegations “disappointing and inaccurate, not to mention a waste of taxpayer dollars, for which this former officer of the University shows no regard.”
