UNC board members tells male graduates, buy a nice ring for a woman, and both will increase in value

A Jesse Helms protege shared his Ozzie-and-Harriet worldview with UNC-Wilmington graduates at their graduation last weekend.

Tossing the one-minute welcome the university gave him to read, UNC governor Tom Fetzer, 64, launched into a six-minute lecture on "topics including continuing education, personal advice on finances, and technology," The Wilmington Star-News reported.

In his off-the-cuff remarks, Fetzer offered a view of life that would have made the late actor Doris Day weep with joy:

Let me just cut to the chase young ladies, there are only two things in this world you should borrow money for. Your continuing education and a house. Pay cash for everything else because it’s a depreciating asset and you will end up owing more than it is worth. And that is the road to ruin. Those are the parents clapping. Young men, I will add one thing to the list for which you may borrow money. A diamond ring. Because it will appreciate, and so will she.

Elected mayor of Raleigh in 1993, Fetzer spent six years seeking endless tax cuts, privatization of city services and arguing that arts funding was a waste of money. He then became a powerful lobbyist, land speculator, and political consultant to losing presidential candidates Elizabeth Dole, Newt Gingrich, and Marco Rubio.

He was elected state GOP chair in 2009 and, with gobs of money from dime store billionaire Art Pope, led the party to win control of the North Carolina General Assembly and gerrymander themselves into power for the next decade. The legislature, busy stacking the UNC board of governors with Republican pols while downsizing it to make the old white men feel more comfortable, appointed him in 2017.

Within a couple of months, Fetzer drafted and sent a letter chiding board chair Louis Bissette and system president Margaret Spellings for insufficient protection of a Confederate memorial on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus without showing it to 13 members.

He then joined a cabal of UNC board members to call for the board to create its own staff and move away from Chapel Hill to run the university system directly.

"The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes but to which no one objects,” he said, reading Thatcher’s definition to the board on Sept. 7. “The process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead.” 

“Divisions in this board, if respectful, will be very helpful,” he said. “Raging internal conflict is a long-held American tradition, and I think even the casual student of history would have to agree that nothing great in this country occurred without a raging, raucous, robust, passionate debate beforehand.”

In 2018, Fetzer launched a private investigation of a candidate for chancellor of Western Carolina University and circulated the results to the board. He explained,

Upon reviewing the WCU candidate’s 50-page curriculum vitae, using an obscure and highly sophisticated investigative tool called Google, it took me all of two minutes to confirm an apparent misrepresentation by the candidate on page 1 of the person’s resume.

Then Fetzer hired a PI friend to investigate the candidate, who withdrew from consideration after having been vetted by two consulting firms and presented by president Spellings for approval. Fetzer admitted he had been recommended for the job himself and that his position on the board gave him access to the personal information he exploited.

Spellings, who got the presidency in 2015 after the board ousted a respected but Democratic incumbent, lasted only three years as the General Assembly turned the board over with new governors from the increasingly radical end of the state GOP and the legislature itself. She resigned n 2018.

In 2009, Fetzer- then 54- filed suit against a talk show host who forwarded a letter suggested he was gay.

Tom Fetzer, who served as mayor from 1993 to 1999, is running to be chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party. He said an anonymous letter was sent to GOP leaders claiming that he is a homosexual. 

Fetzer said Curtis Wright, a radio and television talk show host in Wilmington, forwarded the letter to the officials. Fetzer sued Wright and the stations where he works in May 2009. 

"I am not gay – never have been, never will be. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support any of the scurrilous allegations made in the anonymous attack on me," Fetzer wrote in a letter to Republicans. "I will spare no cost or hardship in defending my good name. I intend to vigorously pursue legal action against any and all who spread these lies."

Fetzer married- " in a small wedding"- four months later.