June 3, 2025 Press Conference
Millennial Campus Press Conference Presentation
Most of us heard about Millennial Campuses for the first time earlier this year, after we found out that this beloved urban forest had been designated part of one. We also learned that this Millennial Campus designation gives UNCA the power to do whatever they want with it, with no input from the community — not the neighborhood, not the city, not the county.
So we started learning more about Millennial Campuses, and the more we learned, the more alarmed we became. Put briefly, Millennial Campuses have a little something for everyone to hate — they take decision-making and oversight away from local communities and vest them in political appointees in Raleigh; they use public resources to unfairly compete with private business; and they put our educational institutions in the dubious position of trying to promote economic growth rather than learning.
I’ll talk more about all those points in a moment, but the top-level takeaway is that Millennial Campuses are an increasingly big part of how the UNC system understands its mission, and that’s bad news for pretty much everyone in the state except rich real estate developers.
First, though, I want to back up a bit and look at how we got here.
To understand what Millennial Campuses are, we need to go back to a 1939 North Carolina law called the Umstead Act that restricts the state’s ability to compete with private businesses and taxpayers. That law explicitly forbids the government of North Carolina from:
directly or indirectly selling goods in competition with citizens;
rendering services to the public that are ordinarily provided by private businesses;
leasing space in a state owned or operated building for purposes of selling goods or rendering services in competition with private business;
contracting with anyone to sell goods or render services in competition with private business.
Pretty cut and dried, right?
The state seemed to think so, too, and the Umstead Act was seen as a powerful brake on the government's actions for decades after it became law — in 1973, for instance, the legislature had to carve out a specific exemption to allow UNC schools to run campus stores, and that exemption specifically forbade them from competing with local merchants and restricted sales to faculty, students and their families.
But that separation between UNC and private enterprise started to blur in 1984 when then-governor Jim Hunt masterminded the purchase of 355 acres as a gift to NC State in order to develop what was hailed as a “new kind of research, innovation and public-private partnership campus” that would promote “multidisciplinary collaboration among students, faculty, and researchers, as well as corporate, governmental, and institutional partners.”
NC State named this project the Centennial Campus, and it wound up being pretty successful as a moneymaker for the University — today, there are more than 70 industry, government and nonprofit partners leasing space on the campus, including a Marriott hotel.
As the Centennial Campus grew, the tension between its mission and the Umstead Act grew as well, until 1997, when the legislature decided to remove any ambiguity and amended the Umstead Act to explicitly exempt the Centennial Campus.
That brings us to 2000, when the legislature rolled the public-private campus model out to the entire UNC system, passing the Millennial Campus Act, which gives UNC’s unelected Board of Governors the power to designate any part of any UNC property a “Millennial Campus” that is then completely exempt from the Umstead Act.
And that’s not all. In addition to giving schools free rein to compete with private businesses (so long as they do it on a Millennial Campus), the act also gives the Board of Governors sweeping authority to buy, sell and develop land on Millennial Campuses, as well as issue self-liquidating bonds to finance those actions, all without the advice or approval of the legislature, the governor or the Council of State — traditional safeguards to ensure our public schools use their resources for the public good.
Instead, this new system of Millennial Campuses is accountable only to itself: The sole reporting requirement schools must meet for their Millennial Campus developments is a short yearly submission to the Board of Governors that briefly summarizes construction, lease agreements and financials.
The development of these Millennial Campuses reflects an increasing preoccupation with “entrepreneurship” on the part of UNC’s leadership, and not just in the sense of encouraging graduates to start new businesses — it extends to the idea that UNC and its administrators should be actively seeking out the highest “return” on university assets, thinking like a business and taking risks to improve that return rather than safeguarding their resources as public assets. Millennial Campuses are envisioned as zones where this university entrepreneurship can take full wing, unencumbered by the Umstead Act or any real popular oversight.
The positive spin on this is that the government is encouraging UNC schools to find ways to earn revenue and make themselves more attractive to students without spending taxpayer money — in addition to those self-liquidating bonds I mentioned earlier, which are secured against Millennial Campus revenue rather than being guaranteed by the state, these developments are usually financed with a mix of monies from the university’s endowment and foundation, as well as from the private developers they team up with.
So for example, suppose a UNC school wants more student housing, but it can’t get the funds it needs from Raleigh, and it's unwilling (or unable) to issue more debt on its own authority. If the school doesn’t have a designated Millennial Campus, its options are limited to raising the funds itself through its foundation and endowment, or continuing to lobby the state for the money it needs.
With a Millennial Campus designation, it’s a different story. In that case, the school can attract a developer with the promise of a cheap, long-term ground lease, subsidized funds for construction and ownership of the housing once it's finished. The developer usually has to put up some money of its own, but once the dorm is done, the developer has a decades-long lease — ~90 years is usual — and ownership of a valuable, revenue-generating building. The university, meanwhile, gets a portion of that revenue, plus new student housing, all without having to spend taxpayer funds.
What’s wrong with Millennial Campuses?
Despite the purported upsides, there are a few big problems with Millennial Campuses:
Lack of local oversight: There’s a reason state law gives cities and counties broad powers to determine what can be built and how in their jurisdictions — those governments represent the sovereignty of the people living in those places and are capable of being responsive to the people’s wants and needs in a way unelected officials in Raleigh aren’t. But the Millennial Campus Act gives the Board of Governors the power to do whatever they want to Millennial Campus land, regardless of what people actually going to the school or living in the community want. For instance, over at Western Carolina, a Millennial Campus dorm project a few years ago racked up dozens of environmental violations and caused a mudslide that damaged student housing, and neither the city, the county, nor WCU itself were able to do anything to hold the developer to account.
And in fact, even that broad power doesn’t seem to be enough: Certain legislators in Raleigh are currently trying to eliminate what little oversight remains, with provisions inserted into the current budget bill that would completely eliminate any city or county control over UNC-led development in Buncombe and Watauga counties, where UNCA and App State are located.
Unfair competition: The North Carolina constitution is very clear: article one reads in part “all government…is instituted solely for the good of the whole.” So public means should always be turned toward public ends, not used to compete against taxpayers and undercut their livelihoods for the benefit of rich, connected individuals. But Millennial Campus developments give private businesses located on them a number of unfair advantages over their competitors:
They don’t have to pay property tax on the value of the government-owned land they’re situated on
Their long-term leases are usually significantly below market rate
Their building costs are often heavily subsidized, either with money from the university’s foundation or endowment, or with tax-exempt bonds issued by the Board of Governors
Why should a particular private developer get the advantage of land tax exemptions, favorable lease terms and construction subsidies when its competitors don’t? Why should land that was purchased by or donated to the state for the public good be given to a hotel or retailer or tech company to use for private profit? It’s a rotten business when the government starts putting its weight behind private, profit-seeking individuals, and our public universities — rightly considered one of the great prides of this state — should have no part in it.
Murky financials: There are provisions in the Millennial Campus Act that silo revenue from Millennial Campus projects into dedicated trusts, in theory preventing schools from using their public-private partnerships as slush funds. But as we’ve touched on, funds for Millennial Campus development are usually a big jumble of public and private monies from different sources, and outside oversight of all this spending is essentially nonexistent. So together with the endowments and foundations, Millennial Campuses are another way for our public institutions to escape accountability for how they are spending money.
It… doesn’t really work: Despite the relative success of NC State’s Centennial Campus as a commercial landlord, the track record of Millennial Campus development over the last two decades has not been great. In fact, the kinds of shenanigans we were talking about at Western Carolina are one of the better cases — at least that dorm got built, even if it took a hill and some houses out in the process. Many of these projects haven’t come through at all, with Eastern Carolina University in Greenville and UNC Greensboro both having announced big Millennial Campus projects in 2019 that have repeatedly stalled, with virtually no work being done. It’s easy to imagine that happening here, such that the woods are clear-cut just before a private partner flakes out, leaving us with a big muddy scar that the school never builds over.
What’s up with UNCA’s Millennial Campus?
That brings us back to UNCA and its Millennial Campus. UNCA requested and received Millennial Campus designation for 210 acres of land surrounding its existing campus in 2021, and the plans presented to the Board of Governors in order to get this designation included a performing arts center, a Lifelong Learning Institute and an executive leadership center.
None of those projects advanced beyond vague hopes, and the University did nothing else with its designation for nearly half a decade.
Then, with the sudden invasion of heavy machinery in the woods this January, it appeared the school was moving forward with its development plans.
But what plans are those?
We’re now in month six of the University claiming, on the one hand, that they have no concrete plans for the woods, and on the other, that the woods will definitely be developed. We’ve heard rumors of everything from student housing to a combination soccer stadium/hotel/conference center. But to our certain knowledge, the University has not made any effort to get community input on any plan it might be entertaining, and any officials, elected or not, that they have shared their plans with have so far chosen to stay silent.
And ultimately, this is our request: that the University of North Carolina Asheville take seriously its constitutional obligation to use its resources openly and for the public good, rather than secretively, for the benefit of private individuals.
These woods were purchased with taxpayer-funded bonds in 1959, as part of the establishment of UNCA. The University at the time pitched this purchase as a good for the community: the people’s taxes going towards a school that would serve the people living in the community. Today, they not only want to claim that the best use of this public resource is giving it over to private profit — they want to do it without the approval of, or even in conversation with, the community they were founded to serve.
So once again we ask the University: Share your plans, listen to the people who live here and develop in ways that benefit the public good, not private bank accounts.
