Regent Paul “Bing” Brown is one of the most outspoken liberals on the Board of Regents, yet he also is the most notorious for making opportunistic promises that are never fulfilled. He is the Regent with the deepest ties to the networks of venture capital and financing in the private sphere that we rebel against in our divestment campaign. Brown deploys narratives around people of color (especially Black students), low-income students, ethics, and his union membership, in order to win political points. He never makes good on promises to actually benefit students and opposes campaigns for human rights when it matters most.
Bing Brown comes from a long line of privileged political players. His grandfather was a U.S. Senator, and his father was running mate to the U.S. Representative Sander Levin in the 1974 gubernatorial race. Brown’s father, also named Paul Brown, was a Regent during the fight to divest from South Africa in the 1980s and was tied for the longest serving regent in U of M history. Regent Brown Sr., like all of the Regents at the time, hesitated to take action around South African apartheid and believed that the institution “ought not to become involved in political issues except on rare occasions,” and that he had “not seen evidence that divestment will have any effect on the government of South Africa.”
Paul Brown Sr. and Harold Shapiro are confronted by BAM III activists, 1987. From the Ann Arbor District Library archives, hosted by the University of Michigan Library.
Like his father, Paul “Bing” Brown would represent a voice of capital and power on the Board. Though all of the Regents today have access to large amounts of political and economic capital, Bing Brown specifically comes from the networks of finance in the private sphere that the endowment today is heavily invested in. Bing Brown was Vice President of Capital Markets at the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, and in that role Brown managed the State of Michigan’s $2 billion 21st Century Jobs Fund, focusing on investments into venture capital and private equity. Today, Paul Brown is Managing Director of MemryX, a venture capital firm operating both in Ann Arbor and Silicon Valley.
Brown used this experience to drive forward his campaign to become Regent, in which he pushed for endowment transparency and accountability. But these were empty promises that were forgotten soon after he was elected. Brown, along with Regent Jordan Acker, campaigned on a ten-point plan for “ethics and transparency” that would ban both endowment investments into companies run by university donors and campaign contributions to Regents from those receiving endowment investments. This plan was constructed in response to a Detroit Free Press series of articles on corruption around the University endowment, including an article revealing incumbent Regent Andrea Fischer Newman had accepted campaign donations from those receiving endowment investments. The plan was released in October 2018, about a month after Newman’s donation scandal, and Acker and Brown won first and second in the election for the Board of Regents one month later.
Was this platform anything more than political opportunism, to gain a few percentage points while Newman was embroiled with corruption? You already know the answer. No aspect of endowment management has been changed in response to the ten-point plan. The plan announced that investments to donor companies would be heavily scrutinized by a third-party; no third-party exists. In fact, Stephen Ross (whose donations Andrea Fischer Newman returned after the Free Press exposé) received a $100 million investment in December 2023 for his corporation Related Companies. The ten-point plan declared that the University maintains records for “maximum transparency” except for when there is a concern to privacy. Yet, the University has routinely and frustratingly denied our FOIA requests this year and even led the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) to file an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charge over consistently denied information requests. The ten-point plan even demanded that Board of Regents meetings be held in the evening to allow community members to attend. The meetings today continue to be held during the morning and afternoon, making it difficult for concerned community members and students to attend. The Board of Regents only allows a handful of visitors into these meetings and gives an exceedingly short time (2 minutes) for public comments with heavy police presence — if anything, access to the Regents’ meetings have become more heavily restricted, not opened to the public.
His opposition to endowment ethics would not stop there. While on the campaign trail, he responded to #UMDivest activists by denying apartheid and compared the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement to Masterpiece Cakeshop’s refusal to bake a cake for a gay couple. Students aptly characterized the example as “a comparison so offensive it is not worth a response.” At the same event, Brown compared Professor John Cheney-Lippold’s refusal to write a letter of recommendation for a student’s study in israel to a hypothetical white supremacist instructor refusing to write a letter for a Black student seeking to work at the NAACP.
As a venture capitalist himself, and the current Managing Director of eLab Ventures, we should not be surprised that Brown stands against ethics around the endowment. As we wrote in our report about the endowment from February 2024, eLab Ventures benefits from the lack of oversight and regulation around the endowment through investments into companies receiving endowment money. eLab Ventures’ returns increase as its investment recipients, like Akadeum Life Sciences and MemryX, are able to fundraise additional capital from the endowment—and Bing Brown reaps a profit.
Brown won his election by portraying himself as a pro-labor candidate. He sat on the board of the Huron Valley Area Labor Federation, won endorsements from many unions during his election, and boasted about his membership in the Lecturers’ Employee Organization (LEO). Brown lauded protesters from the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) who demanded a living wage outside of Santa Ono’s inauguration. Of course, during GEO’s abolitionist COVID-era strike (Fall 2020), Bing Brown responded by introducing more ways to police other students. During GEO’s 2023 strike, Bing Brown voiced support for undemocratic state-led fact finding to avoid movement at the bargaining table and stated that GEO’s demands for a living wage did “not reflect well on the students who we admitted and have chosen to teach.” On a panel discussing Regents’ views on collective bargaining, Brown stated that he sometimes thinks workers win too much in negotiations. Alums report that he even thought graduate workers were paid extra for research on top of GSI labor — and that it was not the University’s problem to pay workers a living wage.
His profoundly anti-labor stances highlight how he acts as a pro-labor friend for the PR points alone. His silence and refusal to engage with the Coalition’s demands should stand in stark contrast to his PR actions and reveal why he pays lip service to labor, endowment ethics, or activism — sometimes desiring to appear friendly, always a voice of management and capital.