Josh Stein, attorney general of North Carolina, spoke with the Scholar Media Team’s Cate Miller ’25 and Content Manager Sarah O’Carroll before his Food for Thought talk this spring. Stein shares about his career path to serving as attorney general, his views on academic freedom and college access, and his plans to run for state governor.
Josh Stein, attorney general of North Carolina, spoke with the Scholar Media Team’s Cate Miller ’25 and Content Manager Sarah O’Carroll before his Food for Thought talk this spring.
Stein shares about his career path to serving as attorney general, his views on academic freedom and college access, and his plans to run for state governor.
Food for Thought is a breakfast and conversation series held on Friday mornings at the Foundation. You can learn more about the initiative and RSVP for upcoming events on the Morehead-Cain Network.
Music credits
The intro music is by Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul.
How to listen
On your mobile device, you can listen and subscribe to Catalyze on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. For any other podcast app, you can find the show using our RSS feed.
The Catalyze podcast is a series by the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The show is directed and produced by Sarah O’Carroll, Content Manager for Morehead-Cain.
You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.
(Sarah)
Josh, thank you so much for speaking with me and Cate here with the Scholar Media team. We’re so looking forward to your Food for Thought talk this morning, so thank you for coming to campus. And Cate Miller is a writer on the team from the class of ’25, and so she’s going to be leading questions. But first, when was the last time you were on campus?
(Attorney General Josh Stein)
I think, sadly, it was the UNC game that they just lost to Miami. Very painful.
(Sarah)
Yes. Hopefully, things will turn up for us. But Cate, I’ll let you go from here.
(Cate)
For our first question, how have your experiences as an attorney and previous work in public service informed your approach to your current position as Attorney General?
(Attorney General Josh Stein)
Well, the way I look at my job is I’m a public lawyer, meaning I represent the state. I represent the people of North Carolina. And so you have to do all of your work grounded in the law, the base of which is our constitution, both the US and state constitution. But you also have to add in the impact on people’s lives. And that’s what I try to do. I try to find issues and prioritize issues that are going to make a difference in the lives of North Carolinians.
(Cate)
What advice do you have for college students and others in higher education who are pursuing a career in law or public service?
(Attorney General Josh Stein)
I think experiment. Just do it, start. A lot of people think, they try to imagine where they’re going to be at the end of their journey, and you never know where that’s going to be. So my view is just do something. And when you do that one thing, you’ll know, did I enjoy it or not? Was I good at it or not? What did I like about it? What didn’t I like about it? So then you can do the next thing, and then you’ll ask yourself the same questions, and then finally, you will find a place where your passions and your talents marry your mission, and then you feel a lot of job satisfaction.
(Sarah)
And I’m going to jump in here. Was that the case for you, or did you find yourself in this path another way?
(Attorney General Josh Stein)
Pretty much it was the case for me. I knew that I wanted to do something public-service oriented. It was how I was raised. It’s what my faith has taught me. And I started out out of college as a teacher. I was a teacher in Zimbabwe and did that for a couple of years. And I thought, well, maybe I’ll go into international development, maybe I’ll go into education. So, of course, I went into law. And I went, and I got a joint law and public policy degree. And initially, I thought, well, hey, maybe I will do community economic development. And I did that, raising capital to invest in low-wealth communities in eastern North Carolina, renovating dilapidated neighborhoods in Durham, an abandoned building in Wilson, all of which was immensely satisfying. And then I got the political bug and became the consumer protection chief for Roy Cooper, who was then attorney general, current governor, and Morehead, as I understand. He was attorney general, and I headed the consumer protection division and loved that. And basically, what you do is you go to work, and you represent people who are being taken advantage of unfairly by businesses who are breaking the rules. The businesses are harming the consumers, but they’re also harming competitors who are actually following the rules and doing things the right way. And I had no intention of ever leaving that job, but part of that job was working at the General Assembly to get laws passed like a Do Not Call law and an anti-predatory lending law and an identity theft protection law. And in the course of doing that work at the General Assembly, and I saw the breadth of issues that the legislature tackled, I said to myself, “That would be fun.” And a seat came open in Raleigh in 2008, and so I ran for state senate and won that, and enjoyed serving the legislature immensely for eight years, four terms. But then when Cooper announced he was going to run for governor and vacate the attorney general’s office, I said to myself, “Well, here’s an opportunity for me to marry my policy making that I’ve done at the legislature with my legal work that I’d done at the attorney general’s office before. So sort of every step has felt natural and normal. But if you had told me in college that I was going to be attorney general, I would not have predicted it.
(Sarah)
And probably be a bit more stressed.
(Cate)
Can you share any updates on your plans to run for governor of North Carolina in the upcoming election?
(Attorney General Josh Stein)
And I think that is a natural segue from the previous question, which is, did I imagine myself running for governor? No. But having served as attorney general and seen the absolute critical nature of who is the governor, really, over the last ten years, from the six years when Governor Cooper has served and handled immense challenges, I mean, my goodness, COVID and HB2, and all this stuff where North Carolina was really behind the eight ball, he provided steady, solid leadership that I think has served the people of North Carolina extremely well. And then you contrast it with the previous four years, where the governor went in lockstep with a legislature that I believe is to the right of the people of North Carolina, pushing extreme legislation, whether it’s anti-gay or anti-voter and anti-choice. So we need a governor who can serve as a counterbalance to our very conservative General Assembly. And when I look around, I think that I’m the one best able to run the race, win the race, and then do the job.
(Sarah)
Thank you. And speaking of just the types of issues that are being debated right now in a Republican-controlled House, and having seen Cooper go through that, I’m curious what your thoughts are on academic freedom. We’re a merit program scholarship. So what are your thoughts on how academic freedom is being negotiated, contested right now? And what would be your approach, and do you have any models for who you look to in terms of who’s doing it well?
(Attorney General Josh Stein)
There are different places of academic freedom. There’s in our elementary schools and there’s in our universities. At the universities, obviously, it has to be a place where young people can wrestle with ideas. I mean, I think back, in fact, I did this exercise where I read some document that I wrote when I was 21, 22 years old last week, and honestly, I was mortified. Like, I couldn’t believe the tone. And generally I agreed with myself, but I’m like, “God, you thought you knew everything.” And I obviously did not know everything because I don’t know everything today. And so kids are searching to figure out who they are and what they truly believe. They’re wrestling with what’s my own view? What is my family’s view? What’s my neighbor’s view? What’s my community view? And so you got to give people the space to figure that stuff out, and colleges need to do that and really respect people who are searching. I think that it’s really important that politicians not try to control the academic tenor of an institution. And I’m really concerned with the way the governance of the university system is today. I feel like the legislature has their fingers much too in the day-to-day operation of the universities, and I think they’re really playing with fire, because when you look at what is a crown jewel institution in North Carolina, it is our public university system, it is our private colleges, it’s our HBCUs. And if they mess that up, they run the risk of messing up what has been an engine of economic growth in this state for the last 50 years.
(Sarah)
That resonates, because even this morning, this Food for Thought series, it came out of a desire to bridge divides, to have scholars talk about things from very different perspectives. And some of that is only possible when you can find safety in being able to change your mind, being able to hear from people who have drastically different life experiences and opinions. So, yeah, and being at UNC-Chapel Hill as well, we have to understand our positioning as a public university. So thank you for that. And Cate, I’ll hand it back to you.
(Cate)
How do you plan to address issues of affordability and accessibility for higher education in North Carolina, and what specific measures will you advocate for to reduce the financial burden on students and families?
(Attorney General Josh Stein)
Well, one thing I’ve been doing is supporting efforts to improve public service loan forgiveness. This is a program that the federal government created a few years ago, 15 years ago, to encourage people to go into jobs that are sorely needed, teaching, law enforcement, first response, all these things that serve the public. And what the government said was, “If you do these types of jobs, we will—over a ten-year period, if you do it for ten years—we will forgive the balance, the outstanding balance of your loan.” But it has been incredibly poorly administered, and this is true under both Democratic and Republican Department of Administration. So this is not a partisan issue. But I want to thank President Biden because he’s trying to fix the problems of the past. And so we have been pushing and pushing to get that program to work so that people who have committed to public service can have their loans forgiven. The President has a loan forgiveness program for all students that is needs based. It’s not universal. It’s targeted to people who can best use it. Those policies are being challenged in court, and I’m in court trying to defend his right to come up with ways to make college more affordable.
I think, in particular in North Carolina, we have to try to contain tuition at the public universities and focus on driving down tuition for community colleges as low as possible, because community colleges are an incredible instrument of opportunity because they serve young people who want to go to college. They can go there for two years very affordably, build up some credits, and then transfer to UNC, UNCW, NC State, UNCG, any of these great schools, and be on their way in a very affordable fashion to get a college degree. But they’re also a way for somebody who is 40 and has just lost a job and wants to get new training in welding so they can go put up solar panel farms. And we have to be very aware that if the costs are too high, it’s going to be a barrier to people, and we really need to keep it affordable.
(Sarah)
Thank you.
(Cate)
What is your vision for the role of higher education in building a stronger and more equitable North Carolina, and how do you plan to collaborate with stakeholders across the state to achieve this vision?
(Attorney General Josh Stein)
We have to create as much economic opportunity across North Carolina as possible. So a lot of parts of the state are thriving, parts of Wake County, the Triangle, parts of Mecklenburg County, the Triad, and then you’ve got Wilmington and Asheville. Those real estate markets are on fire. But these are a lot of times people coming in from outside who have resources, which makes it really tough on people who are living and working here. Then you have half the counties— North Carolina is one of the fastest growing states in the entire country over the previous decade—half of our counties lost population. It’s amazing. And that’s because there isn’t as much opportunity there. So, we have to be very aware of trying to spread economic opportunity more equitably across the state because if somebody wants to live in the community they grew up with and they’re going to work hard, they should not be limited. Their future should not be limited just because they want to stay in their hometown. But for a company to want to grow and succeed in a town, there has to be a hospital there, otherwise the managers and workers aren’t going to want to be there; there has to be good broadband there, or else they can’t compete against the businesses where they’re located in communities with high-speed broadband; there has to be good roads and railroads to move their products to market. So there are these basic investments we have to make. There have to be good public schools. You don’t want to go to an area, if you think your kid is going to be starting behind kids who are in Wake County or Durham County or Forsyth County or Orange County, then you’re not going to move your family there. And so we have to make sure that everyone has a chance.
(Sarah)
Last question.
(Cate)
How do you plan to address environmental issues in North Carolina, including climate change, air and water pollutants, and protecting natural resources? As someone from Wilmington, this is extremely important for me because we have a huge issue with PFAS in our water.
(Attorney General Josh Stein)
Yeah, I am very much aware of it. In fact, I’ve taken DuPont and Chemours to court for discharging Gen X, which is a PFAS, one of these chemicals that lasts forever, into the Cape Fear River for decades. And so I’ve taken them to court because I think they need to pay to clean up the mess they’ve made. There are too many people in southeastern North Carolina, hundreds of thousands, who are worried about drinking water from their home tap, and that is absolutely unacceptable to me. So clean drinking water, clean air to breathe, these are basic non-negotiables, and if companies are out there polluting those, they need to be held accountable and made to pay. On climate change, we are working on this issue on a host of fronts. We’re working at it at the Public Utilities Commission to come up with a clean power plan so that we can reduce carbon emissions by 70% over the next seven years, and that is absolutely doable, and I’m over there arguing vociferously for them to do more. We need renewable energy. It will both drive down carbon emissions, but it will also create this economic opportunity in rural communities that folks are desperate for. It adds to the tax base. Everything about it is a win-win. So there’s a lot we need to do, and I’m focused on trying to get it done.
(Sarah)
Josh, thank you so much for sharing. It’s great to hear this before the height of the race. And I wanted to ask, is there anything about you personally that you wouldn’t just be able to pick up from your online presence and things like that?
(Attorney General Josh Stein)
I wish I were a more interesting person, but I’m pretty simple. I like walking our dogs with my wife. I love college sports. I’m a huge Carolina fan. Can’t tell anyone else that, but I grew up here in Chapel Hill, grew up in Charlotte, and then in Chapel Hill. So when you’re twelve years old, and you’re going to watch James Worthy and Michael Jordan playing Carmichael Auditorium, you’re pretty much hooked for life.
(Sarah)
Okay. Anything else you’d like to add for the Morehead-Cain audience that you’re about to speak to or the broader UNC-Chapel Hill community?
(Attorney General Josh Stein)
Well, it’s fun to be with college students. I have two of my own, one who just recently graduated, and I’ll sound like an old man, but every time my wife and I go visit our kids, we just say how much we love all the other students. Because young people are awesome, and they have so much energy, so much idealism, so much openness to what is next in their life because nobody knows. And I know that it’s not always easy to be a young person in these days, but I’m invigorated by being with young folks, so I’m excited to be here today.
(Sarah)
Thank you so much.
(Cate)
Yes, thank you so much.
(Attorney General Josh Stein)
Thanks. I appreciate y’all.