Payne named university attorney

Donna Gooden Payne, university counsel at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, has been named university attorney at East Carolina University

Chancellor Steve Ballard said, “I am delighted that Donna Payne has accepted our invitation to join ECU. She is a talented, experienced and respected attorney, and she is well versed in higher education in North Carolina. We had an especially strong pool of candidates from all parts of the country, and she emerged at the top.”

Payne said she is a longtime admirer of ECU. “The university is the most influential institution in eastern North Carolina, and its faculty, students and alumni are important in many, many ways to the entire state as well as the nation,” she said. “I look forward to sharing its opportunities and challenges. It’s a great time to be a Pirate.”

Her appointment is effective July 1.

A native of Bladen County, Payne is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead Scholar, and she holds a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Before joining UNCP in 2002, she was in private practice in Austin and Elizabethtown. In 2003 she served as interim university counsel at UNC-Wilmington while continuing her work at Pembroke. At UNCP, she also serves as chief of staff and assistant secretary to the Board of Trustees. At ECU, she will succeed Kitty Wetherington, who resigned to join a law firm in Greenville.