Making the best of the new UNC president
Published October 27, 2015
Editorial by Winston-Salem Journal, October 26, 2015.
Note to the board of the University of North Carolina system: If you’re going to throw a controversial new president at your entity and the rest of the public, do the lead-up transparently, for the good of that new president and everybody else. But that’s not the way the board of governors played it. And now everybody has no choice but to make the best of it.
Friday, the board chose Margaret Spellings, a longtime lieutenant of former President George W. Bush who served as his secretary of education, to be the system’s new president. This came after a selection process so secretive that even some of the secretive leaders of the state legislature, who appoint the board, complained, as did some members of the board and system faculty members.
But this is where we are. The Republicans who control the legislature and the board it appoints wanted progressive Democratic President Tom Ross out and a conservative in. The GOP controls all these days, just as the Democrats long controlled all.
Critics worry that Spellings leans too heavily toward the profit side of higher education, noting that she has served on the boards of the for-profit Phoenix University and a student-loan collecton company. She also, of course, has her supporters.
“I am a lifelong Democrat, but I adore Margaret Spellings,” Kati Haycock, the president of the Education Trust, recently told the Chronicle of Higher Education. “She came to Washington with just an intense passion about low-income students and students of color.” Haycock told the Chronicle that whether one loves or hates No Child Left Behind, the Bush administration’s effort to improve the public schools, it was born of that passion.
While critics note that Spellings lacks the background of an academic career, her leadership of the UNC system will be part of a national trend that includes Janet Napolitano, President Obama’s former head of Homeland Security, who now runs the University of California system.
Tom Ross, who came to the system from leading Davidson College, has certainly been committed to the UNC system and has fought to keep up its high standards in the face of tight money from the legislature. Though he inherited the academic/athletics scandal at the system’s flagship university at Chapel Hill, he should have demanded that school’s leaders be more aggressive, transparent and thorough in resolving the problems that scandal exposed.
Now Spellings, who takes office early next year and will be paid significantly more than Ross, must resolve that scandal and a host of other challenges, including maintaining the system’s national reputation and holding down tuition fees. Perhaps her shared political affiliation with the legislative majority will help her do that. She indicates a commitment to bringing out the best in our cherished UNC system.
We welcome her and wish her all the best. The legislature and its board have spoken. Now we must all move forward together.
