Margaret Spellings Is Stepping Down at UNC. Will Anyone Want to Replace Her?

U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

When Margaret Spellings was named president of the University of North Carolina system, there was widespread concern among faculty members that she would be a pawn of the Republican-controlled state legislature and a rubber stamp for the Board of Governors, whose members are appointed by those lawmakers.

Spellings may not have fully won over her faculty critics, but some of them came to respect her policy views and tough-minded independence. “The worst fears were not realized,” said Michael C. Behrent, an associate professor of history at Appalachian State University. “Margaret Spellings, while conservative, has a serious vision for higher education.”

Critics on the board were a different story. Spellings expended a good deal of her time and energy pushing back against a board that she and others criticized for micromanaging issues on campuses and at the system office. She also has been seen as a strong advocate for the system at the Statehouse, where she helped push through a major college-affordability measure, called NC Promise, that sharply reduced tuition on three of the system’s 17 campuses.

That kind of fighting and advocacy can take a toll, and Spellings has decided that she’s had enough. On Friday she announced that she would step down on March 1, just three years into her five-year contract. The board will appoint an interim leader to replace her before starting a search for a permanent successor.

“All leaders are for a time,” Spellings said on Friday. “I came into this position knowing that the most lasting contribution I could make was to help create a culture of higher expectations for the citizens of this state — and we have done just that.”

Many students and faculty members have remained critical of Spellings’s leadership, most recently for not taking a stronger stand on issues like removing the statue of a Confederate soldier from the flagship campus, in Chapel Hill.

Now, however, with Spellings on the way out, Behrent said, there is a new worry: whether the governing board will find a candidate who is more willing to go along and get along with its agenda.

And another question arises as well: Who would possibly want the job?

‘Times Change’

With Spellings’s resignation, taking a job as the system’s president may be seen by other higher-education leaders as a road to nowhere.

She is the second consecutive UNC president to leave under less-than-ideal conditions and with a tenure of less than five years. Her predecessor, Thomas W. Ross, was forced out of the position in what appeared to be a politically motivated power grab by the board.

When she was named to the job, Spellings, who was U.S. secretary of education under President George W. Bush, was seen as an ideal candidate to smooth relations with the board and the legislature because of her conservative credentials. In her remarks on Friday, Spellings seemed to acknowledge that the board’s priorities were no longer the same as her own.

“I came into this position intent on creating a culture of higher expectations, and that shift is underway,” she said in prepared remarks at a Friday news conference. “But times change, and those changes demand new leaders and new approaches.”

She wouldn’t say whether the board’s divisiveness had played a role in her decision to step down. But she has spent her career in the political realm, and she knows how politics works. Despite the political turmoil that has marked her three years at UNC, she repeated on Friday a comment she made when she was hired: “That’s the fun of it.” In public higher education, she said, “governance is always being calibrated and recalibrated, over and over.”

About her reasons for leaving, she said only that it was “the right time.” Not long ago, she had said publicly that she loved the job and was looking forward to the future. “I’ve given it my all,” she said.

Spellings, not the board, initiated the conversation about her exit. That discussion started “a few weeks ago,” she said. Harry Smith, chair of the Board of Governors, said she and the board had reached a “mutual agreement that it is now the right time for a new leader for our next chapter.”

Both Spellings and Smith alluded to how tough the job of UNC president is — and how the tenures of college presidents nationwide are getting shorter. “Higher education is under some pressure anyway,” he said, “and from a trend perspective, I don’t think Margaret is far off the trend.”

“Three years is a good run,” Spellings said.

On average, college presidents surveyed by the American Council on Education in 2016 had served in their current positions for 6.5 years, down from 8.5 years a decade before.

The system office has been mired in a deeply partisan battle with the board, on which a faction of former legislators and lobbyists has led an effort to bypass Spellings, overstepping the traditional boundaries of governance.

Last year, for example, the board voted to bar the UNC Law School’s Center for Civil Rights from litigating. While governing boards are typically responsible for the broad outlines of a system’s operations, without the recommendation of the system’s president they rarely make decisions about how a single academic program should operate.

The board last year also considered measures to hire separate staffs for its members and move the system’s staff members out of their offices in Chapel Hill, proposals Spellings saw as unnecessary and intruding on her authority. And this year a board member undermined Spellings by derailing her recommendation for whom to hire as chancellor of Western Carolina University.

The top candidate in that search dropped out after the board member questioned his academic credentials and hired a firm to probe his background, without consulting Spellings or the board.

In a letter to the board’s chair, a longtime faculty leader said the debacle had created “a historically unprecedented crisis of governance in the UNC system, and one that has the potential for turning the university more sharply down the course of authoritarian capture and partisan manipulation.”

‘Hurricanes of All Kinds’

Spellings has openly sparred with board members over their actions, arguing that their role is to look at the big picture and leave the details to her and campus leaders.

“Let me manage the enterprise, and let them set policy,” Spellings told WRAL News in September of last year. “Let them see, understand, and defer to the chancellors and me, who have a lot of experience.”

Several hours after announcing that she would step down, Spellings led a conversation on the Chapel Hill campus with John B. King Jr., U.S. education secretary under President Barack Obama, about the future of education. Pressed on how higher-education governance in North Carolina had affected her ability to do her job, she largely demurred.

“The people who are appointed to governing boards in any state, including North Carolina, care deeply about the enterprise,” she said. “Have we created the kind of structure that allows them to move the needle in the most productive way? Are we organized for success?”

Spellings also discussed what she’d like to see in North Carolina. She cited changes that she has set in motion and seemed wistful about goals that hadn’t been reached yet, among them a “college-going culture” and better teacher-preparation programs. At one point, she became emotional when talking about how committed people are in the state to improving public higher education.

Her time at UNC may not have unfolded as she planned. And she’s leaving before the results of many of her efforts to improve accountability and affordability are fully realized. Still, she said, “I think we’ve done a lot of good, notwithstanding the hurricanes of all kinds.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.

Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.