Molly Corbett Broad, who led the University of North Carolina through lean budget years and helped win approval of the largest bond issue for higher education in the nation’s history, announced on Wednesday that she was stepping down after nearly eight years as president of the 16-campus system.
“It has been a joy every day, the successes and challenges both,” Ms. Broad said at a news conference.
Ms. Broad wrote in a letter to the university system’s Board of Governors that she would step down as head of the country’s oldest public-university system at the end of the 2005-6 academic year, or when a successor is in place. After a yearlong research sabbatical, she said, she will take a position as a professor in the School of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ms. Broad, an economist, came to North Carolina from the California State University System, taking office in July 1997. She has largely won praise for her deft political touch, and particularly for her efforts to win passage of a $3.1-billion bond measure in 2000. The bond referendum, which was approved by an overwhelming 73 percent of North Carolina voters, provided $2.5-billion over six years for improvements at North Carolina’s public universities and $600-million for the state’s community colleges.
Still, Ms. Broad’s tenure also coincided with a period of belt-tightening as North Carolina, like other states, grappled with declining revenues. She pressed for, and won, moderate annual tuition increases -- moves that were controversial in a state with a constitutional mandate to keep such increases as low as possible.
At the news conference, she listed efforts to maintain accessibility by raising financial aid, even as tuition climbed, as an accomplishment. North Carolina’s college-going rate is now the sixth-highest in the country, she noted.
Although her two predecessors retired at age 65, Ms. Broad, 64, said her decision to step down had come after months of thought and was based on the best timing for a “healthy and strong transition” for the university system. With the appointment of a chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Asheville later this spring, new leaders will have been named at three North Carolina campuses in the last year.
And Ms. Broad signaled that she has a full agenda in her final year as president, including completing a study of the state’s labor needs and seeing the bond initiative into its “home stretch.”
“I intend to keep running this marathon, interspersed with sprints,” she said.
Even before Ms. Broad announced her resignation, names of possible successors had been floated, most notably Erskine B. Bowles, a former White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and a two-time Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate.
Members of the state Senate’s Republican caucus recently wrote to state leaders that they would “strongly support” Mr. Bowles, an investment banker, if a vacancy were to come open, saying he has “the stature and business acumen to properly manage the complex financial requirements of this important institution to assure academic excellence in the future.”
State Sen. Robert Pittenger said he and other Republican lawmakers were unhappy with testimony Ms. Broad gave at a recent appropriations hearing and were concerned that she was not doing enough to create operating efficiencies. “He’s a manager,” Senator Pittenger said of Mr. Bowles. “This is not political.”
Background articles from The Chronicle:
