In many ways, the University of North Carolina system has become a poster child for troubled governance. In recent years, the system has been subject to a long list of conflicts between its politically appointed Board of Governors, the system’s administration, and its individual campuses.
Higher-education advocates in the state have blamed those tensions on the system’s board for dragging partisan politics into the board room. As some critics see it, board members have sought to enforce conservative ideals at the expense of academic freedom and institutional autonomy.
Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, created a commission last fall to recommend changes in university governance. Cooper’s goals were expansive: Repair the system’s oversight, and reduce what the governor and others see as the board’s political overreach.
“The UNC system is the envy of the nation for what we have built here,” Cooper said at the time. “But there are signs of trouble that come when all of its appointed leaders are chosen by too few — signs of undue political influence, bureaucratic meddling, and singularity of political thought.”
That group has now released a set of seven recommendations, including expanding membership on the system board from 24 to 32 or 36, allowing members of both parties in the General Assembly to make appointments to the board, and doubling the terms of those appointments, from four to eight years. The commission made similar recommendations for the Boards of Trustees for the system’s 16 universities: increasing their size from 15 to 17 members, doubling their terms, and making appointments bipartisan.
The UNC system is the envy of the nation ... But there are signs of trouble that come when all of its appointed leaders are chosen by too few.
The commission also called for the system’s board to stream its meetings live and record them, require lobbyists and elected officials to have a one-year “cooling-off period” between their political career and a board appointment, and create an academic center to study higher-education governance. A full report of the group’s work will be released in the coming weeks.
Jane Stancill, vice president for communications at the UNC system, said the Board of Governors already livestreams all their meetings.
Experts in higher-education governance gave high marks for the commission’s ideas, but they warned that there was little chance most of them would be enacted.
“The commission’s recommendations would address a number of governance concerns, including the partisan tensions and lack of transparency that are well-known issues in higher education in North Carolina,” Sondra N. Barringer, an assistant professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University, said in an email.
“I think it is unlikely that the Republican-controlled legislature will act on these,” Barringer said, “as it would weaken their power over higher-education governance in North Carolina.”
More Diversity
Thomas W. Ross, a former president of the UNC system and a co-chair of the commission, said state law requires the university’s governing boards to represent the state’s diversity.
But the current system board and most campus boards fall short on that measure because most members are white men, while a majority of students in the system and across the state are women, Ross said.
A report on the demographics of the system’s governing bodies, from the College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College, found that three-quarters of the Board of Governors are men, along with two-thirds of university trustees. Women make up nearly 60 percent of students in the system, the report said, and a little more than half of the state’s population.
The institutional board of North Carolina State has only one female member, which is shocking to Margaret Spellings, another former president of the system and the commission’s other co-chair. “It is hard to look at the system’s largest institution and say it makes sense for only one woman to be on that board.”
It is hard to look at the system’s largest institution and say it makes sense for only one woman to be on that board.
More than three-quarters of the system board is white, compared with 62 percent of the state’s population and 55 percent of students at its public universities. Boards of Trustees for individual institutions are more diverse over all, the report found: Six of those boards, all at minority-serving campuses, have a non-white majority of members.
Politically, too, the system’s board is the least representative of the state: 64 percent of the board members are registered Republicans, compared with 30 percent of the state’s population.
Henry Stoever, president of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, said the commission’s recommendations have the potential to improve governance in North Carolina, particularly the measure to lengthen board terms to eight years. That would depoliticize the governance, he said, because board membership would not shift so quickly after a turnover in partisan control of state government.
Board members, too, would have more time to fully learn about their roles before their terms were up, said Stoever, allowing them to focus more on substantive issues of financial stability and student success.
Change May Take Time
Whatever the merits of the commission’s recommendations, North Carolina legislators have shown no willingness to lessen their grip on the state’s public universities.
In 2016 the Republican-controlled General Assembly removed the authority of the governor to appoint any institutional trustees just weeks before Cooper was sworn in to replace his Republican predecessor. The following year, lawmakers passed a bill reducing membership on the system’s Board of Governors from 32 to 24.
A bill under consideration this year would expand the system board to 28 members. But it would also grant sole authority to legislative leaders to appoint those members, instead of having them elected by both the House and Senate, removing any bipartisan consideration.
This year, lawmakers have also drafted legislation requiring all of the state’s public colleges to seek a new institutional accreditor. The bill is a response to an inquiry by UNC-Chapel Hill’s accrediting agency, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, into that campus’s Board of Trustees proposal to create a new School of Civic Life and Leadership on the flagship campus.
Ross said legislators should consider the recommendations, which encourage the kind of diversity of thought that many Republicans have argued for in other cases. In particular, he said, a center to study higher-education governance could make the state a national leader on this topic.
Spellings, who served as U.S secretary of education under President George W. Bush, said there was a strong consensus for the recommendations among the Republicans who participated on the commission. But the ideas may take time to be embraced by citizens and elected officials in the state, she said.
That consensus apparently didn’t include Rep. John R. Bell IV, a Republican and majority leader in the state House of Representatives, who was listed as a member of the commission. Bell did not respond to a request for comment.
Bell didn’t attend any of the meetings or participate in any way, Spellings said: “We’re sorry he wasn’t there to give his thoughts.”
