The governor launches a shot across the bow with new UNC commission
The University of North Carolina’s motto — light and liberty – honors its guiding principles.
It may also point the way for the UNC System to escape the grasp of Republican state legislators.
That’s the potential effect of Gov. Roy Cooper’s executive order creating the Governor’s Commission on the Governance of Public Universities in North Carolina. The 15-member body won’t have the power to change how Republicans are abusing and diminishing the UNC System, but it will be able to shine light on the damage. That exposure could cause enough political backlash to liberate UNC.
Cooper said the commission will review how members of the 24-member UNC Board of Governors and campus boards of trustees are appointed. But the symbolism of the two people he selected to lead the commission suggested it is about much more.
The co-chairs are former UNC System president Thomas Ross and his successor, Margaret Spellings. They are keenly aware of how politics is intruding into the leadership and operation of what is arguably the state’s greatest asset. Ross, UNC president from 2011 to 2016, was ousted but the Republican-dominated Board of Governors for the offense of being a Democrat. Spellings, a former secretary of education under President George W. Bush, has strong Republican credentials, but quit in 2019 because of micromanaging and political meddling by the members of the UNC Board of Governors.
That Ross and Spellings are coming back to take a hard look at the system suggests that this will not be a wonky review of the appointment practices for boards governing the UNC System and its 17 institutions. It could be, and should be, a reckoning with those who are undermining one of the nation’s most respected public universities.
In public hearings and interviews the commission could document and define how political interference is eroding faculty morale, contributing to staff turnover and weakening the university’s ability to attract top professors. The commission will report its recommendations in July.
In an interview, Ross stressed that he did not agree to be co-chair out of spite. He said when the governor asks you to serve your state, you don’t turn him down. But he also suggested that the commission likely will hold public hearings and listen to those who are worried about the direction of the university.
“There is enough concern by people about what is happening at the university. People feel like governance is in need of some reform,” he said.
That’s for sure. The UNC Board of Governors is the only statewide university governing board solely appointed by the legislature without input from the governor, according to the American Association of University Professors. The legislature’s power was further concentrated in 2016 when Republican lawmakers stripped the governor of power to appoint some members of campus boards of trustees.
The need to examine the extent of political hackery and meddling in the UNC System was made clear by Republican leaders’ almost immediate dismissal of the commission as an overreach by Cooper into their exclusive appointment powers.
Those who have defended UNC’s independence hope the commission takes a clear stand against the effects of political interference.
Roger Perry, a former chair of the UNC-Chapel Hill board of Trustees and co-founder of the Coalition for Carolina, a group formed to protect the university from partisan influence, said he expects the commission to go deeper than an examination of various university governance models.
“I would bet it will be more aggressive. I don’t believe they are going to come up with pablum,” Perry told me. “My guess is they are going to expose the overreach that has been occurring. I think they’re going to call that out. I certainly hope so.”
All North Carolinians who value the quality of the UNC System should hope so, too.
Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-829-4512, or nbarnett@ news observer.com
