Chaotic search for UNC president strains university’s credibility

The University of North Carolina Board of Governors has put its credibility, and that of the university system, at risk with internal disputes over the choice of a new president following the purely political ouster of President Tom Ross.

The search has become an embarrassingly amateurish failure on the part of people who don’t seem to know what they’re doing or appreciate the gravity of their mistakes. It must be abandoned. Any candidates foolhardy enough to take the job under these circumstances would raise doubts about their own competence.

One reason board leaders gave for an emergency meeting Friday was their fear that the name of the candidate to whom they were planning to talk might get out. Guess what? It got out long before. Margaret Spellings, an education secretary under President George W. Bush, was going to interview for the job and was reported to be the top candidate.

But the complications kept growing. Legislative leaders, who reportedly have tried to force their own choice on the board, objected to the meeting and accused board leaders of trying to make a choice without following a law passed by the Republican General Assembly that would require the board’s search committee to submit three names to the full board for a vote on the president. But the bill is not yet law because Gov. Pat McCrory hasn’t signed it. His lack of action – or even comment – on the bill continues his being AWOL on who should lead the state’s most important institution.

Meanwhile, the pending requirement for legislative approval is a blatant attempt by Senate leader Phil Berger to make the choice himself. If the three “finalists” were not to his liking, the man who has major sway over university funding would make his disapproval known in the next budget.

The fiasco this search has become was born out of political motivations to fire Ross, a Democrat, by a board now overwhelmingly dominated by Republicans but not by experience. As the search has gone on and been hobbled by infighting, the board’s reputation, already damaged by the Ross firing, has been wounded. The absurdity of the situation is that the struggle isn’t between legislative leaders and some rogue board of holdover Democrats. The board that Berger and others are so at odds with is the one they handpicked.

The board should call off this bungled effort before it hurts the university itself. It should ask Ross to stay in office and take time to reconsider its decision. And when the time comes to select a president, one hopes board members will be sobered by the mistakes they’ve made. The 32 spots on the Board of Governors were viewed as perhaps the most prestigious such positions in the state. But now ... now they’re close to becoming a punchline.

This story was originally published October 16, 2015 at 4:15 PM with the headline "Chaotic search for UNC president strains university’s credibility."