Jenkins: Giving Margaret Spellings a chance to succeed

It’s 1956, and Chapel Hill is abuzz.

There’s an opening, you see, for the office of the president of the University of North Carolina, and the search appears to be closely held among a handful of people. The current president, a business tycoon, has resigned, and as best anyone can determine, no huge formal search has ensued. The faculties of the campuses involved (the system is much smaller) have not been consulted. Trustees are apparently determined to designate their choice, a man without a doctorate who has never before run an institution of any size. He possesses a law degree from UNC-Chapel Hill, and an undergraduate degree in textiles from N.C. State. He is from a small town in western North Carolina and has never walked in the social salons of New York or in the halls of power in Washington.

Shocking, you say? Oh, that’s not all. The individual is only 36 years old. To run the University of North Carolina, which will in fewer than 20 years have 16 institutions in it?

How will the vaunted university, once led by the sainted Frank Porter Graham, ever survive?

And in time, through controversies over athletics (he killed off the fabled Dixie Classic basketball tournament because of gambling) and desegregation (his progressive view was not shared by all) and his defense of liberal faculty members and opposition to attempts to quell free expression (the stupid Speaker Ban law) and a thousand other firestorms large and small, he became the most significant and perhaps the most beloved North Carolinian of the 20th century.

This came from brilliance, humility, a commitment to young people, strong family and a personal integrity that wavered not once in a long life.

A new person now will occupy Bill Friday’s former office space in Chapel Hill. She is Margaret Spellings, who is now facing some criticisms, as she has no graduate degree and no experience in running a university. Some faculty, a few of whom publicly protested her selection once it was done (something of which Bill Friday would not have approved), wanted in on the presidential search, which would have rendered an already chaotic procedure utterly hopeless.

But it is not Margaret Spellings’ fault that the firing of current President Tom Ross, a sound, wise and honorable leader who deserved to carry on, was politically motivated, and it is not her fault that inexperienced Republicans on the UNC Board of Governors made an embarrassing hash of their duty. It is not her fault that GOP lawmakers stuck their noses in the process to try to force their own choice on the board.

Margaret Spellings gained position in politics and as U.S secretary of education under George W. Bush and while her choice may indeed have political overtones, she deserves no prejudgment by faculty members who ought to care about fairness or Democrats who dismiss all those associated with the former President Bush.

She also doesn’t deserve to be used by state House Democrats to raise campaign money because of her Bush connections, but that unsavory maneuver is already in progress. Not very classy, to put it mildly.

Neither she nor anyone will ever stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Bill Friday in the university’s history, though there have been splendid successors in Dick Spangler, Molly Broad, Erskine Bowles and Ross. What Spellings does deserve is at the least a chance to make her own mark.

This story was originally published October 29, 2015 at 4:51 AM with the headline "Jenkins: Giving Margaret Spellings a chance to succeed."