Margaret Spellings, whose commission on higher education as Bush 43’s Education Secretary accomplished nothing and whose tenure as president of the University of North Carolina system was at best uneventful, has just announced her resignation from that post.
That opens the door to a governance change that she opposed, namely giving the UNC Board of Governors its own independent staff. The state legislature seems to have given that the green light and as the Martin Center’s Jay Schalin explains in today’s piece, bringing that idea to fruition now would be a good idea.
Why would that matter? Schalin explains, “the creation of a new staff position loyal to the board alone represents a major shift in power. The system administration has long been able to manipulate the board by controlling the information and setting the agenda; the board staff member, who should be a senior policy person, will inevitably disrupt those dynamics.”
To put it another way, the Board could stop being potted plants and exert the oversight it’s supposed to if it had its own sources of information.
Schalin points to a small but revealing instance showing why the Board needs its own staff. A person was recently tabbed as the new chancellor at Western Carolina, but one Board member suspected that his academic credentials were bogus. He had to do his own digging to discover that that was indeed the case. Even though the candidate admitted to falsifying his credentials and had to step down, the Board member took heat for overstepping his authority.
Verifying facts about candidates for such positions, Schalin argues, should be among the duties of an independent staff.
Schalin concludes, “Higher education is entering a period of transition and volatility; the public is starting to wake up to negative trends that have been occurring for years. The board must be more involved than in the past—they are the part of the UNC system governance that is closest to the people of the state. The greater the awareness possessed by those in charge, the better. The Board of Governors needs its own source of information.”
He’s correct, and it would be wise for other states to do the same thing.