At first, I was not enthusiastic about the choice of Margaret Spellings as president of the University of North Carolina system last year. Since she was a former secretary of education I thought she would either be something of a figurehead or else an “expert” breezily bringing Washington, D.C., knowledge to the Old North State.

I was wrong. At least based on her first five months in office, she seems to have taken the helm, avoiding the newcomer’s weak “I’m-going-to-listen-to-all-the-constituents“ approach and instead competently negotiating the shoals of the state legislature, the governing board, and university faculty and staff. She has done this even though her tenure began with loud student protests (I don’t know quite what the students objected to except that she was a Republican).

Her major appointments have been solid (such as hiring Andrew P. Kelly from the American Enterprise Institute) — paid for by reorganizing her office and laying off some employees.

I respect her for championing, in an interview with Inside Higher Ed yesterday, the controversial $500-tuition law just passed by the North Carolina legislature, calling it an “innovation…and a game-changer.” (I too have championed it, twice.)

She has an attitude that might bring success. As she told IHE, she wants to expand accountability measures for each campus (the process is called performance funding, which is much talked about but rarely implemented well). She said that accountability measures could be an alternative to micromanagement by the governing board or the federal government.

The hiring process that brought Spellings to UNC was a controversial one, overseen by John Fennebresque, chairman of the UNC Board of Governors, who had a stormy tenure. But if Spellings turns out to be as good a helmsman as she seems to be, Fennebresque will have a lot to be proud of.