By Mary Sue Coleman, PhD
President, Association of American Universities
As a proud alumna of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), I have watched with dismay as the UNC Board of Governors (BOG) has plunged one of the world’s most respected institutions of higher learning into a crisis. This is the institution that in recent years garnered two Nobel Prizes for its faculty, helped sequence the human genome, developed new models for human disease and new drugs to fight cancer. The BOG has driven out three distinguished leaders in recent years: President Thomas Ross in 2016, President Margaret Spellings in 2018, and Chancellor Carol Folt in 2019. I have a vested interest, both personal and professional, in UNC. As a 1969 graduate with a doctorate in biochemistry, former president of two Big Ten universities, a veteran of governing boards of three colleges and universities, and current president of the Association of American Universities which represents America’s leading research universities, I am deeply concerned about how public universities like UNC are governed.
The mounting pressures on public higher education are taking a dangerous toll on our best institutions and their leaders in ways that call for concerted and thoughtful reevaluation of institutional oversight. The boards of these institutions have a responsibility to ensure that they are working to empower the institutions’ leadership, not undermine it. UNC is hardly an outlier but rather is the latest in a troubling trend of poor board governance. In the past decade AAU member institutions in Virginia, Texas, Oregon, and beyond have struggled to maintain their identity and mission, provide the highest quality education, manage internal conflict, and combat challenges to their institutional autonomy.
Public higher education is one of our national treasures, but the problems these institutions face are complex. Our universities are dealing with long-term declines in state support, with demands to do more with less money, and with appropriate calls for greater public accountability. They face real and valid concerns about cost and accessibility for lower income students. Perhaps the most troubling issue is the pressure of competing political and ideological forces that push research institutions and their leaders to focus on ever-narrowing career preparation. This approach is damaging to the education and research required of universities to serve society and deliver economic benefit of new discoveries. Universities are the platform from which new and unforeseen careers are invented.
At the AAU, we understand and respect the authority of states to oversee and govern their public institutions. However, precipitous departures of respected academic leaders make it exceedingly difficult to attract and retain the quality of leaders that an institution such as UNC has long enjoyed on its many campuses and has a right to expect. The pattern of disorderly transition generated by the UNC BOG appears to be grounded in historical grievances. Focusing on such grievances impairs the balanced leadership expected from a university system that was once a superstar of American higher education.
It is more crucial than ever that governing boards and leaders in higher education work together to advance their core missions: educating citizens to be innovators, entrepreneurs, artists, teachers, doctors, scientists, and more; finding cures for diseases; fueling job growth; ensuring national security; and making our communities attractive places to work, live, and celebrate.
Universities are not complaisant places, nor should they be. They are the ground zero of democracy and by design are messy and often quarrelsome, especially when students and scholars generate new knowledge and pursue the truth. The public is often unnerved by open debate in universities when serious and contentious issues are confronted. Likewise, the public can be enraged when university researchers discover inconvenient truths. And yet ours are institutions that have delivered countless cures and discoveries, from vaccines and MRIs to the internet and smartphones. America’s research universities are the envy of the world.
It is the job of governing boards to understand that these universities invariably question what we think we know. Governing boards must not only protect but also promote an environment where we can challenge current knowledge. Because without intellectual challenge, there is no genuinely “higher” education or human progress. Boards do not need to “resolve” debate. Universities do so themselves by encouraging the competition of ideas even if resolution of debate may take years or decades.
Establishing appropriate governance principles and practices is essential to this mission. Governing boards should counsel and empower leaders and ensure that they have the resources to execute their vision for the university.
The people of North Carolina would be well served by a BOG committed to “making things work” with UNC presidents and chancellors. The existing pattern of revolving door leadership only harms the institution and contributes to the undermining of public universities at a critical moment when institutional trust is needed. It is time for the University of North Carolina to lead again and be a model of good governance.
Jane S Gabin says
I, also, am an alumna of UNC-Chapel Hill, with a PhD in English. I share Dr. Coleman’s dismay with its BOG. But I am not sure that UNC has always been “a model of good governance.” Admittedly, my example is very personal and small compared with the much larger issues that it has dealt with. My husband, already retired from teaching, was working with the College of Arts & Sciences as a part-time academic advisor for a few hours a week. He was successful at this and was the only one in his office with institutional knowledge. He was abruptly dismissed from this position in 2014. This was so clearly a discriminatory act, but it is so costly to sue. The entire episode has left me with a bitter feeling. What a cruel way to conclude a 50-year record of service to the University!
Carolyn Goldfinch says
Excellent advice. My hope is that our BOG have the insight and motivation to follow your suggestions. I am really quite concerned about our state.
Shirley Ort says
Thank you for this insightful and compelling analysis. Spot on. Like many North Carolinians, I value this great asset of ours and look forward to better days ahead.
John A McCann says
I agree unfortunately this university and the country have been taken over by right wing zealots who have no vision or aspirations make our institutions an envy or shinning light. They just want to play how low can you go politics at the expense of people hope and the future. It saddens me greatly how backward this country has gone where people no longer stand up for truth and what is right.
James V. Carmichael, Jr. says
Very thoughtful statement. I have watched this struggle over the past decade with alarm. We need sane voices and minds more than ever among all of these—ideological? monetary? quasi-political—struggles. As an alum and retiring faculty member, I have faith we can survive the current state of disorder.
Ivy says
I too am a graduate of the University of North Carolina. I am in total agreement with the statements of Dr. Coleman. The BOG needs to allow those chosen to do their jobs without political overreach and interference. UNC has been a premier public university in the US and I would like to keep it there.
Brent Milgrom says
Dear Ms. PHD,
I could not disagree more with your openion.
Brent Milgrom, Sr.
Francis Borkowski says
Dr. Coleman has stated the issues very well. As a former chancellor at Appalachian State
University, part of the job I dreaded most was attending BOG meetings. I was told one time, “You’re doing so well at our salvation army campus.” There was little understanding
and no sensitivity to the students and constituents we served.
Ellen de Graffenreid says
Wow, that’s horrifying.
As a double UNC Alumna and generous annual donor, I appreciate your words and those of Dr. Coleman.
Helen Redwine says
I agree with every word in Mary Sue Coleman’s thoughtful essay about the state of affairs at UNC and the disgraceful actions of the BOG.
I’m signing up to receive the Latest NC Education News for higher education.
Hopefully, changes will be effected in the near future to allow our university system to again reflect the values that have made our university highly respected for many decades and discard the political micro-mismanagement currently in charge today.
B. Lee Cooper, Ph.D. says
Dr. Coleman,
Well said. The BOG members should be supporters and encouragers of Presidents, not negative nellies who pursue their own ideological ends at the expense of open discussion and fierce campus debates. As a former Provost and University President, I relied heavily upon the Board leadership for guidance. But I relied even more heavily upon the faculty for high quality teaching. Your words of support for higher education are particularly meaningful when the American public faces the challenges of Federal government run by a reading-adverse, idea-empty, racially-biased, and educationally-challenged idiot. Let’s watch the University of North Carolina regain is status as a top-flight teaching and research institution. Hopefully, the BOG will become a more helpful source of this rebirth by standing strongly behind a discerning President.
Bill Atkins says
Thank you for a through discussion of this delicate and important topic. Hopefully there will be some turnover and then some clarity will return to the board. It is amazing how narrow thinking
leaders can be so destructive.
George Dewitt Armstrong says
Wow… now blaming BOG for the UNC Liberal leadership failures… Quit electing leadership with political agendas… Period… UNC should not be partisan yet they openly are… Lead, teach rule-of-law, and tolerance… not mob rule, and intolerance…Teach critical analysis not just critical… Teach History not erasing history. I am glad for the recent BOG change in UNC leadership… There was an obvious personal agenda against the Statue versus leadership maintaining control. The lack of control was not the BOG it was the chancellor.. This article looks to be more of the same blame game by academia … Teach values and judgement… UNC does not have to subscribe to the Confederacy to maintain a statue just because a bunch of hoodlums say they do…
Neal Konneker says
Huh? Lots of principled sounding rhetoric but what exactly is she proposing?
It sounds like she is calling for the Board of Governors (BOG) to stop interfering with the University Presidents and Chancellors as they continue to ruin the universities.
Most universities have long since become indoctrination camps rather institutions of higher learning and open debate. They have also been grossly mismanaged as evidenced by the fact that the cost of a college degree has gone up faster than the rate of inflation despite the fact that rapid technological advances have made most things cheaper. Universities have expanded their armies of administration bureaucrats who have little or nothing to do with educating students and whose real purpose is to brainwash students and staff into having “correct thoughts”. Offices of diversity and sustainability come to mind. Universities are in serious trouble. If they continue as indoctrination camps rather than teaching students the skills they need to get good jobs (or even to think critically) students and parents will eventually realize they are being ripped off going it to debt for worthless degrees and will find better alternatives. The BOG is certainly culpable in having allowed this to happen. But the three people Dr. Coleman mentions were part of the problem rather than the solution. I would like to the see the BOG take a stronger hand and return the Universities to their original purpose of teaching students how to think critically rather than telling them what to think.
paul rowe says
If President Spelling was forced out she sure got a sweet golden parachute for her limited tenure and overall lack of achievements. It is difficult to see what she accomplished for faculty, whose wages have been stagnant for the last decade, while infrastructure has grown. She cashed out. Meanwhile, any faculty who gets hired in the system has to pay all relocation fees, moving expenses, which is making us less competitive and puts an immediate burden on new faculty, or those with families.
Our two senators are heavily funded by the NRA and this network is hardly pro-education. BOG would seem to be in place as an aftermath result of the outrageous gerrymandering by Republicans, and now we see the corruption now disclosed in the 9th district by an ordained minister engaged in criminality to secure votes. Why aren’t Tillis and Burr and the BOG addressing the student loan crisis in some creative ways…? As state funding for higher ed get throttled more is placed on individual and student debt. Of course, there may be a goal to keep an uninformed electorate, and anti-education stance in this state; fyi: there’s a lot less of this “mind control indoctrination” going on in higher ed in this state. It’s an outlier that I’ve rarely witnessed but it appeals to the low information voter and those wanting to dismantle the importance of educated electorate.
Penn Wood says
I am on the board of the Capital Foundation and NC Museum of. History Assoc. which met today. It was the day before the legislature met to decide status of historic Southern statues many erected by UDC members located on our Capital Square that The anarchic group of outsiders got wind of leaving the Square ones in place that they trashed the “Silent Sam ” And Mrs Folt
Looked the other way.
Rick Meyer says
Dr. Coleman makes some excellent points, particularly in encourage us to embrace vigorous debate on every subject rather than marginalizing minority opinions.
Margaret E. Griffin says
Dear Dr. Coleman,
Thank you sincerely for your insights into the problems caused by the Board of Governors in ousting three very capable, hard working, respected leaders. I especially admire Chancellor Folt’s work at UNC, communicated with her on occasion, and appreciated her taking the time to respond to me. I would be SO GRATEFUL if someone would take steps to have Chancellor Folt reinstated. (And perhaps also President Spellings and President Ross–but ESPECIALLY Chancellor Folt.) From my viewpoint, I think there would be MUCH SUPPORT from many grateful North Carolinians, and that it would send a much need message to a Board that needs significant changes anyway. Thank you for your help and leadership in this matter.
Bettie Sue Masters, Ph.D. says
Dear Mary Sue–
Your words hit home as I have now returned to my Alma Mater, Duke, after a 40-year stint at two of the University of Texas medical centers in Dallas and San Antonio. I saw an admired colleague, as Chancellor of the UT System, struggle with the Texas Board of Regents while they meddled in the affairs of the flagship institution, the University of Texas at Austin. He survived this onslaught but it did not make his tasks easy or pleasant as he planned new initiatives for the System. Such politically-motivated activities serve no one, least of all the educational and research missions of these outstanding public institutions.
Thank you for speaking up from your very successful professional experiences and your current position. We need voices such as yours to make a difference, especially in the current anti-intellectual environment in which we find ourselves.
BM Brown says
Our university is better off without Carol Folt. She gave in to mob rule and unlawfully removed a public monument with no legal authority to do so. I spent the last week of my UNC career sleeping on the floor of the Naval Armory on campus to help prevent a similar mob from burning the building down after the Kent State riots.
I’m afraid the next time a building, monument, or professor displeases the mob, similar anarchy will occur. The Board of Governors was right to give Folt the bums rush. BM Brown ‘70
Dr. Mary Wayne Watson says
I could not agree more. Thank you, Mary Sue Coleman, for this insightful article. I can only hope that the NC BOG heeds this warning. The people of the state of NC are suffering with this micromanaging governing board.
I wish you would come to UNC yourself. Think about it.
F. Raine Remsburg says
I share your well expressed concerns, Dr. Coleman. While there may be numerous ways in which your several concerns could be addressed, I suggest one idea intended to change the “Silent Sam” tragedy into a benefit for the University and persons who care.
To educate many and to further UNC’s exemplary national reputation, I invite consideration of an attempt to change the “Silent Sam” controversy into a teaching, possibly a healing, opportunity.
More specifically, I encourage the University to consider making a film in which the history of the controversy and conflicting positions of persons on each side of it are presented calmly and without vitriol in keeping with the “exchange of ideas” philosophy of great universities.
F. Raine Remsburg
’63
Jeremy Blum says
I am a moderate politically and here are my thoughts. The mission statement at the home page of this website is way too vague. Don’t assume most NC residents know all that is going on. Dr. Coleman’s essay is a little more specific but still too vague. As someone looking in from the outside I get the picture that this is a politcal battle between a Republican board and Democratic leadership at the Universities. While I agree with the Democrats on the Confederate statues and Republicans on Capitalism I’m unsure as to whether this is about that or much will need more specifics.