Written by Barbara Durr, Asheville Watchdog.
The search for the next chancellor for the University of North Carolina Asheville (UNCA) is the first under a new state policy that reduces the involvement of UNCA’s faculty and local trustees, while giving greater control over the search process to the State Assembly-appointed UNC Board of Governors and UNC System president.
The next chancellor of UNCA — North Carolina’s only designated public liberal arts and sciences university, serving about 3,000 students — will be the fifth person to lead the university in eight years. The current interim chancellor, Kimberly van Noort, took over after Nancy J. Cable departed in December 2022.
“Our goal is to successfully complete our search by the end of the fall 2023 semester,” with the selection of the top three candidates by the search committee by mid-October, and the new chancellor taking office in January 2024, the UNC System president, Peter Hans, said.
Hans, a former Republican congressional aide, GOP political consultant and registered lobbyist, appointed the 13-member UNCA search advisory committee, which first met in July. He named Roger Aiken, interim chairman of the UNCA Board of Trustees and a former member of the Board of Governors, to be chairman of the search committee. Aiken is also a Republican.
Previously, search committees typically had about 20 members and the system president and Board of Governors were excluded from participating. The members of those more locally controlled search committees were chosen by each university’s Board of Trustees, in consultation with the system president.
The new policy for chancellor searches was changed by the Board of Governors on May 25, and it limits search committees to 13 members, including the president of the system and two Board of Governors members. The committee membership is also now solely determined by the system’s president.
The previous chancellor search committee at UNCA included five faculty members. The current committee assembled by Hans has only one faculty representative, Dee Eggers, UNCA Faculty Senate chair and associate professor of environmental studies.
Across the whole of the UNC System “faculty are paying close attention” to the search at UNCA, said Wade Maki, a professor at UNC Greensboro and chair of the Faculty Assembly that represents all UNC faculty.
“There’s more system influence over the search committee,” said Louis Bissette, a member of the UNCA Board of Trustees and a former member and chair of the Board of Governors. “It’ll be very interesting to see how the influence of the system plays out.”
“Politicizing the search process”
In North Carolina’s polarized political environment, the UNCA search is seen as a test of the new, more centralized control by the State Assembly in Raleigh of chancellor selection — what Kevin McClure, associate professor of higher education at UNC Wilmington, called a “kind of politicizing of the search process.”
“A larger trend in higher education,” McClure said, is that “typically Republican state legislatures and governing boards interfere in search processes, and in some cases use higher education leadership as a type of spoils system for political allies.”
“For some,” McClure told Asheville Watchdog, “this is an effort to remake higher education, which they see as being too woke and too invested in identity politics.”
Aiken, the UNCA trustee, disputed that assessment.
“I don’t really see that there’s much of a place for politics to get into it if we do our job and we listen to our stakeholders and we do the right thing for the university,” Aiken told Asheville Watchdog.
The concern about potential political influence stems from how the cascade of leadership choices is made in the UNC System, given the domination of the North Carolina General Assembly by the Republican party.
The 24 voting members of the UNC Board of Governors are elected by the General Assembly, where Republicans have a veto-proof majority in both the House and Senate. The Board of Governors in turn chooses the president of the UNC System.
Each university’s board of trustees consists of 13 members: eight chosen by the Board of Governors; four directly by the General Assembly; and one representative chosen from student government.
Aiken said he believes the presence of Hans on the UNCA search committee is a “tremendous benefit.” He said the previous more campus-driven searches “operated in their own bubble,” and when local trustees, faculty and students picked their top three candidates to recommend to the system president, “the president didn’t have any input or any knowledge of what had happened in the process.”
After Hans and the other members of the UNCA search committee choose their top three candidates, they send that slate for approval to the whole UNCA Board of Trustees. If the Trustees approve, Hans then chooses a single finalist and recommends that person to the Board of Governors, which has final approval.
Hans served on the UNC Board of Governors from 2003 to 2014, and was chairman of the board from 2012 to 2014.
The loss of local autonomy
“The process is trending toward more centralized control of institutions, and I’ve always been on the other side of that issue,” Bissette, a former Republican mayor of Asheville, said regarding the whole UNC System of 17 campuses, which collectively serve some 240,000 students.
“The local people have a better feel for the needs of the institution than people sitting in Raleigh,” Bissette said. “One strength of the system was the autonomy of local institutions, and I think we’re losing that.”
The policy change for chancellor searches was based on research by the Board of Governors Committee on Strategic Initiatives, which analyzed the policies of 31 state systems and found that 22 explicitly included the system leader or system board members, but only seven included both.
Notably, two of those seven did not allow the president to vote. The UNC Board of Governors chose to include both its members and the president, and allow all to vote.
While McClure, the UNC Wilmington professor of higher education, said he recognized a logic to having the UNC System president engaged in the search process — given that the president oversees all university chancellors — the new search policy “in many ways continues a pattern of involvement and interference in some cases by the Board of Governors.”
After multiple controversies within the UNC System for more than a decade, Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, created a bipartisan Commission on the Governance of Public Universities last year. The commision produced seven recommendations in June to better mirror the diversity of the state which “is not reflected in the public university governance today.”
The commission was created because of concern that university boards are “plagued by undue political influence and bureaucratic meddling” that hinder effective university governance, according to the news release from the governor’s office last November.
The recommendations, which included enlarging the Board of Governors to 32 members to ensure regional representation on that body, have yet to make it to the agenda of the Board of Governors, according to Jane Stancill, spokeswoman for the UNC System.
One faculty member, one student
In addition to Aiken, Hans, and two Board of Governors members — Carolyn Coward, an Asheville attorney with the Van Winkle law firm, and Joel Ford of Charlotte — the UNCA search advisory committee consists of:
- Alondra Barrera-Hernandez, UNCA Student Government Association president
- Karen Brown, secretary of UNCA’s Board of Trustees
- Tim Burns, UNCA Staff Council chair-elect and information security officer at UNCA
- Janet Cone, UNCA senior administrator for university enterprises and athletics director
- Philip Dubois, chancellor emeritus of UNC Charlotte
- Dee Eggers, UNCA Faculty Senate chair and associate professor of environmental studies
- Peter Heckman, member of UNCA’s Board of Trustees
- Jim Peterson, member of UNCA’s Board of Trustees
- Steve Tuttle, UNCA Alumni Association Board of Directors chair-elect
Eggers, who has been at UNCA since 1999 and who is the lone faculty representative on the search committee, told Asheville Watchdog that shared governance — a century-old policy that refers to the participation of faculty in key decision-making to manage a university — has been decreasing.
“Shared governance in the U.S. higher education system is credited as being one of the key features that makes ours the best system in the world,” Eggers said. “From personal experience, I can say that there is less faculty involvement in senior leadership committees and decision making than there was last time I chaired the senate nine years ago.”
“Involvement of faculty in decision making can really help head off disaster, especially faculty with long institutional memories” said Eggers.
Aiken said that his intention for the search committee is “to get as much input as we can” from faculty.
Eggers said that sidelining of faculty is not just occurring at UNCA.
“At Faculty Assembly, representatives from many institutions say they have observed reduced shared governance on their campuses,” Eggers said. “Erosion of shared governance is part of a larger context of concentrating power at higher and higher levels.”
Final choice expected soon
Another factor that has raised questions about the UNCA search is its timeline. Hans told the committee that the intention was to have the committee select the top three candidates by mid-October.
“Based on my research and my work with search consultants, they would characterize this as an incredibly aggressive timeline for a chancellor or president search,” McClure said. He said he wished them the best of luck but said the rapidity of the search may raise questions “about whether they’ve [already] got somebody in mind.”
Stancill, spokeswoman for the UNC System, said, “The timeline is not unusual. In 14 chancellor searches in the UNC System in the past six years, the median search length was 190 days.”
In this case, the committee kicked off on July 24. The final approval is expected between November and December, well short of the median search length.
The question of whether there may be a candidate in mind, perhaps interim chancellor Van Noort, arises partly because of the expectation that a new chancellor would start in January, midway through the academic year.
“Normally, people in president or chancellor positions don’t leave mid-year,” Bissette said. “This is out of sync with that tradition.”
Asked about McClure’s speculation that there might be a preferred candidate waiting in the wings, Aiken said, “If there was a candidate in mind, I wouldn’t be working as hard as I am.”
He also said that Hans told him that, if needed, the search could be extended.
The search committee is making an effort to gather input from the campus, alumni, and the wider community on what they believe is needed in a new chancellor. It has organized both online and in-person listening sessions.
Given the frequent turnover in the UNCA chancellor’s office, Steve Tuttle, who sits on the search committee representing UNCA alumni, said in one listening session that he “is looking for a long-term commitment, a 7- to 10-year commitment, a long-term vision and long-term execution.”
The committee also invited anyone to submit their views about a new chancellor in an online survey. Michael Strysick, the UNCA chief of marketing and communications, said, “We now have 500 total submissions, so I am confident in saying that there has been significant interest in providing feedback to the Search Advisory Committee.”
The next chancellor will find the job challenging even beyond issues of trust in the fairness of the search process, including fundraising, decreasing enrollment and retention of students, and increasing departures of faculty, many of whom have left in recent years due to salaries that don’t match Asheville’s high cost of living, and frustration with the churn of top leadership.
Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and surrounding communities. Barbara Durr is a former correspondent for The Financial Times of London. Contact her at [email protected]. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/donate.