Opinion: The UNC Board of Governors needs more perspectives

It has been one week since the Board of Governors appointed Margaret Spellings as the UNC-system president.

Sadly, her appointment is only another transgression in the ideological misgovernance by the overwhelmingly Republican board. Some previous shameful acts of ideological politics include the ousting of President Tom Ross and the discontinuation of the UNC-Chapel Hill Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.

In order to fight this singular political domination of the university system, and to prevent it from happening again, the N.C. General Assembly should limit the number of appointees on the board from any one political party. Perhaps a maximum of 22 members of the board’s 32 voting members could be registered to one political party.

Currently, only one voting member of the board is a Democrat. This represents a lack of ideological diversity and provides the board with a limited scope of perspective.

While creating limits on the amount of members from one party on the board would also limit the power of that party, it would still allow for a majority to form and would not result in the deadlocking of the board.

But also, with this, that majority would be able to hear dissenting opinions, which would hopefully raise points the majority might not consider otherwise.

This would be beneficial to both liberal and conservative boards. Diversity of ideas is imperative if the board ever wishes to be independent of politics and represent the entirety of the state.

The argument persists that the board is a non-partisan entity, so the party of its individual members does not matter. However, the events of the last several years seem to provide a clear refutation to this idea. Time after time, board decisions dominated by conservative perspectives have been rammed through without substantial debate on the board itself in spite of widespread public outcry.

In addition to a diverse array of political ideologies, creating voting positions for real stakeholders in the system is equally as important to creating a better board. While lawyers and business people can have real opinions and feel a deep tie to the university system, they still do not have the same stake in the the system that a professor or school administrator would.

This would help ensure that the wishes of faculty and staff of universities are not only heard but voiced in the form of votes.

Both of these quotas could be enacted by the state legislators when they start their new session in April 2016 and would contribute to making the board more reflective of the state and universities it represents.

This isn’t to say there isn’t value in having non-university employees on the board. North Carolina taxpayers who are not privileged to take part in the UNC system should be represented as well.

This new system would not paralyze governance, instead it would open up new room for debate and representation that should be considered invaluable to a ruling body that claims to be non-political.

It is the job of the board to do what is best for the university system and limiting the discourse of debate to one political ideology is not just harmful, it betrays the principles of democracy. This needs to be corrected.