Q&A with UNC's Margaret Spellings

Margaret Spellings’ time as the UNC-system president — in charge of 17 campuses across the state — has been marked by protest, controversy and political speech. Senior writer Natalie Short talked to Spellings about her previous experiences and her past year in office.

The Daily Tar Heel: How has your past experience in education and government informed your current role?

Margaret Spellings: I feel like everything that I’ve done in my career has added up to being prepared and ready to lead the University. Whether it’s having attended a large public university in Houston, that frankly reminds me a whole lot of UNC-Charlotte, or my work at the state legislative level in Texas and at the federal level both at the White House and at the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, it’s just kind of a combo platter of experience that really has brought me here today. I’m just thrilled to be here, because we all know that without education we don’t live in a very thriving, growing place, and as individuals it’s the key to our own long-term success.

DTH: What are some of the things that you’ve done for the University system in the past year that you see as highlights?

MS: I would say the strategic plan that the board unanimously adopted in January, that work was developed through a process of town hall meetings on each and every one of the campuses, an online survey that engendered support and input from thousands of people, active involvement from the faculty and staff, of course my team here, folks around the legislature — it was a very multi-stakeholder process that wrought a very concise but powerful strategic plan that is gonna guide our work over the next five years. Around that, we made a strategic legislative request — the budget’s supposed to come out (Monday) — so I’ll tell you how we did after we see it. But it also serves as a guiding light for the institutions, and they can develop their own strategic plan within this framework.

DTH: Could you explain the strategic plan a bit more specifically?

MS: What we’re doing right now is negotiating institutional-level agreements that everyone can see what part of those strategic goals that they are going to tackle uniquely. Obviously we have 17 institutions that are all very different and so those are a process. We expect to finalize those by the end of the summer, and so our Year 1 will be the ‘17-’18 school year, and it’s a five year plan.

DTH: Was it your own idea to bring in the Boston Consulting Group to evaluate the UNC system?

MS: That’s again, kind of, what you would expect senior level managers or executives to do. Right after I was named, and before I arrived on the scene, I raised some private funds to get the Boston Consulting Group to come and take a look under the hood, see what we did well, where we could improve, where we lacked the right talents, etc. They made some recommendations, I acted on them, for the most part. Any organization is organic, so you’re always reacting to the times. That’s another thing that I would say is an achievement — reducing the size of general administration but also emphasizing the things that are most important and of course those are the things that are derived around the strategic plan.

I’ll give you an example. They observed that we could do more to help develop the professional staff here at general administration and within the University, I mean we’re in the human capital business and as an institution itself, we were under-investing in that. That was an observation that they made. They also observed, and we made a legislative request around this, that we really don’t have the right kind of information systems to really smartly manage the enterprise and frankly to answer the questions that the Board of Governors and the legislature has. We have 17 institutions with a multitude of systems, we’re under leveraging shared services and system platforms. I think we can be smarter about the way we are organized.

DTH: Have there been any specific political hurdles that you had to navigate in order to do your job?

MS: House Bill 2 obviously was a year-long saga that affected the University and many in it, athletic and otherwise. So we were caught in the middle as I’ve said a million times, between the legislature and our government and the constituencies of the Universities. And so I was pleased and relieved that the legislature took action on it. Secondly, I would say I personally didn’t think the DACA Op-Ed was particularly controversial, those were issues that I’ve worked on for decades, and I was pleased to see last week that the Trump administration has heard a number of us among the country, and I’ll be thrilled when they make it a little more permanent.

DTH: How do you feel that your relationships with your adversaries within the UNC system have developed within the past year?

MS: I felt like if people had gotten to know me, they would see that whether we’ve agreed 100 percent at the time or not is really not the issue, it’s that I’m an honest broker and respectful to people in and out of the institution and I think that they’ve gotten to that same place with me and it’s a productive environment. So I think things have really settled down and I’m glad to be here. I hope they’re glad I’m here.

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