More than a year after the Nikole Hannah-Jones debacle crystallised concerns over structural racial inequities at the University of North Carolina, the state¡¯s governor is pushing for an overhaul.

Roy Cooper, the governor of North Carolina since 2017, has?announced the creation?of a high-level commission to examine how the state appoints members of its university governing boards and to suggest reforms to that process.

¡°In a state with many racial, ethnic, geographic, political, socio-economic and cultural backgrounds,¡± the governor told a news briefing, ¡°we have an appointed university leadership that doesn¡¯t come close to?reflecting our diversity.¡±

The bipartisan study commission will be led by two former presidents of the 16-campus UNC system, Margaret Spellings and Tom Ross ¨C a Republican and a Democrat ¨C and be asked to produce a report within eight months.

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It follows last year¡¯s highly publicised incident in which the board of trustees at the UNC flagship campus in Chapel Hill delayed a vote on accepting Pulitzer-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones as tenured faculty member, only to watch her give up and?take a similar position?at Howard University.

The board¡¯s effective rejection of Professor Hannah-Jones ¨C it formally approved her?only after months of heavy pressure?¨C was widely attributed to its lack of racial diversity, and was seen as part of a series of such decisions blamed for driving away black students and academics from one of the nation¡¯s top public institutions.

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Yet the governor¡¯s move in creating the study commission, while put forth as bipartisan, seeks to address a problem with clear political dimensions.

Mr Cooper is a Democrat, but the Republican-controlled state legislature ¨C under a law enacted in 2016 when the state also had a Republican governor ¨C holds nearly complete control over choosing members of the UNC system¡¯s statewide board of governors and the boards of trustees at individual universities.

For the sake of North Carolina¡¯s well-regarded public universities, Mr Cooper said, that situation cannot persist. ¡°If this continues much longer,¡± he said, ¡°it will not end well.¡±

It wasn¡¯t clear, however, how the commission could alter the underlying political dynamic. Republicans in charge of the state legislature responded negatively to the governor¡¯s announcement, calling it a partisan attempt to wrest back control of appointments to university governing boards.

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Mr Ross is an attorney and former state judge who led the UNC system from 2011 to 2016. Ms Spellings, a political activist who served as US secretary of education in the George W. Bush administration, led the UNC system from 2016 to 2019.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com