How Strategic Chancellor Selections Are Shaping the UNC System’s Future

Earlier this month, the UNC System announced Kevin Howell as NC State University’s next chancellor. Howell is the 10th chancellor of a UNC System institution appointed during UNC System President Peter Hans’s tenure.

Though Howell has held leadership roles at NC State for nearly 20 years, he’s not an academic in the traditional sense. That’s part of a trend in the UNC System, and a good one.

Hans is a sophisticated leader who often avoids public confrontation. It’s an ideal style for the head of a complex organization with potential friction points in politics, business, and academia. His impact on the System, especially at the all-important chancellor level, runs deep.

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The core narrative of new chancellors at UNC System institutions really isn’t who they are. It’s how they were selected.

Central to that selection process is a relatively new phenomenon: a direct role for the UNC System president. This doesn’t get talked about much, but one can argue it’s the most important UNC System policy shift in years.

Hans enjoys far more influence over chancellor selections than his predecessors did. Historically, university boards of trustees would lead a search process that featured members from every last constituency in the university but none from the System. That committee would winnow down a large pool of candidates to at least three and put them through to the UNC System president to choose from. Given the visibility of the chancellor’s role and the risk that a failed search would tarnish the institution’s reputation, the deck was always stacked in favor of picking one of the candidates that the President had almost no role in identifying.

The weakness in this model is obvious: if the UNC System is to be a cohesive operation that prioritizes the state’s interests in addition to those of its individual universities, then a siloed chancellor selection process could only be improved by adding input from the central office. That’s why most other neighboring public systems, like Georgia and Florida, reserve a prominent role for System governing boards and executive officers.

The Board of Governors revised the selection process in recent years, and the president now has an active role on search committees, WUNC reported in 2023. Search advisory committees now also include a current or former chancellor and key members of the Board of Governors in the deliberations. Hans now creates a list of qualifications, serves on the search advisory committee, interviews candidates, and negotiates employment terms – terms that include the same incentive compensation criteria that governs Hans’s pay.

Hans’s authority over campus leadership decisions has yielded a (growing) slate of chancellors who broadly reflect a common vision for leadership within the UNC System. What’s more, those chancellors do not come from strictly academic backgrounds. Yes, education is the core mission of a university. But chancellors do not stand in front of lecture halls: They run a business – a big, complex business with many different constituencies and plenty of politics.

So who are they? Here are the five most recent chancellor appointments:

NC State University | Kevin Howell (March 2025)

Howell graduated from NC State and has a law degree from UNC-Chapel Hill. He served in external-facing leadership roles at NC State for a combined 15 years, and most recently as chief of external affairs for UNC Health and UNC School of Medicine.

Appalachian State University | Dr. Heather Norris (February 2025)

Dr. Norris, who served as interim chancellor for much of the past year, has more of a traditional academic background, starting out as a professor at Penn State and then App State. She advanced from faculty to administration, first as dean of the Walker School of Business and then as provost and executive vice chancellor.

UNC-Chapel Hill | Lee Roberts (August 2024)

Roberts’ resume is  among the least “traditional” for a chancellor in the UNC System, though it’s no less impressive than any of his counterparts. Roberts co-founded SharpVue Capital, an investment firm. He served as state budget director under former Gov. Pat McCrory, and also served on the UNC Board of Governors and State Board of Community Colleges.

North Carolina Central University | Dr. Karrie Dixon (June 2024)

Dr. Dixon is viewed as something of a rock star in higher education administration. She served for years on staff at the UNC System, including as chief student affairs officer and vice president for academic and student affairs. From 2018 to 2024, Dr. Dixon led Elizabeth City State University, where she helped bring the university back from the brink of closure.

Winston-Salem State University | Dr. Bonita J. Brown (May 2024)

Dr. Brown has a lengthy resume in university administration, serving in various leadership roles at Winston-Salem State, UNC-Greensboro, and UNC School of the Arts before becoming chief strategy officer, chief of staff, and interim president at Northern Kentucky University.

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An investment firm co-founder; a ubiquitous and respected external affairs leader; a former chancellor; a chief strategy officer; a former professor: Such is the diversity of backgrounds in just the five most recent chancellors selected under Hans’s leadership.

There’s a broad feeling that the UNC System’s policy change to empower Hans will lead to a more consistent and cohesive leadership cohort at constituent universities.

Similar backgrounds – that is, lengthy careers in academia – do not guarantee similar outlooks or performance. Hans and the Board of Governors are diversifying the types of experience that chancellors bring to System leadership, and in so doing they’re unifying the System’s direction.

What is that direction, exactly? We’ll leave you with this excerpt from a speech Hans delivered to Morehead scholars in 2024:

“First and foremost, it’s our job to cultivate deep curiosity and a willingness to hold complex, nuanced ideas. In other words, it’s our job to educate – our first and most important mission.
 
Staying true to our purpose, our mission is the single most important thing we can do in a polarized era. That isn’t easy – there is constant pressure and temptation to take political positions, and there are plenty of people both inside and outside the university who want to see us become a combatant in the culture wars – but remembering our role and sticking to it is the way we keep public trust. It’s critical for a public university to maintain public support.”