Cal State Official to Head N. Carolina University System

Molly Corbett Broad, the second-in-command in the California State University system, was selected Wednesday to lead the University of North Carolina’s 16-campus system.

The university’s board of governors approved Broad, 56, as the fifth president of the system that has grown to include all of the state’s public colleges with a combined enrollment of 153,000. She will be the first woman and first non-North Carolina native to take that post.

After the closed-door appointment, Broad said the North Carolina job was “one of the very few opportunities outside of California” that would entice her to leave her job as Cal State’s executive vice chancellor.

When she takes office this summer, Broad will run her own university system, elevate her salary from $162,888 to $240,000 and move into a luxurious Chapel Hill home reserved for the university president.

“It’s a terrific honor for her and it’s an enormous blow for us,” said Cal State University Chancellor Barry Munitz. “Here is a non-North Carolina person without a doctorate, who they realize can run a major research university system.”

He described Broad as his “alter ego,” who as chief operating officer handled day-to-day operations of the 22-campus, 350,000-student university system, freeing him to work on strategic issues.

Munitz said he has not decided whether to ask Cal State’s Board of Trustees to begin searching for Broad’s replacement or restructure its top management to possibly eliminate the position.

Broad, who was raised in Pennsylvania, came to Cal State in 1992 as a senior vice chancellor and became its No. 2 executive a year later. Before that, she was the top executive of University of Arizona and an administrator at Syracuse University.

She said she never completed her doctorate in economics at Syracuse because job opportunities continued to come her way.

James E. Holshouser Jr., the former North Carolina governor who led the nationwide search, said many assumed that the university would look for a president with strong ties to the state.

“Only the emergence of a truly exceptional candidate would override that,” Holshouser said. “And that’s exactly what happened.”

In an unrelated move, the UC Board of Regents on Thursday appointed UC San Francisco Medical School Dean Haile T. Debas to be interim chancellor of the San Francisco campus. Debas agreed to serve a year as interim chancellor while UC officials search for a permanent replacement for Joseph B. Martin, who is headed to Harvard University as its medical dean.