Critics of UNC system mourn Fox on the run.

• Author: Cline, Ned
• Position: North Carolina State University Chancellor,Mary Anne Fox, resigns

As one of the nation's top physical organic chemists, N.C. State University Chancellor Marye Anne Fox knows a thing or two about chain reactions, and her decision to pack her bags for California set off a conflagration in Raleigh and Chapel Hill. When her backers blamed her departure on lack of support from her boss--UNC President Molly Broad--politicos pounced, citing the loss as another reason to rev up restructuring the entire university system.

This, of course, is not the first time legislators have gone after a UNC president. But its implications go beyond the failed relationship of two ambitious, tough-minded administrators. Broad bashers want to dilute her power and that of her governing board.

A legislative committee is considering stripping the president's power to choose the chancellors of the 16 campuses. It's also mulling shrinking the Board of Governors from 32 to 15 members, changing the way they're selected and lengthening their terms--plus moving the system's headquarters from Chapel Hill. "The offices should be right here in Raleigh," says Sen. Tony Rand, the powerful Fayetteville Democrat who co-chairs the panel and, without much notice, has sponsored a bill to bring about these changes.

"That move would be a disaster for the university and its independence," says William Friday, who held Broad's job from 1956 to 1986. "Step by step, politics is becoming more involved in university matters. That is both unhealthy and unwise."

The irony is that Broad hand-picked Fox as State's chancellor in 1998. Fox, then the University of Texas at Austin's vice president for research, was the top choice of only one member of the search committee. She wasn't one of its top two recommendations. Broad insisted on a third--Fox--whom she appointed. A member of the National Academy of Science and of President Bush's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Fox was considered for a White House job in 2001.

After she accepted the presidency of the University of California at San Diego this spring, State trustee C. Richard Vaughn vented in a letter that he sent each member of the Board of Governors. "She didn't want to leave and was looking for a much longer career at N.C. State," says Vaughn, chairman of John S. Clark Co., a Mount Airy-based general contractor. "But she got no support from the top after the first six months. What happened to her is despicable and should never have happened."

"She is a champion chancellor," says Peaches...