CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — The chancellor who has led the country’s oldest public university for four years will step down next year in the wake of scandals involving academic fraud, improper travel spending by fundraisers and special treatment for athletes.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp will step down in June after the academic year and return to teaching in the chemistry department, where he had been a longtime professor and former chairman, the school said Monday.
Thorp met privately Friday with the Board of Governors overseeing the 17-campus state university system, and several members said afterward they thought Thorp was doing a great job. Thorp’s successes included the attracting $767 million in research funds last year, putting the school among the Top 10 U.S. public universities for attracting federal research funding, board members said.
Thorp said in an interview Monday that he decided to resign on Sunday, stressing that it was his choice and that he wasn’t pressured by the board.
“They were supportive of me and appreciative of how hard everything’s been. But over the weekend I’ve had a chance to reflect on kind of where we are,” Thorp said.
In the latest black eye for the university in a two-year series of scandals, the mother of former Tar Heels basketball star Tyler Hansbrough and top university fundraiser Matt Kupec resigned their development jobs last week under suspicion of improper travel spending. An internal audit Thorp launched is checking whether the pair used money from donors to travel to cities where Tami Hansbrough’s younger son Ben was playing basketball for Notre Dame.
“I’ve had a lot of things that have happened over the past two years that have been difficult, things that Carolina’s never really faced before,” Thorp said. “A lot of them came from policies that we’ve had in place for a long time that weren’t really adequate to catch things that needed to be caught. I also trusted some people who didn’t do things the right way. And I think that whenever I found out about these things I took action, put reforms in place and made sure that the things that happened make this a better university.”
