CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Margaret Spellings — a former education secretary to George W. Bush — resigned Friday as president of North Carolina’s public university system, ending a tenure marked by cultural controversies and a hard-edged governing board that didn’t choose her.

The University of North Carolina Board of Governors approved a separation package for Spellings, paying her more than $500,000 when she leaves as president of the 17-campus system in March, three years after she started.

Spellings got the job after the Republican-majority North Carolina university board in 2015 forced out her predecessor, who got the job under Democratic control. But the board has almost entirely been replaced since Spellings arrived and new members appointed by the legislature, several of them brashly conservative former lawmakers themselves, have sought to disrupt a university system that had been seen as self-satisfied and elitist.

Associated Press