The UNC Board of Governors has decided not to make any changes  in its leadership for the next two years as it grapples with massive budget cuts and a national search for a new president to replace Erskine Bowles.

Re-elected Friday by the other members were chairwoman Hannah D. Gage, vice-chairman Peter D. Hans and board secretary Estelle "Bunny" Sanders. 

Gage, who lives in Wilmington, joined the board in 2001 and in 2008 became the first woman to lead it when she was elected to her first two-year term as chairwoman.

The board oversees the state's 16-campus public university system. The state legislature, which faces a revenue shortfall this year of $800 million, is pondering whether to trim the system's budget by as much as $175 million. That, says university officials, would cause serious damage to the system, which has already suffered  $575 million in cuts in recent years.

After she was elected, Gage quipped that she had been told by several people that no one else would want the job, given the challenges the system faces.

Gage is a retired broadcast executive, and a 1975 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill. She is a former chairwoman of of the UNC-Wilmington Board of Trustees and members of her family have ties to a host of system universities, served as trustees of three different campuses and on the board of the UNC system when it had six campuses.

Hans is a 1991 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a senior policy advisor with the law firm Nelson Mullins Riley and Scarborough in Raleigh.

Sanders is mayor of the Town of Roper and a graduate of Howard University.