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RALEIGH (AP) — The University of North Carolina's governing board elected Davidson College President Tom Ross on Thursday to become head of the state's higher education system, bringing in a former judge with deep ties to state government and UNC.

The Board of Governors unanimously elected Ross, a Greensboro native, six months after Erskine Bowles announced he was stepping down from the job heading the 17-school system of more than 220,000 students. Ross, the Davidson president since August 2007, was the lone recommendation from the board's search committee, which ran a nationwide search and interviewed other candidates.

Ross will take office Jan. 1.

"In the end, that long and winding road led us back to North Carolina to one of our own," board Chairwoman Hannah Gage said before the final vote. "Tom Ross knows from his experience what it takes to run a university, and he knows what it takes to deliver a high quality academic experience."

Ross will leave Davidson, a prestigious liberal arts school north of Charlotte and his alma mater, after only three years. He told the board it will be difficult to leave the Presbyterian school that his two children also attended.

"It is the place that nurtured me and helped me grow as a student and again as its president. It has been an emotional struggle for me to come to my decision," Ross said in accepting the job. "But I do so feel called to this position and to this university."

Bowles, once President Bill Clinton's chief of staff and a former U.S. Senate candidate, announced in February his impending retirement. He's already on to another big task — co-chairing President Barack Obama's national debt commission.

Ross has a distinguished public service and government career that, when combined with his connections to Democratic politics and UNC, made him the leading candidate. He got his law degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, taught at the School of Government, once led the UNC-Greensboro trustee board and served on a special commission recently to examine the UNC system's long-term future.

Then-Gov. Jim Hunt, a Democrat, appointed Ross in 1984 to a Superior Court judgeship, marking him as the state's youngest judge at the time. He served as a judge for 17 years, during which he led a commission that reformed the state's sentencing system so that parole would be abolished and criminals would serve nearly all of their actual sentences.

Ross, 60, already has had experience with one of his new prime relationships — with the Legislature.

As director of the Administrative Office of the Courts from 1999 to 2000, he had to work with General Assembly leaders to try to get more funds for the judicial system's budget. He'll arrive trying to protect a system that's been hit by large budget cuts the past two years, leading campuses to pass along supplemental tuition increases of up to $750 per student to help offset an extra $70 million in spending cuts lawmakers directed them to make. The student body is expected to grow by an additional 50,000 students in the next seven years.

Ross served as executive director for the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation in Winston-Salem for seven years before going to lead Davidson.

Ross will be the fifth president of the university system since a unified governing board for all of North Carolina's public colleges and universities was created in 1971. The UNC system is comprised of 16 university campuses and the N.C. School of Science & Mathematics in Durham for high school students. The president administers the system and carries out the policies of the 32-member board.