As the changing of the guard approaches in the General Assembly, it is important to reevaluate the direction in which the University of North Carolina system is headed. One issue that the legislators may face deals with the level of administrative salaries.
After Mary Anne Fox announced she would be leaving her position as Chancellor of North Carolina State University for a higher-paying position at University of California-San Diego, UNC system trustees began to panic over the supposed inadequacy of administrative salaries. Discussion about the use of private donations to supplement top administrators’ salaries ensued.
Such a policy had been terminated in the 1990’s due to concerns that it created a disparity among the 16 UNC system campuses. Trustees and board members have agreed recently administrators’ salaries need to be raised, but at the July meeting of the UNC Board of Governors, the proposed use of private donations was struck down unanimously.
That decision has received wide support. In a July 11 News and Observer editorial entitled “Public, literally,” the assertion is made that “allowing donors to kick in for salaries would enable those donors to try to influence policy (even more than they already do).” The article went on to predict that the policy “would widen the gap in the system between schools with affluent alumni.”
The main problem with this logic is that it overestimates the influence problem. At the University of Virginia (which receives only 8 percent of its operating budget from the state legislature, versus 25 percent for Chapel Hill) private funds amounting to nearly $143,000 supplemented the salary of the president of UVA, providing almost half of the total amount. Yet there is no evidence that any or all of those private donors have become the “powers behind the throne.”
Furthermore, why does it really matter how large the difference in pay between the chancellors of the various campuses is? How exactly would it damage UNC-Pembroke, for example, if Chancellor Moeser’s pay were augmented?
The idea that a pay raise for administrators is needed apparently has been swallowed whole by the UNC Board of Governors. At its July meeting, the BOG unanimously agreed that the top university administrators must now receive salaries that rank among the 25th percentile of “peer” institutions. This means that Chancellor James Moeser of UNC-Chapel Hill and system President Molly Broad may each see a nearly $50,000 pay raise.
But what is so crucial about paying top administrators at that particular level? Chancellors and administrators might still choose to depart for a higher paying offer. In any case, replacing any who choose to leave with equally competent people has never been terribly hard. This salary boost seems to be a solution in search of a problem.
With the state budget still in the red, additional spending on administrative salaries just so we can say that we’re “keeping up with the Joneses” is hard to justify.
The Board of Governors wishes to compete with peer universities on one hand, but thinks that a policy successfully instituted by peer universities would corrupt the system. Furthermore, they think that the taxpayer should bear the cost of what amounts to an image-building endeavor. All of that fails to address the real issue. North Carolina schools suffer from the same problem that most universities currently allow — an inefficient administrative system.
The job of a leader is to increase performance and productivity. The duty of a university is to educate. Therefore, logically, an administrative leader should be hired because he can raise educational standards and improve the academic environment on campus. Sadly, those considerations rarely matter. Most administrators are chosen because of their money raising ability, their devotion to politically correct ideas (especially the quest for ever more “diversity”), or both.
In a February 17 article by The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, Professor Thomas Reeves suggested a solution. When searching for new administrators, he advised, universities should place one ad through several media outlets. That ad would inform applicants that “the compensation package will not surpass the highest salary paid to a professor of philosophy.” Furthermore, the chancellor or president will be “required to spend at least ten hours a week talking with faculty and students.” If these suggestions aren’t extreme enough, Reeves goes on to say that viable candidates will need to be “widely published authors” and before hiring will need to “spell out exactly how many courses in the campus catalogue should be eliminated.”
Reeves is getting at something important. Administrators should be chosen first and foremost because of their devotion to academic excellence.
Instead of arbitrarily raising salaries, the UNC system could develop a comprehensive system to evaluate academic performance among undergraduates. They could then give administrative bonuses according to the academic performance of the administrator’s university. Whether the money is private or public, the policy would at least put the focus back on education. This would be a move in the right direction and it is the kind of “progressive” policy that North Carolina and academia in general desperately needs.
Brian Sopp is a sophomore political science and journalism major at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is also an intern with the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Chapel Hill and assistant editor of Carolina Review.