After an embarrassing fall from grace, it is time for soul searching. Following the scandal surrounding the hiring and promotion of Mary Easley, N.C. State, the alumni magazine for North Carolina State University, held a dialogue. The editors brought together six people—university “stakeholders”—to discuss N.C. State’s “culture” and how it might have contributed to the Easley affair.
The resulting article, published in the autumn issue, itself became a subject of controversy. The head of the alumni association and publisher of the magazine, Leonard Barton, was fired this month by interim N.C. State chancellor Jim Woodward. Some alumni think that the article was a factor, although the chancellor has said that the reason was the stagnation of the alumni association and the need for new leadership. It was “absolutely not because he wouldn’t censor the magazine article,” Woodward told the Pope Center.
The participants all had strong ties to the university, and they sounded full of remorse—and in some cases blame—for the way that the Mary Easley affair was handled. They expressed concern about the lack of a process for channeling requests of the kind made by the governor and urged more “openness” and “transparency.” Yet, while the participants spoke candidly, and their concern for the university seemed genuine, it’s not clear that they have a handle on how to find and sustain transparency in the face of political pressure, which is unlikely to end.
The discussion also dealt with governance, as panelists raised concerns about how one part of the campus (e.g., the faculty) related to other parts (e.g., trustees) and even how fast administrators’ salaries have been rising.
The participants were:
Bill Friday, founder of the modern UNC system and a 1941 graduate of N.C. State; Suzanne Gordon, a recent trustee (and 1975 graduate) who is the chief information officer for SAS; Billy Maddalon, a Charlotte businessman (and 1990 graduate) and former alumni association board president; Dwuan June, a 1990 graduate who is who is now an editor at the Washington Post; Jim Martin, a chemistry professor and the immediate past chair of N.C. State’s Faculty Senate; Art Padilla (a 1969 graduate), head of the university’s Department of Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Notably missing was any student—due to a scheduling problem, I was told.
Based on the discussion, I must conclude that N.C. State’s culture is not very different from other state universities, especially in states that have a history of political finagling. N.C. State simply “got caught.”
Opaqueness seems to be characteristic of state universities. And even if the openness and better communication sought by the panel comes about, will it prevent the kind of actions that embarrassed N. C. State?
Indeed, the discussion referred to a previous scandal, in 1989, when N.C. State’s basketball program was found to be violating academic requirements. Dwuan June, who was a student at the time, said that the attitude was similar to today’s—the chancellor had said that everything was “going great” until a report by the Board of Governors revealed the abuses (in what the Los Angeles Times called a “bombshell”). And a few years ago, the alumni magazine attempted to write about a series of nationally reported hazing incidents at State. There was so much internal debate and delay that the article was never published.
References to turf fights or other divisiveness—between faculty and trustees, among deans, between deans and chancellors, and between trustees and the Board of Governors—also surfaced during the conversation.
Bill Friday kicked off the discussion with a blunt message. He compared the Easley affair to the recently revealed “clout list” at the University of Illinois, where students from politically powerful families were given preference over more qualified applicants.
“We are a creature of the state. We are financed by the state. We serve the state. But that is far and away a role quite different from being in the political life of the state,” he said. “You step across the line once in any substantive way and you’re in trouble.”
Billy Maddalon said that the Mary Easley affair occurred in “an environment of institutional inferiority”(which I assume to mean dependence on the state and competition with the more favored university, UNC-Chapel Hill). “And great things aren’t achieved in a fearful setting.” Instead of being transparent about her hiring and promotion, he said, “we buried it in a pile of paper.” As a general rule, officials should “welcome the interest, welcome the critique, welcome the question asking.”
Similarly, June said, “If you were open and honest from the get-go with the Mary Easley thing, I don’t think the story would have blossomed. There would have been nothing to look for.” He compared the N.C. State reaction unfavorably to the steps taken by officials at Virginia Tech after the 2007 multiple slayings. “As soon as they knew something, whether it was good for them or it was not good for them, it was on their Web site.”
Art Padilla was a little more specific about the source of the Easley problem. “There was no process.” The officials who received the request to hire Easley should have had a method of dealing with it. Chancellors and admissions directors “get those calls all the time. ‘I have a friend who has a daughter,’” he said. “You need to be able to deal with it responsibly and transparently.”
Suzanne Gordon, whose term on the board of trustees ended in June, admitted that the trustees failed to ask enough questions about Mary Easley. (Although Easley joined the university in 2005, the run-up in her salary, which launched the news investigation, occurred in 2008.)
The broader issues involved governance and the “historical decentralization” of the university. For example, Padilla said that trustees and the chancellor must “work to strengthen faculty governance.” Jim Martin noted that there is no faculty member on the board of trustees.
Friday agreed in principle that interaction between the board and the faculty is lacking. In his opinion, N.C. State doesn’t do “as much as it should do to involve the faculty in the decision process,” adding that “that basic trust feeling of communication internally” may be missing. There was also discussion about whether the individual colleges are still the silos (“fiefdoms”) they were when Bill Friday was an administrator in the 1950s (the answer seemed to be not nearly to that extent).
The characteristics sought by the panelists—openness, transparency, communication—clearly have been lacking at N.C. State. Had they been present, the school might have hired Easley openly and not raised her salary so much and so secretively—leading officials to try to cover it up later. They could have dodged the bullet of bad publicity.
But the panelists still failed to address the key problem, that political pressures will always exist at a school that receives approximately $500 million a year from the state legislature. Whether officials will stand up to politicians any better a few years from now is impossible to say. As for the other theme of the conversation—better communication on campus, especially between the trustees and the faculty—certainly it is desirable, but its direct relevance to avoiding a scandal is not clear.
All in all, the panel was a good one, and some issues were aired. But a lot more needs to happen before the public can be confident that N. C. State will consistently speak the truth.