The state’s higher education budget is usually a mixed bag of “the good, the bad, and the ugly,” and this year’s is no exception. However, the legislature should be commended for addressing a number of important issues that traditionally have been neglected or overlooked.
The evidence is in, and it’s disconcerting: UNC employee salaries are beyond the pale. University leaders need to zero in on plum administrative jobs that have little to do with education and eliminate them posthaste. Even in the case of necessary administrative functions, officials should consider consolidation and outsourcing. If the latest data are an indicator, there is much to be reined in.
Rising student default rates at University of North Carolina schools are rising, with particularly troubling rates at the system’s HBCUs.
For quite a few years, North Carolina’s colleges and universities have blurred the line between higher and basic education by admitting students who need remedial classes before they can handle college-level work. Fortunately, several provisions moving through the General Assembly may change the face of remediation by shifting it back to lower levels of education where it belongs.
Today, the system is faced with an important existential question: how to “right-size” the system itself, which may include reducing the number of campuses. This question badly needs to be addressed, and soon; as Harry Smith, the chair of the Board of Governor’s budget and finance committee, admitted in March, “[P]eople have been ducking this conversation for a long time.”
The most important decision that the University of North Carolina system’s Board of Governors will make this year is the selection of the next system president. Board members have an excellent opportunity to find someone willing to initiate a badly needed departure from the university establishment’s status quo.
If certain subjects are studied less in the academy, they will be studied more outside of it, and by those who are seriously interested. And that may turn out to be for the best. After all, many top poets, such as T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, and many important thinkers, from John Locke to Edmund Burke to John Stewart Mill to Eric Hoffer, had non-academic day jobs when they produced their greatest works. A shift to the life-long learning model, using resources both inside and outside the academia, may very well initiate a flowering of culture instead of decay.
Pending bills represent progress toward reforming higher education in North Carolina. However, they are only scratching the surface of the work that needs to be done. The scandals at UNC-Chapel Hill show that the UNC system desperately needs to be made more transparent. And more attention should be directed to reducing the cost of a university education by making the system more efficient. Even so, some reform is better than none.
Students are not actually trained to think for themselves. And radical professors and administrators simply replace one dogma with another instead of creating open-minded critical thinkers. In other words, professors spend their time tearing down American values only to replace them with alternate campus values.
UNC Board of Governors meetings are hard to navigate for the uninitiated, such as a member of the public. The committee rooms are small, spread out, and poorly labeled. All the people who attend the meetings seem to know each other. Finding a place to sit in the boardroom often means arriving an hour before the meeting begins. And if you don’t get a seat, you’re out of luck. Although the main board meeting is video-streamed into the lobby, it’s hard to hear and it isn’t recorded.