Editorial: Budget bill fine print has big impact on UNC academic status

CBC Editorial: Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023; editorial #8886

The following is the opinion of Capitol Broadcasting Company

The legislature’s chronic mismanagement of state operations now jeopardizes one of our state’s greatest assets – the 16-campus University of North Carolina System.

With apparently no advance notice to or consultation with the leaders of the university system, legislative leaders radically revised the 38-year-old Distinguished Professors Endowment program to recruit and retain top teaching and research talent.

The program matches private donor funds with state dollars and has been used to create more than 700 professorships in a wide variety of subjects and disciplines throughout the UNC system – with the majority of positions at UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State.

Imagine running a $6.5 billion university system -- spread out among 16 campuses with 240,000 undergraduate and graduate students and a staff of 47,400 including 14,283 faculty – only to discover a major revision to this critical employment tool was secreted into 1,411 pages of state budget legislation (the bill and committee report) that was revealed and passed over barely a 24-hour period in late September.

The new law limited these professorships only to “STEM” (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines. It specifically excludes “a field of scholarship related to journalism or law.”

Some legislative leaders chafed when the UNC journalism school offered a tenured faculty position to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow who was the primary reporter on the 1619 Project that reexamined the role slavery played in United States history and consequences of that legacy.

Legislative leaders have also focused on the law school over the statements and actions of some faculty as well as the failure of a selection committee headed by law school dean Martin Brinkley to pick the legislative leadership’s favored candidate to be the new dean of the UNC School of Government. The committee selected Aimee Wall, a 20-year faculty member who’d previously served as associate dean and a professor of public law and government in the school.

It was a revealing entry in the budget law -- particularly to those pointing to the rhetoric around and laws passed in other education areas -- seeing this as attacks on the humanities, arts and history fields.

UNC Board of Governors members – appointed by the legislature’s leadership -- expressed some concerns about the new law during a committee meeting last month. John Fraley, a former Republican state House member, urged system executives, including President Peter Hans, to “have some discussion with whoever made the change.”

It is astonishing that people we entrust to enact reasonable and necessary laws act so immaturely and impulsively.

Using state laws to settle political scores is a petty abuse of power.

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