What is UNC's main thing?

Charles Kuralt, legendary storyteller and CBS broadcaster, spoke to celebrate the 200^th anniversary of the University of North Carolina. "What is it that binds us to this place as to no other?" Answering his own question, he continues, "Our love for this place is based on the fact that it is, as it was meant to be, the University of the people".

Is UNC truly the university of the people?

Some wonder. There seems to be a strong feeling that UNC has lost its way.  So, the leaders at the university retained a national public relations firm, at a cost reported to be over $900,000, to find the answers to those and other questions.

I consulted with someone who has devoted much of his career to working in higher education and marketing. This person shared three main questions every university should ask before developing and deploying any communications strategy:

            Who is the intended audience?

            What do we want them to know, feel, think and do?

            How will we measure success?

The national firm hired by Carolina interviewed 21 stakeholders, including top university officials, deans, faculty and communications professionals, asking for their feedback. Were these 21 the right stakeholders to be interviewed? Many, many more stakeholders need consulting, beginning with the men and women in every section of our state who help support UNC with their taxes and send their children there to learn. Others include those from business, healthcare, research, community leaders and philanthropists. To be sure this is a large group but if you really want to get a fuller picture you must interview many more people.

Such a comprehensive survey would likely reveal that people are confused how to define UNC. Is it an elite university that just happens to be in North Carolina or is it North Carolina’s University, delivering elite educational results, with scholarship that is solving critical issues for our state and creating prosperity for all?

How can you call yourself the university of the people when so much energy and resources are spent on building luxury boxes or debating whether to tear down the Dean Smith Center for more luxury boxes? How do you justify paying a former NFL coach over $50 million just to buy your way into big-time college football – effectively becoming an NFL farm team? OK, most of these dollars come from contributors, but the average person doesn’t know. Besides, aren’t they distracting UNC from its larger purpose?

The University of the people?

Fixing the problems will be difficult. UNC, and most universities in the state system, are actually run by politicians, not educators or top-notch administrators.

Problems started in 2011 when Republicans took control over the legislature. First, they decided they would take charge of the running of our 16 state-supported universities, starting with the firing of President Tom Ross because he was a Democrat. Next, they determined that the governing board of the universities, the Board of Governors (BOG), would contain members who were almost exclusively white male Republicans, not representative of our state demographics. At least Democrats tried to have women, minorities and Republicans on the board.

They not only fired Tom Ross but also his replacement Margaret Spellings, former Secretary of Education and a Republican,  hired by the BOG without the blessing of the Senate President Pro Tem.

The next step was to take charge of the individual university boards of Trustees, who report to those Board of Governors. In the infamous short session of 2016, legislators quickly took away the authority of the governor to appoint trustees at universities. Now lawmakers and their hand-picked BOG name each university’s trustees. Their meddling makes it difficult for any chancellor to administer the university. Holden Thorp, Carol Folt and Kevin Guskiewicz either resigned or were replaced due to interference. Without a fix to the governance problem and the political influence it will be difficult running any university, especially one the size of UNC.

But some serious thought needs to be given to deciding what UNC is to become. Is it striving to be the Harvard of the South or does it want to be the best damn university in our state and region? UNC receives about $1 billion per year in research grants, research that has yielded economic development, medical breakthroughs, new products and significant discoveries, but is that UNC’s primary reason d’etre? And UNC health is unequalled, but is UNC primarily a hospital?

We understand that today’s colleges are multifaceted and have branched out into other endeavors but how many times have we seen large corporations grow so large they forget their main reason for being and end up going broke? Sometimes some of these other branches need to be spun off.

Steven Covey once said, “Don’t forget to keep the main thing, the main thing.”

Tom Campbell is a Hall of Fame North Carolina broadcaster and columnist who has covered North Carolina public policy issues since 1965.  Contact him at tomcamp@carolinabroadcasting.com