You just couldn’t make a story up this good.
It seems that the Faculty Council of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has now endorsed a resolution calling for UNC officials to conduct a careful study of compensation patterns at the school. This comes in the wake of report published late last year that appeared to show female faculty members at the school earning about $1,332 less than men, on average, after the appropriate adjustments.
This may sound like just another routine campus victimology story, but look closer. As Carolina Journal’s Jon Sanders pointed out right after the first study appeared, the data showed not only a likely (but, let’s face, pretty darn small) disparity in favor of male faculty but also a likely (and, on average, somewhat larger) pay disparity in favor of minorities vs. their white peers of both sexes. Did the Faculty Senate express its dismay at the university’s obvious racial preferences? Did its members demand an immediate inquiry and corrective action?
You can guess the answer. Virtually the entire focus of subsequent discussion was on what faculty members and observers said was evidence of discrimination against women. It seems obvious to me that, unless you have a cabal of sexist administrators who hate whites making compensation decisions, these minor disparities are probably due to benign factors beyond any researcher’s ability to measure. Career paths, aspirations, family responsibilities, just sheer luck – these are all hard to model.
I’d like to believe that the Faculty Senate has endorsed a more thorough study because it harbors the same doubts that I do about the existence of an underlying, nefarious conspiracy here. Somehow, based on what its leaders and members have said, I don’t think so. Plus, here’s the really good part. Everything else I’ve written is just the set-up. It turns out that the debate in the Faculty Senate was surprisingly intense, though ultimately the decision was unanimous. The debate wasn’t about jumping to PC conclusions, though.
Some faculty members reportedly said they were nervous about endorsing a wider compensation study at UNC-Chapel Hill because they were afraid of what state legislators might do with it. As The Herald-Sun reported, history professor Richard Pfaff lobbied during the meeting for the removal of a section of the resolution asking for the percentage of time “spent by men and women faculty, subdivided by rank, doing research, teaching, committee work, clinical work and other responsibilities.”
Pfaff said he was afraid that such detailed information might “fall into the hands of the N.C. General Assembly” (in Herald-Sun reporter Eric Ferreri’s delicious phrase, suggestive of a document drop in a parking garage or something). “We’re handing them an invitation to prescribe to us the way we spend our time,” he argued. Yes, the possibility of gender oppression on campus is a serious concern, but far more serious would be state government’s discovery that it is wasting the taxpayers’ money on generous subsidies for slothful academicians.
I’ve never been wild about state legislators – who invented tax-funded sloth – trying to dictate the hours and job responsibilities of professors. But such a policy would be only the logical extension of the UNC system’s oldest sales pitch: that it has been and should remain a well-funded arm of state government, rather than (as in some states) a state-assisted but independent system bearing more of its own financial risks and paying for a more reasonable share of its expenses by actually charging its users more. If you want to be (tenured) state employees so badly, Dr. Pfaff and Co., why do you think you shouldn’t have to account for your time the way most of them do?
The best way for faculty members to protect their much-vaunted academic freedom and independence would be to wean themselves off of the taxpayer dole, which even after recent tuition hikes still covers three-quarters or so of the cost of educating the average student. If tuition covered, say, at least half the cost and the schools were also required to fund their own building and research programs purely through receipts, the faculty’s time allocations wouldn’t be anyone else’s business. The alternative might eventually be state politicians trying, albeit clumsily, to increase the productivity of the billions they appropriate to building and running the university system through applying the same work rules that other state employees must follow.
Probably won’t happen anytime soon, though. First, UNC appears to have found a new champion in House Co-Speaker Richard Morgan (more on this later). And second, Pfaff was successful in amending the Faculty Council’s resolution. Now it calls only for “approximate” accounting of the time faculty members spend on teaching, research, and other tasks. Thus the stonewalling will continue – until a Deep Throat emerges with the requisite manila folder.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.