RALEIGH — This year, 2009, has been an annus horribilis for the University of North Carolina system. Permanent budgets have been cut in the range of 6 to 10 percent and many activities frozen.

At N.C. State, a highly publicized scandal involving former first lady Mary Easley has fueled legal proceedings and cost the chair of the board of trustees, the chancellor and the provost their positions.

At UNC-Chapel Hill, external auditors released a report that was critical of the campus’s bloated administrative structure, and a variety of events revealed many in the Carolina community continue to be intolerant of First Amendment rights.

As painful as all of this has been, the climate of crisis provides an opportunity for the people of North Carolina and the leaders, faculty, and students at the system’s 16 campuses to reflect. Administrators and faculty need to reassess their behavior. Along with the public, we must remind ourselves of what a public university should be. A nice place to start is to understand what a good public university is not.

• A vanity project. The university system does not exist to allow faculty members to teach whatever they want. It does not exist to allow administrators to push initiatives in which the broader academic community or public is uninterested or that will generate little value. Researchers should not look on it as a home for their pet interests.

Instead, a public university should improve the human condition and add to our knowledge base. It should always do this with particular sensitivity to the needs and interests of the people who support it with their tax dollars. When we say this is the “people’s university,” we should mean it.

With this in mind, the university should ground its teaching in the basic values of the society that birthed and reared it. Collectively, courses should provide a broad and coherent education. Research in all disciplines should tackle large questions and find answers that elevate the quality of life; that bring about peace and prosperity, freedom, and fairness.

Unfortunately, this does not happen as much as it should. Our curricula are full of esoteric and disconnected courses. In many disciplines, the material taught is often a reflection of passing “fads” or the political interests of vocal faculty. Professors undertake research in narrow and scattered subfields, regurgitating knowledge that has little relevance to their students’ futures and real-world problems. They are often experts, not because they are good, but because what they study is so small. All of this is reinforced by reward systems that incentivize the wrong kind of behavior. Bad administrators, for example, are paid much more than valuable teachers and researchers.

• A liberal interest group. The university should not be in the business of trying to move federal and state policy in a leftward direction. But that is precisely what some want it to do. A number of professors, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, see themselves on a mission to mobilize a grass-roots movement of young people dedicated to particular social causes. Sometimes administrators think it is their job to cozy up to the state’s political establishment rather than lead their organizations. Again the behavior is reinforced. Dissenters are frozen out of the decision making process. Resources are often distributed as a reflection of identity politics and ideology, not performance and value generated for students and the public.

When it acts like a political interest group, a public university will be a successful one. It molds thousands of hearts and minds, has privileged access to influential policymakers, and is heavily supported by the public treasury. But when it does, it also destroys the public’s trust and fails in its basic mission.

Instead, a public university must foster diverse viewpoints and allow ideas to compete in an open marketplace. Students should draw conclusions after succumbing to the force of argument, not bowing to a professor’s inflexible way of thinking. Administrators should forget the politics and lead the university. Our accomplishments should persuade the public and politicians of our value.

• A community college. The public needs to understand that its university system is not an extension of its community colleges. The latter are adept at providing technical competencies more narrowly tailored to particular professions. Universities should provide foundational knowledge and vital skills that allow graduates to be valuable citizens and productive and successful members of a world in which critical thinking, communication, and leadership abilities are essential for success. As a result, reading Plato and Melville, understanding democratic theory, solving quadratic equations, and knowing what a molecule is are all very important to the public university student, regardless of what she wants to do after graduation. Exposure to the breadth of life and its challenges, not the mastery of a technique, is the central feature of a good public university education.

North Carolina’s public and the people of its universities would do well to remember these things as the crises abate. If we do, this tumultuous period, traumatic as it is to some, will actually have been valuable.

Andy Taylor is Professor and Chair of Political Science in the School of Public and International Affairs at N.C. State University.