RALEIGH — Here’s why the University of North Carolina should stop its grousing.

No, this is not another piece about Chapel Hill’s new basketball coach. It seems that the UNC Board of Governors has not only come out in favor of Gov. Mike Easley’s proposed tax increase for FY 2003-05 — most of which House members decided to endorse Wednesday in their budget — but is actually lobbying to recover some of the savings that the governor, possibly in a brief spasm of unwitting prudence, had found in the university budget.

Along with leaders of the public schools and community colleges, UNC leaders have written the General Assembly and governor to complain about tens of millions of dollars excised from their budget requests for the next budget biennium. While the entire argument is questionable, I reserve particular scorn for UNC, which is subsidized way out of proportion to its peer institutions and to common sense.

Even after recent tuition increase, students and their families finance only about one-fifth of the cost of education across the 16-campus system (I though it was going to be higher, but the governor’s budget contained statistics to the contrary). Moreover, researchers benefit from significant taxpayer subsidies for student assistants, facilities, and other overhead costs and yet claim all of the reimbursement for “overhead” they receive from federal or private grantmakers.

As George Leef, director of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, has argued, North Carolina’s low-tuition policy is no bargain. It squanders taxpayer money on a group of disproportionately wealthy students and families, most of whom will attend college in any event. It skews the higher education market, adversely affecting private colleges and choice. It encourages wasteful consumption as some students attend colleges with little intention of completing their degrees on time, or at all.

Most states in the nation have divised a more reasonable sharing of costs in their public systems, from one-third in some up to one-half in Northeastern and Midwestern states. The Christian Science Monitor recently reported on states such as Colorado that are rethinking not only the extent of subsidies but also whether state university systems should be devolved into something more akin to “state-assisted” university systems that enjoy more autonomy but less taxpayer subsidy.

North Carolina appears to be in a time warp on these issues. We’re continuing a policy that, if it ever made sense, certainly doesn’t anymore. Sure, university folks who fear accountability and the responsibility of earning their keep are jealously guarding their special dispensation. But why are so many otherwise sensible people being so easily taken in by their self-serving argument?

Perhaps, after all, it is about the basketball.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.