No new DJ today — sorry. Other responsibilities intruded. But the following column, appearing in July 2005, is newly relevant given recent debates about “competitive” salaries for certain high-level UNC administrators and faculty members.
RALEIGH – Correct me if I’m wrong – as if Carolina Journal readers need prompting on that score – but I think that officials at the University of North Carolina system are advancing contradictory premises in two different policy disputes currently hot in the state’s political circles.
First, they are expressing strong opposition to a possible budget provision that would authorize UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and possibly other campuses to set their own tuition policies rather than having them dictated by a central authority. Allowing campuses to set their own tuitions, says UNC system administrators and their allies in newsrooms and the General Assembly, would inevitably lead to the old, bad “competition” that once against among UNC campuses for resources, programs, and students.
On another matter, however, many university officials say that competitive forces are welcome and inevitable: when it comes to setting a salary range for a new system president to replace outgoing UNC leader Molly Broad. When the top of the announced range approached $500,000, UNC defenders hastened to point out that they really had no choice but to go with compensation similar to that paid by other university systems and high enough potentially to induce talented individuals from the private sector to take on a stressful, complicated job at the UNC system.
Let’s pick a proposition and go with it, okay? Either embrace the idea that competition is inevitable as long as scarcity exists – in dollars, in time, in attention spans, in political favors – or, well, embrace whatever central-planning fantasies are popular these days.
(As it happens, citing “competitive forces” to defend a half-million-dollar salary for the new UNC president doesn’t really work, because it is not at all clear that the market for a truly effective leader extends as broadly as the search committee apparently thinks it does. It is more of a political post than an academic or managerial one, and thus would likely benefit from a focus on individuals with relevant North Carolina experience. But I digress.)
Assuming the continued existence of a state-funded University of North Carolina system, its effectiveness will rise to the extent that policymakers welcome competition rather than attempt to squelch it. One of the original arguments for UNC central planning was that the various institutions were competing within the General Assembly for funding and new programs. The best solution to that problem would be to apportion tax dollars on a per-student basis, perhaps adjusting them somewhat according to chosen major (some academic programs are more expensive than others) and then letting the dollars flow to the campus of the student’s choice. A similar process should apply to funds for research and community service – they should flow to institutions based on demonstrable performance through some kind of competitive grant process, rather than determined by dictates either from the system office or the General Assembly.
Perhaps the most graceful rule of thumb here would be this: every now and then, UNC officials and legislators should step back and look at the budget and planning process they are using. To the extent that it still resembles the budget and planning process of a 1970s-era Yugoslavian automobile factory, they should worry.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.