RALEIGH — About a month ago, I must confess that I wrote a not-particularly-becoming column about the poor-mouthing over at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. State budget cuts had been so severe, said UNC officials, that the flagship campus could barely afford to pick up the trash and keep the copy machines going.

Pretty soon, it appeared, the campus telephone system would be next. Perhaps the little troopers, characteristically making the best of a bad situation, would have raided the university’s bulging trash cans for discarded cups and string in order to fashion a crude communications system.

Anyway, I expressed my skepticism about the purported fiscal crisis at UNC. “Cry me a river,” I remarked to a public university system that, even after all those “cuts,” remains one of the most subsidized in the United States. It turns out that the river does, indeed, run through “it” — with the “it” being the sort of waste product through which rivers have no business running, if you know what I mean.

A couple of articles over Labor Day weekend demonstrated that UNC’s problem was one of priorities, not one of resources. First, there was another of those sob stories about budget cuts on campus, this one by the News & Observer of Raleigh. In a piece that looked at budgetary fallout at several schools, UNC-Chapel Hill was said to have suffered $24 million in reductions, including:

* The College of Arts and Sciences won’t recruit for 30 open faculty positions.

* Trash cans from offices will be emptied three times a week instead of daily. Classrooms will be cleaned thoroughly once a month instead of once a week.

* The Institute of Nutrition has been eliminated — a cut worth $200,000.

* Two academic departments — operations research and statistics — have been combined to save administrative costs.

* An Office of Continuing Education in Health Sciences has been closed, worth $150,000.

* An information technology training center has been closed, worth $100,000.

* Heels for Health, an employee fitness program, and Arts Carolina, an arts program, have been eliminated.

Frankly, this list isn’t exactly the tear-jerker that one might have expected. Still, there are some real implications of these changes. Some jobs were eliminated. Some services were diminished. If only UNC-Chapel Hill had had some other recourse. If only the school had sufficient reserves to spare some of these job losses. . .

Well, that actually leads to the other article, published in The Charlotte Observer. It seems that university officials weren’t pleased with the North Carolina General Assembly for its failure during the 2003 session to fund a proposed new cancer hospital at Chapel Hill. Lawmakers couldn’t agree on a way to finance the construction of the entire $180 million facility, so they chose not to put any money into planning or site preparation — a wise move, considering the fiscal uncertainty that continues to hang over the state budget.

But this little legislative technicality, this “one event” as a UNC official dismissively put it, couldn’t be allowed to stand in the way of progress. So the school announced that it is dipping into “reserves” to the tune of $7 million to start planning the hospital, which UNC leaders want to have completed by 2009.

Now, there are two implications of this. One is that the UNC administration feels it has the right essentially to obligate the taxpayers of North Carolina to nearly $200 million in construction cost for a building that has not yet received the approval of their elected representatives. Obviously, UNC leaders believe that if it spends millions on planning, this will put pressure on lawmakers to “follow through” with tax increases or other means of financing the construction, so as not to “waste” the planning dollars already spent. Deceiving voters about the $3.1 billion higher education bond back in 2000 — you know, the one that wouldn’t raise your taxes — was bad enough. This is arguably worse.

The second implication is that the UNC administration feels it can safely spend $7 million out of reserves for this rather speculative venture but cannot imagine tapping that $7 million, or perhaps even a little more, so that it can afford to hire professors or pick up the garbage. What, pray tell, is a reserve for?

Yes, the tears are flowing, the resulting river is running through “it” — and I’ll feeling ill.

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