Legislators to Address Higher Education Issues

Posted on Feb. 26, 1983

As I have noted in previous columns, the North Carolina General Assembly that convened in January will be called upon to make decisions on many issues that will have a lasting impact on higher education, and particularly on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I am bringing some of these issues to our readers’ attention again, not suggesting, of course, that our readership be of one mind about their relative importance or about the decision that should be reached on any individual item.

Of immediate concern is the freeze instituted during the last General Assembly on merit salary raises for university employees. While this freeze is shared by all state employees and intended to be equitably distributed, it has lately begun to jeopardize our University’s ability to maintain the excellence so carefully built over time in many of our departments. Indeed, by making the provision so restrictive as to disallow the use of non-state monies for merited salary increases, the Legislature, in effect, precipitated the departure of some of our senior academicians.

Dean Stuart Bondurant Jr. of the School of Medicine recently identified one department that has almost been eliminated as a result of the effect of the freeze on senior faculty members who felt obliged to leave the University because they believed their livelihoods adversely affected and their families unreasonably penalized.

In addition to the question of merit raises, there is the more general question about across-the-board salary increases — a somewhat more complicated issue because the North Carolina Constitution mandates that the state maintain a balanced budget. Obviously, it is difficult to provide basic services with the present economic strains and without the capacity to provide across-the-board merit raises to the almost 180,000 state employees, including over 7,000 at UNC-CH.

Perhaps the most explosive higher education issue before the General Assembly is the question of the level of support provided to private schools and universities. Quite frankly, with state funding of private education becoming an increasingly more emotional and political issue, it is difficult now to debate the case rationally.

Even so, a spirited campaign is currently taking place to raise the level of state support to private education. At a time when the state’s general budget is under close scrutiny, it is likely that the campaign will effectively polarize supporters in each camp.

On the national scene, of course, there are many issues to be addressed in the new Congress that will directly affect the University, largely having to do with appropriations for research grants and student aid. The generally acknowledged need to reduce the federal deficit means that budget considerations in higher education will be carefully deliberated in the 98th Congress.

I am not attempting to offer a prescription for the University’s problems, but rather, I encourage alumni to stay in close touch with their legislators, both state and federal. There is no question but that these funding decisions will have a very real, immediate, and lasting effect on the University at Chapel Hill and that it is imperative that all of us, both as citizens and alumni, make our preferences known to our elected leaders.

Like you, I hope that every effort will be made to protect this most precious resource — the University at Chapel Hill.

Yours at Carolina,

 

 

 

 

Douglas S. Dibbert ’70