The following piece appeared in this morning's WSJ. Lest you think it is not coming to North Carolina, I can assure you that the documents I sent to you this week are already about measuring our productivity. Our value to the taxpayer is not too far away as there are always legislators wanting faculty workload information and the like. We all already know that most of our jobs are not seen by the public and there is a perception that a 9 hour teaching load, for instance, means we work for 9 hours. We have to do a better job in making our work transparent and in demonstrating its value to the people whose tax dollars support us.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703735804575536322093520994.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsFifth
THE SATURDAY ESSAYOCTOBER 22, 2010.Putting a Price on Professors
A battle in Texas over whether academic value can be measured in dollars and cents..
By STEPHANIE SIMON And STEPHANIE BANCHERO
Carol Johnson took the podium of a lecture hall one recent morning to walk 79 students enrolled in an introductory biology course through diffusion, osmosis and the phospholipid bilayer of cell membranes.
A senior lecturer, Ms. Johnson has taught this class for years. Only recently, though, have administrators sought to quantify whether she is giving the taxpayers of Texas their money's worth.
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Matt Wright-Steel for The Wall Street Journal
Chester Dunning, a history professor, has won several teaching awards. According to a report by the chancellor, he also loses money for the university, though his department is in the black overall.
.A 265-page spreadsheet, released last month by the chancellor of the Texas A&M University system, amounted to a profit-and-loss statement for each faculty member, weighing annual salary against students taught, tuition generated, and research grants obtained.
Ms. Johnson came out very much in the black; in the period analyzed—fiscal year 2009—she netted the public university $279,617. Some of her colleagues weren't nearly so profitable. Newly hired assistant professor Charles Criscione, for instance, spent much of the year setting up a lab to research parasite genetics and ended up $45,305 in the red.
The balance sheet sparked an immediate uproar from faculty, who called it misleading, simplistic and crass—not to mention, riddled with errors. But the move here comes amid a national drive, backed by some on both the left and the right, to assess more rigorously what, exactly, public universities are doing with their students—and their tax dollars.
.As budget pressures mount, legislators and governors are increasingly demanding data proving that money given to colleges is well spent. States spend about 11% of their general-fund budgets subsidizing higher education. That totaled more than $78 billion in fiscal year 2008, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers.
The movement is driven as well by dismal educational statistics. Just over half of all freshmen entering four-year public colleges will earn a degree from that institution within six years, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
And among those with diplomas, just 31% could pass the most recent national prose literacy test, given in 2003; that's down from 40% a decade earlier, the department says.
"For years and years, universities got away with, 'Trust us—it'll be worth it,'" said F. King Alexander, president of California State University at Long Beach.
But no more: "Every conversation we have with these institutions now revolves around productivity," says Jason Bearce, associate commissioner for higher education in Indiana. He tells administrators it's not enough to find efficiencies in their operations; they must seek "academic efficiency" as well, graduating more students more quickly and with more demonstrable skills. The National Governors Association echoes that mantra; it just formed a commission focused on improving productivity in higher education.
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Carol Johnson lectures at Texas A&M; she netted the university $279,617, according to the chancellor's report.
.This new emphasis has raised hackles in academia. Some professors express deep concern that the focus on serving student "customers" and delivering value to taxpayers will turn public colleges into factories. They worry that it will upend the essential nature of a university, where the Milton scholar who teaches a senior seminar to five English majors is valued as much as the engineering professor who lands a million-dollar research grant.
And they fear too much tinkering will destroy an educational system that, despite its acknowledged flaws, remains the envy of much of the world. "It's a reflection of a much more corporate model of running a university, and it's getting away from the idea of the university as public good," says John Curtis, research director for the American Association of University Professors.
Efforts to remake higher education generally fall into two categories. In some states, including Ohio and Indiana, public officials have ordered a new approach to funding, based not on how many students enroll but on what they accomplish.
Details vary, but colleges typically earn points under such a system for pushing students to take science, engineering and math; for ensuring that they complete classes that they start; for improving on-time graduation rates; and for boosting more low-income students to degrees.
.These performance metrics generally affect just a portion of an institution's public funding—but that can be significant. In Ohio, for example, state funding for one community college jumped 11% in each of the past two years because of the new formulas. Several four-year campuses, by contrast, lost about 5% a year. President Barack Obama has pushed for similar incentives on a national level but could not get a proposed $2.5 billion fund for high-achieving colleges through Congress.
A second approach to reform is driven by college administrators seeking to build credibility with the public by disclosing their school's strengths and weaknesses.
Minnesota's state college system has created an online "accountability dashboard" for each campus. Bright, gas-gauge-style graphics indicate how many students complete their degrees; how run-down (or up-to-date) facilities are; and how many graduates pass professional licensing exams.
The California State University system, using data from outside sources, posts online the median starting and mid-career salaries for graduates of each campus, as well as their average student loan debt. "Taxpayers can make a pretty good estimate of their rate of return," says Mr. Alexander, president of CSU Long Beach.
A few schools have even taken to guaranteeing their education. Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Mich., pledges to retrain any of its graduates whose employers are dissatisfied with their skills or attitude.
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Matt Wright-Steel for the Wall Street Journal
Assistant professor Charles Criscione works one-on-one with an undergraduate; he ended up $45,305 in the red.
.Concern about America's higher-education system kicked into high gear in 2006 when Margaret Spellings, education secretary for President George W. Bush, issued a biting report. She chided universities for coasting on their reputations and urged them to start measuring how much students learn—and why a degree costs so much.
The same year, a survey conducted by a coalition of corporations found that nearly 30% of employers ranked new hires with four-year college diplomas as "deficient" in written communication skills.
The reports jolted academia. Scrambling to respond, scores of public colleges agreed to post data they had previously kept private on a "College Portraits" website—including their scores on standardized tests that attempt to measure how much a school improves students' critical thinking skills between freshman and senior years. About 300 colleges now participate in the site, run by two consortiums of public colleges.
Public Higher Ed: From Jefferson to the Cold War
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Getty Images
The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
.1795
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which formally opened in January 1795 with a single professor, Rev. David Ker, was the country's first public university to admit students. One of the duties of the school's early professors was to perform morning and evening prayers and examine students on the "principles of morality and religion." By the end of June, 41 students had enrolled.
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Corbis
The University of Virginia
.1819
Thomas Jefferson, along with his friend James Madison, believed that public education was vital to maintaining a strong republic. In 1789, he wrote that "wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government." He founded the University of Virginia—the country's first nonsectarian university and the first to use an elective course system—in 1819.
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Corbis
President Abraham Lincoln
.1862
The Morrill Act, signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, laid the foundation for a nationwide system of public universities. It granted each state 30,000 acres of land for every member of its congressional delegation. The land was then sold off to fund public colleges, with a particular focus on schools that specialized in agriculture, engineering and science. The act ultimately funded 69 universities.
1915
The standards for tenure, or job protection for professors, were first laid out in 1915 by the American Association of University Professors over concerns about academic freedom. (There had been several incidents in which colleges punished or fired faculty—for teaching evolution, for example.) As of 2007, 21% of U.S. faculty members were full-time and tenured, down from 37% in 1975.
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Getty Images
Scientist operating micromanipulator
.1945
In the postwar years, a flood of federal research money transformed U.S. universities and boosted their reputations internationally. Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, wrote in an influential 1945 report that basic scientific research should take place in universities, relatively free from the pressures of "convention, prejudice or commercial necessity."
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Getty Images
Dr. Clark Kerr
.1958
From 1958 to 1967, Clark Kerr served as president of the University of California system, expanding its reach and inspiring other state officials to follow his model. He created a system with multiple campuses state-wide to serve a range of students, from community colleges to elite research universities. He also proposed that every student should be able to go to college, regardless of ability to pay.
.To critics, that isn't enough. They see a system in which some tenured professors teach just two or three classes a year, sometimes on obscure topics that mesh with their research but not necessarily with student needs. At the same time, more instruction is handled by part-time lecturers, who now make up at least 50% of the nation's higher-education faculty—up from 30% in 1975, according to the American Association of University Professors.
Meanwhile, tuition is soaring; undergraduate costs at public four-year universities climbed 139% between 1990 and 2010, according to the nonprofit College Board. Last school year, average tuition and fees were $7,020 at a four-year public university and $26,273 at a private institution, the College Board says.
Nowhere has the overhaul movement taken hold more firmly than in Texas. A law that took effect this fall—and which passed the legislature unanimously— requires public universities to post online the budget of each academic department, the curriculum vitae of each instructor, full descriptions and reading lists for each course and student evaluations of each faculty member. The law, the first of its kind in the nation, requ ires the information to be accessible within three clicks of the college's home page.
Supporters say the information will help students pick useful classes so that they can move more quickly toward degrees. Skeptics fear it will spark culture wars as left and right tussle over the merits of specific classes and teachers. Ideologues could "find something they don't like in a syllabus, take it out of context and paint the wrong picture," said Karan Watson, interim provost at Texas A&M.
Others are concerned that posting students' evaluations online will boost the status of professors who are entertaining—or an easy A—over those who require kids to wrestle with tough material. "I know from experience that everyone who taught statistics got a lower evaluation than those who taught courses that were a little less challenging," says John Antel, provost at the University of Houston.
Individual Texas colleges also are moving on their own reforms. Thomas Evenson, dean of the College of Public Affairs and Community Service at the University of North Texas, has ordered his faculty to spend at least four hours a day, four days a week, on campus or engaged in field research, in addition to the hours they spend teaching. The goal: to make "more of an effort" to ensure that faculty are "present, available and productive," he said. The University of Houston has doubled the pot of money set aside for teaching awards, to $400,000 a year.
But perhaps the most far-reaching initiative is the cost-benefit balance sheet at Texas A&M, the oldest public university in the state. Each faculty member is assessed on criteria including the number of classes that they teach, the tuition that they bring in and research grants that they generate.
One metric divides their salary by the number of students that they teach. The range is striking. Some nontenured lecturers earn less than $100 for each student they instruct. Other professors are teaching such small classes that their compensation works out to more than $10,000—in a few cases, more than $20,000—per student.
Mr. Criscione, the assistant professor studying parasites, came out at $23,563 per student. He says that is because he was setting up his lab and applying for grants most of that year, as is standard for new hires in the biology department, so he supervised just two students.
Faculty on the huge flagship campus, which serves 39,000 undergraduates here in east-central Texas, say some of the data on the spreadsheet are inaccurate, including inflated salaries and missing grants. They also say it's unfair to judge their productivity by class size when they often can't pick what they teach but are assigned by their department heads.
And they point out that the data do not take into account the many hours spent preparing lectures, advising students, serving on curriculum review committees or making other contributions to the college community. "A 50-minute lecture takes me two days to prepare," says Mr. Criscione. "There are 24 lectures in a semester, so you do the math."
In response to complaints, administrators recently pulled the report from a public website to review the data. University President R. Bowen Loftin sent a letter to faculty promising the data wouldn't be used to "assess the overall productivity" of individuals.
Administrators in the chancellor's office, which produced the document, declined to be interviewed. The Board of Regents also declined.
The concept of a productivity spreadsheet came from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that Gov. Rick Perry invited to a state university summit in May 2008. The group suggested several reforms with a common theme: Let taxpayers see what's going on at every public institution—and let them decide what's worth subsidizing.
Bill Peacock, a vice president at the foundation, acknowledges that this approach could mean a radical reshaping of academia, with far more emphasis on filling students with practical information and less on intellectual pursuits, especially in the liberal arts.
That's OK by him. "Taxpayers of the state of Texas," Mr. Peacock says, should decide whether "they should be spending two years paying the salary of an English professor so he can write a book of poetry simply to add to the prestige of the university or the body of literature out there."
When the choice is put that bluntly, Chester Dunning, a history professor at Texas A&M, wonders if he'd pass muster. Mr. Dunning teaches two classes a semester and has won several teaching awards. His salary of about $90,000 a year also covers the time he spends researching Russian literature and history. His most recent book argues that Alexander Pushkin's drama "Boris Godunov" was a comedy, not a tragedy.
Mr. Dunning says his scholarly work animates his teaching and inspires his students. "But if you want me to explain why a grocery clerk in Texas should pay taxes for me to write those books, I can't give you an answer," he says.
His eyes sweep his cramped office, lined with books. Then Mr. Dunning finds his answer. "We've only got 5,000 years of recorded human history," he says, "and I think we need every precious bit of it."
Write to Stephanie Simon at stephanie.simon@wsj.com
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Saturday, October 23, 2010
Friday, October 8, 2010
BOG Update
The UNC Board of Governors met Thursday and today. Here are some highlights.
1. UNC Online. The board saw the proctoring system being run at ECU on a start-up basis. It prompted a discussion about online education and where we need to be going in the near future. The next UNC Online Project Task Force meeting in two weeks will include Hannah Gage and our meeting on online issues is in March. There are a number of issues we want to get out in front on. More to come.
2. Budget. Setting budget priorities is the big topic on the table now. How to handle tuition is also something that will be determined. The latter is a scheduled review. Deferred maintenance (see the recent N&O article) will likely get emphasis. Capital projects will be scaled back (as with the decision not to build the UNC Law School). We will have to follow all of these discussions carefully. We also should note that enrollment funding is likely to have some significant change (we will be looking at a new model later this month for connecting enrollment to retention and graduation) and we also need to follow the discussions on where tuition dollars will go (to campuses or to the general fund; we, of course, prefer the former).
3. Executive Compensation will be an on-going issue in P&T. A study done last year reveals that we are significantly behind most of our peers for Chancellors. But EVERYONE from President Bowles down stressed that NOTHING is to be done now in this climate and NOTHING is to be done until the Faculty and Staff get the raises that they also deserve. The issue here is how to recruit and retain the best....no matter what the category of employment.
4. We have to set new peers for each school. That process will be delayed until Tom Ross comes on board in January.
5. The big news, new VP for Finance Ernie Murphrey is retiring at the end of the year and Jeff Davies will head the search for his replacement ASAP. Ernie has a long career with our system, but needs to step away to deal with some family issues.
These highlights give you an idea of what is happening. UNC Football was on the front pages, so you can read that one on your own.
1. UNC Online. The board saw the proctoring system being run at ECU on a start-up basis. It prompted a discussion about online education and where we need to be going in the near future. The next UNC Online Project Task Force meeting in two weeks will include Hannah Gage and our meeting on online issues is in March. There are a number of issues we want to get out in front on. More to come.
2. Budget. Setting budget priorities is the big topic on the table now. How to handle tuition is also something that will be determined. The latter is a scheduled review. Deferred maintenance (see the recent N&O article) will likely get emphasis. Capital projects will be scaled back (as with the decision not to build the UNC Law School). We will have to follow all of these discussions carefully. We also should note that enrollment funding is likely to have some significant change (we will be looking at a new model later this month for connecting enrollment to retention and graduation) and we also need to follow the discussions on where tuition dollars will go (to campuses or to the general fund; we, of course, prefer the former).
3. Executive Compensation will be an on-going issue in P&T. A study done last year reveals that we are significantly behind most of our peers for Chancellors. But EVERYONE from President Bowles down stressed that NOTHING is to be done now in this climate and NOTHING is to be done until the Faculty and Staff get the raises that they also deserve. The issue here is how to recruit and retain the best....no matter what the category of employment.
4. We have to set new peers for each school. That process will be delayed until Tom Ross comes on board in January.
5. The big news, new VP for Finance Ernie Murphrey is retiring at the end of the year and Jeff Davies will head the search for his replacement ASAP. Ernie has a long career with our system, but needs to step away to deal with some family issues.
These highlights give you an idea of what is happening. UNC Football was on the front pages, so you can read that one on your own.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Buildings and Budgets
Another item to think about with regard to budget. The list never ends.
From today's N&O.
Masthead
Published Sun, Oct 03, 2010 03:35 AM
Modified Sun, Oct 03, 2010 03:41 AM
UNC system facilities are 'in a mess'
In N.C. State University's Gardner Hall, scientists struggle to keep their workplaces free of mold even as they study it under microscopes.
The decaying, 58-year-old, red-brick building houses several plant science departments whose faculty members routinely analyze mold and fungi. The soundtrack for these efforts is the rattly, tinny din of dozens of dust-coated air conditioner window units that run year round - a low-tech attempt to counter the mold spores that slowly but resolutely attach themselves to walls and countertops.
Faculty here will continue this battle for the foreseeable future. There isn't nearly enough money available to properly maintain Gardner Hall and hundreds of other teaching and research facilities across the UNC system.
This may sound familiar. In the past decade, the state issued bonds to raise $3.1 billion to repair university and community college buildings. Though that money was used to revamp hundreds of campus facilities, the construction program fell far short of fixing all the UNC system's infrastructure needs.
So as campus officials keep shifting money around to fix the latest busted heater or hole in a roof, Gardner Hall's scientists will continue producing 21st century science in a building unlikely to be featured in an NCSU marketing campaign anytime soon.
"We're not on any campus tours," said Margaret Daub, head of NCSU's plant biology department. "Nobody lets anyone over here."
In 2000, North Carolinians made a resounding statement about the value of public higher education, approving the bonds in an Election Day referendum. That sent the UNC system on a 10-year building campaign on a scale rarely seen in American higher education. Hundreds of buildings were gutted, renovated, or built anew - creating an influx of flashy new facilities with the latest and most expensive technology.
Total spending for the UNC system: $2.5 billion. Community colleges received $600 million . UNC spent about $1.4 billion on new construction and the balance on renovations, infrastructure, land acquisition and technology improvements.
The bond program legislation read in part, "The General Assembly finds that although the University of North Carolina is one of the state's most valuable assets, the current facilities of the university have been allowed to deteriorate due to decades of neglect and have unfortunately fallen into a state of disrepair because of inadequate attention to maintenance. It is the intent of the General Assembly to reverse this trend and to provide a mechanism to assure that the state's capital assets are adequately maintained."
But the trend wasn't reversed. Though the bond program created construction booms at public universities, it touched just a portion of the infrastructure at each campus. For those many buildings that didn't benefit from bond money, the slow, steady deterioration caused by a lack of repair money continued. In all, the $2.5 billion spent addressed less than half of the $7 billion in total needs cited in a 1999 consultant's report.
And the meter keeps running. The UNC system's backlog now tops $3 billion, according to system data.
"The problem is perpetuating itself," said Hannah Gage, chairwoman of the UNC system's Board of Governors. "As the economy has slowed, the state's ability to give us the money we need has declined. We're in a mess."
Eisenhower-era building
Poor Gardner Hall - with its chipped, stained floor tiles, poor ventilation and white cinder block walls - is NCSU's poster child for disrepair.
"It is a true Sputnik-era science building," said Kevin MacNaughton, associate vice chancellor for facilities at NCSU. "It is one we have tried mightily to keep afloat."
The higher education bond program financed 40 projects at NCSU that resulted in new or renovated facilities, but the campus still has a maintenance backlog totaling more than $439 million.
"We have the haves and have-nots on this campus," MacNaughton said. "The buildings touched by the bond program are the haves, and the ones that were not are the have-nots."
Across the state, public campuses tell similar tales. N.C. Central University in Durham received $122 million in bond funds for 23 projects; its maintenance backlog stands at $85 million. Chapel Hill, which spent more than $500 million on 50 projects, would need $645 million to adequately update its facilities, officials say.
This problem isn't unique to North Carolina. Across the nation, public universities are grappling with crumbling infrastructures and shrinking state appropriations. When budgets are tight, it has proven easy for campus leaders to put off that new roof on the science building or that new steam line for the library.
The costs swell over time until they're so daunting some campus leaders just don't want to deal with them, said Terry Ruprecht, now retired from the University of Illinois, where he spent 40 years in various facilities and energy services positions.
"Their eyes roll back in their heads when they see the total numbers," said Ruprecht, co-author of a study on the subject. "They're too big, so the easiest thing to do is just move on."
An unfulfilled pledge
It wasn't supposed to be that way in North Carolina.
In 1993, the General Assembly pledged to provide state agencies with 1.5 percent of the current replacement value of their building stock as a way of combating deterioration. That target was later raised to 3 percent.
But it proved tough to hit. In 2009, for example, the state would have had to appropriate $282 million to the UNC system to meet that goal. The actual appropriation was $25 million.
From 2000 to 2010, the state spent just one-quarter of what it hoped to on repairs and renovations for the UNC system - $558 million. It would have needed $2.1 billion to hit that target.
And, of course, times are much different now than when the $3.1 billion bond issue was approved in 2000. The economy was healthier, and the university system, under the leadership of President Molly Broad, was in growth mode. Today, the university system, while far larger in terms of students, is a leaner operation and in reduction mode because of the state's lagging economy.
"For any significant construction program, the economy has to get healthy again," said state Sen. Richard Stevens, who was the trustees chairman at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2000 when the bond program began. "You'd need another bond program, and that's not going to happen anytime soon."
The UNC system is not engaged in any broad effort to solve the maintenance issue, though it has in recent years tried to slow new construction, and it is pushing for more transfer students and online courses to alleviate stress on residence halls and classrooms.
So what's a campus to do? At UNC-Chapel Hill, trustees have convened a working group after a facilities report earlier this year showed a deferred maintenance backlog of $645 million.
In a sense, the bond program exacerbated the problem by financing so many new buildings that require upkeep.
"We built a bunch of new facilities; we really upped the ante spending $2.5 billion," said Roger Perry, a UNC-CH trustee leading that working group. There was no provision for maintaining the new buildings.
What now?
At UNC-CH and elsewhere, campus leaders kick ideas around. Some insist another bond issue is the best solution. Others wonder about a private fundraising campaign aimed specifically at repairs and renovations - a tough sell to donors who like their names on things. Another idea: a trust fund of sorts for each new building, where you shave off a percentage of the project cost strictly to be used for upkeep.
Ruprecht, the retired University of Illinois official, tried to persuade his bosses to adopt a version of that plan. It never caught hold because it meant either spending far more for a building than expected or constructing a smaller facility with the money provided.
"That requires fiscal discipline that in all of my years in higher education has never existed," Ruprecht said.
Earlier this year, Ohio State University took a bold step to hold down facility costs, requiring that for a new building to go up, another of equal size would have to come down. The goal there is to add no net academic space, said Julie Anstine, Ohio State's special assistant to the senior vice president for administration and planning.
The policy is an acknowledgement that the largely underfunded long-term costs of running a building dwarf its one-time price of construction.
"It's the operating costs, the energy and utilities and everything that comes with it," Anstine said. "It's a total shift in how we think."
While UNC campus and system officials search for solutions, the gang over at NCSU's Gardner Hall will conduct business as usual - running the heaters and the air conditioners together to combat humidity, and covering expensive lab equipment with tarps, lest a burst pipe from the floor above drip through the ceiling and ruin an experiment.
And they'll keep fighting off that mold and bacteria.
"We want the kind we study," Daub said, "not the kind that comes flying in from outside."
eric.ferreri@newsobserver.com or 919-829-4563
From today's N&O.
Masthead
Published Sun, Oct 03, 2010 03:35 AM
Modified Sun, Oct 03, 2010 03:41 AM
UNC system facilities are 'in a mess'
In N.C. State University's Gardner Hall, scientists struggle to keep their workplaces free of mold even as they study it under microscopes.
The decaying, 58-year-old, red-brick building houses several plant science departments whose faculty members routinely analyze mold and fungi. The soundtrack for these efforts is the rattly, tinny din of dozens of dust-coated air conditioner window units that run year round - a low-tech attempt to counter the mold spores that slowly but resolutely attach themselves to walls and countertops.
Faculty here will continue this battle for the foreseeable future. There isn't nearly enough money available to properly maintain Gardner Hall and hundreds of other teaching and research facilities across the UNC system.
This may sound familiar. In the past decade, the state issued bonds to raise $3.1 billion to repair university and community college buildings. Though that money was used to revamp hundreds of campus facilities, the construction program fell far short of fixing all the UNC system's infrastructure needs.
So as campus officials keep shifting money around to fix the latest busted heater or hole in a roof, Gardner Hall's scientists will continue producing 21st century science in a building unlikely to be featured in an NCSU marketing campaign anytime soon.
"We're not on any campus tours," said Margaret Daub, head of NCSU's plant biology department. "Nobody lets anyone over here."
In 2000, North Carolinians made a resounding statement about the value of public higher education, approving the bonds in an Election Day referendum. That sent the UNC system on a 10-year building campaign on a scale rarely seen in American higher education. Hundreds of buildings were gutted, renovated, or built anew - creating an influx of flashy new facilities with the latest and most expensive technology.
Total spending for the UNC system: $2.5 billion. Community colleges received $600 million . UNC spent about $1.4 billion on new construction and the balance on renovations, infrastructure, land acquisition and technology improvements.
The bond program legislation read in part, "The General Assembly finds that although the University of North Carolina is one of the state's most valuable assets, the current facilities of the university have been allowed to deteriorate due to decades of neglect and have unfortunately fallen into a state of disrepair because of inadequate attention to maintenance. It is the intent of the General Assembly to reverse this trend and to provide a mechanism to assure that the state's capital assets are adequately maintained."
But the trend wasn't reversed. Though the bond program created construction booms at public universities, it touched just a portion of the infrastructure at each campus. For those many buildings that didn't benefit from bond money, the slow, steady deterioration caused by a lack of repair money continued. In all, the $2.5 billion spent addressed less than half of the $7 billion in total needs cited in a 1999 consultant's report.
And the meter keeps running. The UNC system's backlog now tops $3 billion, according to system data.
"The problem is perpetuating itself," said Hannah Gage, chairwoman of the UNC system's Board of Governors. "As the economy has slowed, the state's ability to give us the money we need has declined. We're in a mess."
Eisenhower-era building
Poor Gardner Hall - with its chipped, stained floor tiles, poor ventilation and white cinder block walls - is NCSU's poster child for disrepair.
"It is a true Sputnik-era science building," said Kevin MacNaughton, associate vice chancellor for facilities at NCSU. "It is one we have tried mightily to keep afloat."
The higher education bond program financed 40 projects at NCSU that resulted in new or renovated facilities, but the campus still has a maintenance backlog totaling more than $439 million.
"We have the haves and have-nots on this campus," MacNaughton said. "The buildings touched by the bond program are the haves, and the ones that were not are the have-nots."
Across the state, public campuses tell similar tales. N.C. Central University in Durham received $122 million in bond funds for 23 projects; its maintenance backlog stands at $85 million. Chapel Hill, which spent more than $500 million on 50 projects, would need $645 million to adequately update its facilities, officials say.
This problem isn't unique to North Carolina. Across the nation, public universities are grappling with crumbling infrastructures and shrinking state appropriations. When budgets are tight, it has proven easy for campus leaders to put off that new roof on the science building or that new steam line for the library.
The costs swell over time until they're so daunting some campus leaders just don't want to deal with them, said Terry Ruprecht, now retired from the University of Illinois, where he spent 40 years in various facilities and energy services positions.
"Their eyes roll back in their heads when they see the total numbers," said Ruprecht, co-author of a study on the subject. "They're too big, so the easiest thing to do is just move on."
An unfulfilled pledge
It wasn't supposed to be that way in North Carolina.
In 1993, the General Assembly pledged to provide state agencies with 1.5 percent of the current replacement value of their building stock as a way of combating deterioration. That target was later raised to 3 percent.
But it proved tough to hit. In 2009, for example, the state would have had to appropriate $282 million to the UNC system to meet that goal. The actual appropriation was $25 million.
From 2000 to 2010, the state spent just one-quarter of what it hoped to on repairs and renovations for the UNC system - $558 million. It would have needed $2.1 billion to hit that target.
And, of course, times are much different now than when the $3.1 billion bond issue was approved in 2000. The economy was healthier, and the university system, under the leadership of President Molly Broad, was in growth mode. Today, the university system, while far larger in terms of students, is a leaner operation and in reduction mode because of the state's lagging economy.
"For any significant construction program, the economy has to get healthy again," said state Sen. Richard Stevens, who was the trustees chairman at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2000 when the bond program began. "You'd need another bond program, and that's not going to happen anytime soon."
The UNC system is not engaged in any broad effort to solve the maintenance issue, though it has in recent years tried to slow new construction, and it is pushing for more transfer students and online courses to alleviate stress on residence halls and classrooms.
So what's a campus to do? At UNC-Chapel Hill, trustees have convened a working group after a facilities report earlier this year showed a deferred maintenance backlog of $645 million.
In a sense, the bond program exacerbated the problem by financing so many new buildings that require upkeep.
"We built a bunch of new facilities; we really upped the ante spending $2.5 billion," said Roger Perry, a UNC-CH trustee leading that working group. There was no provision for maintaining the new buildings.
What now?
At UNC-CH and elsewhere, campus leaders kick ideas around. Some insist another bond issue is the best solution. Others wonder about a private fundraising campaign aimed specifically at repairs and renovations - a tough sell to donors who like their names on things. Another idea: a trust fund of sorts for each new building, where you shave off a percentage of the project cost strictly to be used for upkeep.
Ruprecht, the retired University of Illinois official, tried to persuade his bosses to adopt a version of that plan. It never caught hold because it meant either spending far more for a building than expected or constructing a smaller facility with the money provided.
"That requires fiscal discipline that in all of my years in higher education has never existed," Ruprecht said.
Earlier this year, Ohio State University took a bold step to hold down facility costs, requiring that for a new building to go up, another of equal size would have to come down. The goal there is to add no net academic space, said Julie Anstine, Ohio State's special assistant to the senior vice president for administration and planning.
The policy is an acknowledgement that the largely underfunded long-term costs of running a building dwarf its one-time price of construction.
"It's the operating costs, the energy and utilities and everything that comes with it," Anstine said. "It's a total shift in how we think."
While UNC campus and system officials search for solutions, the gang over at NCSU's Gardner Hall will conduct business as usual - running the heaters and the air conditioners together to combat humidity, and covering expensive lab equipment with tarps, lest a burst pipe from the floor above drip through the ceiling and ruin an experiment.
And they'll keep fighting off that mold and bacteria.
"We want the kind we study," Daub said, "not the kind that comes flying in from outside."
eric.ferreri@newsobserver.com or 919-829-4563
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