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Molly Broad, president of the state’s university system, invited a few newspaper editors and publishers to Chapel Hill last week. She apologized for the disarray of the General Administration building. It’s heading into an asbestos-removal project.
Broad might want to leave the asbestos in place a little longer. It may be carcinogenic, but asbestos is great at resisting heat.
And Broad is getting her share of that.
Just three years after accepting the top post in the 16-campus university system “with hope, humility and high expectations,
”Broad finds herself proposing the most massive building program in the system’s history — $6.9 billion to modernize and expand facilities over the next 10 years. University leaders are looking to the state to come up with $4.1 billion of that.
On top of that, Broad wants $31 million to launch a grant program for needy UNC students, and $28.5 million to boost faculty salaries.
Feel the burn.
This all comes at a time when the Legislature hopes to get in and out of town with as little real decision-making as possible. The short session starts a week from Monday. Lawsuits, natural disasters, tax cuts and long-term commitments have all come due, while revenues have not kept up with projections. Eying a $500 million shortfall and a November election, lawmakers are hoping for a caretaker session.
The Chamber of Commerce’s legislative breakfast last week found Rowan delegates talking about road maintenance, teacher pay, mental health, electric deregulation —all important matters.
But modernizing university labs and making room for Baby Boom Echo college students was not high enough on anyone’s list of priorities to merit a mention.
The nearest UNC campus lies some 40 miles away, but Rowan residents have a lot at stake in this debate —namely, their young people. Rowan has 196 students at N.C. State, 166 in Chapel Hill and hundreds more at N.C. Central, Appalachian, East Carolina, UNC-Charlotte and the like.
And don’t forget the the community college system. The community colleges plan to partner with the university in asking lawmakers to meet their campuses’ $1.2 billion in building needs over the next 10 years. Rowan-Cabarrus Community College, which hopes to get $15.6 million out of that, counted more than 21,000 students at its campuses in 1998-99.
Lawmakers should feel guilty over the way they left the university hanging last year. The Senate, acting with too much good faith and haste for some people, approved a $3 billion bond for the university that did not require a referendum. Tossed this hot potato, the House claimed it was too much, too fast, with too little public input. The House approved a $1.2 billion bond that would be put to a public vote.
When it came time for the two sides to concur, negotiations broke down and action was put off until this year.
“Politics reared its ugly head again,” said Sen. Tony Rand, D-Cumberland, prime sponsor on the Senate side.
There was plenty of blame to go around. Skeptical lawmakers called for the list of needs to be prioritized and further detailed. Friction between the House and Senate caused a good deal of the problem. And some wondered if the university itself hadn’t botched the job.
How would previous presidents like Frank Porter Graham, William Friday or C.D. Spangler have handled this situation? Broad may have asked herself that.
She never let on if she was pondering the most logical question: How and why did her most immediate predecessors let the university system slide into this state of disrepair?
Leaking roofs and outdated science labs abound. Conditions at Chapel Hill’s chemistry building, Venable Hall, are so bad that a consultant has recommended demolition. Some N.C. State labs lack adequate ventilation. Professors in N.C. Central’s physics labs cover the walls with plastic so peeling paint doesn’t fall onto delicate optical lenses.
“It’s my feeling we’ve allowed this condition to persist too long,” Rand said last week. He’s heading the select committee appointed to review the university’s request and come up with a funding proposal.
Visits to the campuses, Rand said, “made glaringly apparent that we really have not been good stewards of our premiere resource.”
He doubts the legislature has the political will to attempt another bond issue without a public vote. He won’t say whether he thinks this November would be a good time to put a bond issue on the ballot.
Everyone will know more about all this on Wednesday. Not only is that the day after the primary, it’s also the date of the select committee’s next meeting.
“That’s when we’re going to do what we’re going to do,” Rand said.
Plenty of people are ready to find out, including Molly I-Can-Take-the-Heat Broad. How the state chooses to finance this effort to modernize its campuses “is not a university issue,” she told the editors. But protecting the caliber and reputation of that institution is.
“It takes a long time to build a university of the quality of the University of North Carolina,” she once told a Raleigh reporter. “It just doesn’t take very long at all for that quality to diminish.”
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Elizabeth G. Cook is editor of the Salisbury Post.
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Elizabeth G.