The draconian hand of a central university board and the “nuclear option” of legislation or loyalty oaths or policy statements prohibiting what are, or are thought to be, inappropriate questions are not helpful here. We could benefit from less meddling by university boards and much less micro-management by our legislatures. Recruitment of top administrators is a board’s most important role, except for the setting of broad policy. They should embrace those central responsibilities.

We could also benefit from astute and resolute senior officers. University presidents and chancellors are thought to have more power than they actually do, but they still occupy a central position in these dialogues. Senior administrator evaluations by boards must include two crucial considerations: ability to keep politics away from their institutions and effectiveness in joining compassion, economy, and common sense to campus structures and procedures.

That so many public university boards have seen fit to intervene in traditional faculty responsibilities highlights serious failures at the board and campus levels. At the board level, the failure has to do with leader selection and appraisal, about focusing on and rewarding the wrong things, and about micro-management. At the institutional level, two very concerning trends are evident: the decline of meaningful faculty involvement in campus governance and leader ineffectiveness.

Public university boards may strengthen their service to the taxpayers who sustain their institutions by addressing administrative bloat and bureaucracy in general, including in the DEI enterprises but also in other sprawling areas that dilute the university’s main purposes. The diversion of academic funds and the use of student fees and other funds have fueled this binge. Boards should insist on the centrality of teaching and research and on the application of university knowledge to address their states’ pressing challenges. They should appraise campus leaders on how well they do these things and eliminate administrative bonuses for doing the jobs for which they are already handsomely paid. They should leave the curricula and the classes to the professors. 

Maybe the move of the UNC system’s headquarters from Chapel Hill to downtown Raleigh and into a building prone to flooding may take care of some of the bloat because fewer folks may want to work there.

Art Padilla: Universities and DEI, Part 1 >>

Universities and DEI, Part 2: What’s new? >>

Banner images were generated by AI (DALL-E 2) with the instruction to “provide a Picasso-style painting of DEI.” 

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Dr. Art Padilla splits his time between his homes in Wrightsville Beach and Raleigh. He served as a senior administrator at the University of North Carolina headquarters and later at NC State, where he was chairman of the Department of Management. He has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, and University of Arizona, winning several teaching awards and recognitions, including the Holladay Medal, the highest faculty honor at NC State. He recently completed the 2nd edition of his book Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments and is at work on his first novel for Penguin.