Welcome back to N.C. State–an institution that’s unfortunately run by a lumbering bureaucratic organization tied to the government of the state of North Carolina. In times of economic downturn, the years of gluttonous indebted spending comes back to haunt governments as bloated and careless as North Carolina’s and require deep cuts to organizations that are, for the most part, worthy of their expansive budgets.
The cuts have come noticeably on the academic side with entire classes lost, sections slashed and research projects canceled. Cadavers aren’t available for anatomy courses, open positions for professors are being frozen and entire graduate programs are being restricted.
These cuts are affecting the entire University from the administration right down to the students.
In a tightening economic environment, it’s understandable to have to downsize somewhat, but when it gets to the point where the mission of the University as a land grant institution is threatened, then some questions have to be raised.
Will the North Carolina General Assembly’s leadership feel any sort of guilt after realizing that its reckless spending increases over the years, including hundreds of millions of dollars in pork barrel and earmark spending could have been better spent by paying a professor’s salary or continuing a research partnership with a major corporation?
Instead of holding onto that money or using it to plan careful growth inside one of the state government’s only successful institutions, the General Assembly wasted it on frivolous half-baked pork projects like a barbershop on wheels and a teapot museum.
Will the Governor and his wife feel guilty after taking $110,000 trips overseas billed to the taxpayer with the purpose of being a “cultural exchange?”
Who is going to fill all of those jobs at the corporations Easley “lured” to North Carolina by promising millions of dollars in grant money and tax breaks if the University can’t turn out the qualified graduates to fill the positions we’ve prematurely promised?
Is it even good business sense to cut the budget of a university that produced companies like Red Hat and SAS without any sort of high profile multi-million dollar grant from the state?
The actual university system isn’t innocent either. Too much has been devoted to non-academic peripheral clutter during the golden years that the weight of the administrative salaries and lavish privileges are beginning to drag on the schools as well. At N.C. State, organizations that receive fee money won’t see as big or deep of cuts as the academic departments unfortunately because their funds are tied to what students directly pay in. The system is simple, but the logic isn’t quite right when administrators are afraid to ask students for more in tuition during tough economic times – yet fee money continues to eat up a sizable chunk of the overall bill from the school. Divert the fee money from these organizations to the colleges to fill in the gaps so students will have the resources for research and reasonable section numbers. As extraordinary as it may seem, it’s necessary to maintain the academic credibility and integrity of a learning institution.
So welcome back to N.C. State, the crumbling, pothole-ridden autobahn of innovation – where the red light that means go may not have the cash flow to pay its own electric bill.
