The Facts:
Erskine Bowles, president of the UNC System, announced his resignation from his post at the last Board of Governors meeting. President Barack Obama recently appointed him as the co-chair of a bipartisan commission reviewing federal deficits.
Our Opinion:
Bowles was an adequate caretaker of the UNC System, but not much else. He could have done more to dampen rising tuition and fees.
The president of the UNC System, Erskine Bowles, announced his resignation at the last Board of Governors meeting. Almost immediately following the resignation, he announced plans to return to Washington D.C. as the co-chair of President Barack Obama’s recently announced fiscal commission.
Bowles, President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff in the late 1990s, and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson are leading the bipartisan commission, which is expected to have recommendations to the president’s desk Dec. 1.
The move is certainly an intelligent one for Obama, seeing that Bowles was chief of staff when Clinton’s administration passed the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, but Bowles departure causes some reflection on his accomplishments — or lack thereof.
In his more than four years in office, he has been the front man for funding difficulties at the universities and doubtlessly had an undesirable job, but the question comes back to the issue of system advancement.
The campuses have expanded, but in many cases without the state support they’ve needed to effectively keep class sizes down.
Tuition has increased substantially. While never more than the BOG’s promised cap of 6.5 percent, a credit to Bowles, tuition and fees at N.C. State increased more than $1,000 while Bowles was president — a loss for students.
Last year, Bowles suggested a drop in the maximum tuition increase to 4.5 percent, but the effort certainly hasn’t affected the General Assembly’s decision to raise tuition during the next two years.
Since Bowles started his career in corporate finance, he certainly should understand the realities of business. Hence, it isn’t unfair to evaluate him as a sort of CEO of education.
Under those criteria, he isn’t a particularly great success. State university systems, especially the UNC System, are dependent on state financing. But in its absence, as for this year, the system’s leaders must press the universities to maintain their endowments through alternate sources.
He stood up to the General Assembly, and fought against funding cuts at times, but it too often appeared that Bowles was playing the role of the consummate politician.
He played the hand he was dealt quite deftly, and surely won’t be remembered as a failure, but his successes are hard to view when the tuition increases and funding cuts are starring back at the universities.
Bowles may have been a competent caretaker for the system, but he certainly wasn’t the champion it needed in the legislature and across the state during the last four years.