Carolina Alumni Review - September/October 2007

not research universities. Maintaining faculty energy at a four-year college is a daunting challenge, and many small liberal arts colleges with lower profiles have had financial troubles in the past several years because of their singular dependence on tuition revenue. So while some other four-year colleges have undergraduate programs with admirable qualities, the schools that I would love for Carolina to emulate include Stanford, Harvard, the University of Chicago and Northwestern — because they have both world-class research and great undergraduate programs.

Rankings are a bag of apples and oranges, as the schools that get compared are, in reality, all very different. If you look at the U.S. News & World Report list, for example, there are schools currently ranked above Carolina whose research profile in the arts and sciences is not as powerful as ours. These include the University of Southern California, Emory University, Dartmouth, Washington University in St. Louis, Brown,Vanderbilt, Notre Dame and Georgetown. Many of Carolina’s academic departments are

stronger than their counterparts at these schools, which is evident in the national rankings of individual departments. These private universities have low enrollments, large endowments and other attributes that play well in the ranking formula. But they are very different places from Carolina.

On the other hand, there are public schools ranked below Carolina that have great research programs, including Wisconsin, Illinois, Texas, and the University of California-San Diego. Carolina has comparable doctoral programs to these institutions, but we are higher on the U.S. News list because ranking criteria ( including higher selectivity) work out in our favor.

The important thing to remember about the rankings is that we compete for students and faculty with all of these schools, including places ranked above or below us in one ranking or another. So while we may be more or less like a particular school, when we compete with them for an individual faculty member or student, the rankings are far less important than they might seem.

Endowing junior faculty

The University and the college increasingly must rely on private money to help us attract the best faculty and students. Fundraising priorities include faculty expansion and retention, graduate student support, facilities and innovative undergraduate programs.

I hope to enable the college to add faculty by creating new privately funded positions for assistant professorships. The UNC System Board of Governors recommended to the Legislature that Carolina be allowed to use endowed faculty chairs for junior faculty positions. Until this point, if UNC received an endowed faculty chair, it had to be used exclusively to attract or retain a senior faculty member. Now Carolina has the ability to use that income to recruit and support promising junior faculty. This means that the faculty can be expanded without having to rely on either our additional state appropriation or on tuition increases. It is now possible to create these kinds of endowed positions with a $1 million gift and apply to the state for a half-million-dollar