Educated,
and
Charitable
Carolina students don’t just leave
at the end of the
semester. They leave
50 or so working
refrigerators, acres
of carpet, an army’s
worth of shoes. This
spring, 18 to 19
tons of it. A new
program of the stu-
dent affairs office
called Tar Heel
Treasure collects
that which gets
abandoned some-
where between the
dorm room and the
ride home and keeps
it out of the landfill.
On May 15 at
7: 30 a.m., the doors
of the Dean Smith
Center opened to
a waiting crowd
of more than 200
people who wanted
all that stuff. They
took away 80 percent of the items at
bargain prices and
left $13,000, which
went to Habitat for
Humanity’s Build a
Block program.
You can see
pictures of UNC’s
own yard sale
at alumni.unc.edu/
left-behind. And you
can read how Build
a Block got started
on page 8.
UNC STUDENT HOUSING
Faculty Retention Plummets as Salaries Stay Frozen
Barely six months ago, UNC was ahead of the curve on hiring and retaining faculty in an extremely difficult economic climate. While
hiring had slowed dramatically at many schools,
Carolina was hiring at about 80 percent of
normal and was winning most of its battles
for professors who were entertaining offers
from others.
By the end of the year, the University
was looking at a 41 percent retention rate
from raids from other schools in which it
countered or could not afford to counter,
one of the lowest rates in several years. The
medical school was hit particularly hard —
of 58 Carolina faculty members who presented offers from other universities and
whom UNC tried to keep but couldn’t,
24 were from the medical school.
Most of those who leave for greener pastures are
associate professors who have achieved tenure by proving their star power but who are young enough to be
vulnerable to universities who will up the ante on salary,
benefits and the other trappings of academia. Though
there are many factors in a professor’s decision to leave,
and retention seems to be cyclical — often rebounding
shortly after a nosedive like this one — the inability to
offer regular salary increases at UNC may be having a
cumulative effect, said Provost Bruce Carney.
The state froze across-the-board salaries last year
and again this year. “Prospects for salaries for this year
and even next are pretty bleak,” Carney said.
Even researchers who are paid through outside
grants that stipulate the ability to give periodic pay
raises to themselves and their staffs are prohibited from
doing so by an edict from the UNC System. The Uni-
versity is seeking to get that rule changed.
A recent memo from the UNC System says no
raises are to be given except for promotions, increase of
duties or in a retention case. The
latter is typified by a written
offer from another university.
Elite and well-funded private
schools are not the only ones
successfully attacking Carolina’s
faculty. Carney listed the univer-
sities of Texas and Michigan as
formidable raiders in the past
year. “It comes down to which
schools are impacted by the
economic downturn,” he said.
High tuitions such as Michi-
gan’s, he said, are important fac-
tors because they are somewhat buffered from the bad
economy as long as enrollment doesn’t slip.
Some faculty who entertain offers, the University
doesn’t try to keep — about one-fourth of the total
this year. The others fall into two categories: UNC
counteroffers to try to hold onto them, or it simply
doesn’t have the money to fight.
Carolina’s high-ranked Gillings School of Global
Public Health generated 10 such competitions this year.
Of the five counteroffers UNC made, it retained three;
for the other five, it didn’t have the funds to counter.
Ultimately, Carney said, results such as these raise
the question of whether the University is positioned
well to compete given the perennial limitations on
state funds and its status as one of the best bargains,
tuition-wise, in public education.
Waldrop Leaving UNC for University of Central Florida
Tony Waldrop ’ 74 — a triple Carolina alumnus and UNC’s vice chancellor for research and economic development — is leaving Chapel
Hill for the University of Central Florida, where he
will be provost and vice president for academic affairs.
Waldrop begins work in Orlando on Aug. 1, nine years
to the day after coming back to UNC.
Waldrop had been one of four finalists for the post
at UCF. He will succeed Provost and Executive Vice
President Terry Hickey, who has held the position since
2003 and had announced in January that he would step
down in June.
According to the University of Central Florida’s
website, UCF is a metropolitan research university that
ranks as the third-largest in the nation, with more than
53,500 students. Waldrop is going from the nation’s
oldest public university to an institution with a very
different history: UCF’s first
classes were offered in 1968.
