that’s one of the most important messages.
We do a lot of things really, really well, and
we are worthy of support. Not the least of
which is real economic value. It is a matter
of reminding people that the money that
comes to The University of North Carolina is an investment in the future — it’s
not an expense to the state, it’s an investment in the future.
Suppose a young person enrolls, at, let’s
pick North Carolina State, and they get
interested in computers, and they grow
intellectually and they learn a lot about
computers and they get an idea, and one of
their buddies goes with
them and they graduate
and they decide to start a
little business. And they
come up with some good
ideas and they develop
some software and things
begin to grow, and next
thing you know, they’ve
got a company called SAS
that employs thousands of
people around the world,
that’s the world’s largest
privately owned software
company, contributes
immensely to the economy
of North Carolina.
Suppose a faculty member doing research in delivery of vaccines through
nanoparticles is up in his
lab on the Chapel Hill
campus doing research and
developing a methodology
for delivering vaccines thru
nanoparticles that are targeted exactly the way they
need to be and finds some
people who are interested
in that and spins out a
company and calls it Liquidia, and it’s now
employing 50-plus people right here in the
Triangle. It is the first company in the world
to have gotten a private investment from the
Gates Foundation, and that faculty member,
Joe DeSimone, is widely recognized as a
superstar in the field of nanoscience.
DAN SEARS ’ 74
There are thousands of those examples
around the state. We have researchers at
Pembroke that are slicing brain tissue and
determining what the effects of various
chemicals are on Alzheimer’s. We have a
piece of equipment at Fayetteville State
that’s really the only state-of-the-art probe
that can enable you to probe the earth and
rocks and do geological research — there’s
one at Duke and it’s 30 years old and even
the faculty at Duke go down to Fayetteville
to use [ours]. We have undergraduate stu-
dents at [N.C.] Central that are working on
trying to find markers for pancreatic cancer.
Review: If you’re the chancellor at
Carolina in this time, what do you cut,
and how different is that from what
the solutions you hear people talk about that
seem easy, like raising class sizes and reducing
the number of sections that you teach, that
impacts quality. Let’s take a freshman English
class, where you as the professor have been in
the habit of assigning six papers during the
course of the semester, two of which are
major papers, one of which is a major
research paper. But the others are all significant writing assignments, and you’ve taken
great care in grading those individually to try
to help improve the students’ ability to write
It’s going to be difficult to cut this time without touching the classroom.
you’d do to deal with the budget cuts at
a smaller school in the system?
Ross: I’m not going to try to substitute
my judgment for our chancellors. They
know their campuses better than I do. I
think what you have to do — I hope all of
our chancellors will do — is first do all
they can to protect academic quality, I
think particularly where state funding is
focused, the most of which is in our
undergraduate programs.
It’s going to be difficult to cut this time
without touching the classroom. Some of
We’ve increased tuition
148 percent across the system
in the last 10 years. ...
I worry about higher education
remaining affordable.
and their understanding of communication
through the written word. And you’ve been
teaching that class to 30 students and now
you’re asked to teach it to 50. Are you going
to be able to take 20 more students times six
