Journalist and Chapel Hill alum Charles Kuralt intoned those now-famous words a decade ago, just before President Clinton addressed the student body. University administrators have made them a cliché by playing and replaying the quotation at just about every football game ever since.
President Molly Broad of the university system and Chancellor James Moeser of the Chapel Hill campus might want to ponder that message more closely the next time it booms from Kenan Stadiums’ PA system. “University of the people” was meant to refer to the people of North Carolina, whose institution it is. Broad and Moeser want to raise the percentage of non-North Carolinians attending North Carolina’s public colleges.
It is high enough already.
Currently, 18 percent of the incoming freshmen classes can be from outside the state. That’s a significant concession in the name of geographic diversity. The university’s top administrators, who are not from North Carolina, want to jack up that cap on out-of-state enrollment to 22 percent. After a great hue and cry rang out from all corners of the Old North State, the university system’s board of governors tabled the proposal until next year. Here’s a better idea: Drown the damn thing in Chapel Hill’s Old Well.
North Carolina was the first state in the union to create a public university. Our forefathers wanted a college in which to educate their sons and daughters as affordably as possible. They wanted a better life for generations of North Carolinians, and they understood that a first-rate university education was the best way to accomplish that goal. For more than 200 years, the university and its sister institutions across the state have done just that.
The taxpayers of the Tar Heel State have willingly footed the bill. In fact, just a few years ago, they chipped in $3.1 billion to build more classrooms and dormitories across the university system to prepare for the ever-increasing influx of North Carolina high school graduates. We see no reason to fill still more of those seats with young people from elsewhere and turn our own away.
Matriculating at one of our public universities is already competitive enough. Bringing in more of the cream of students from other states will only make it harder. What’s worse, the out-of-state students already being admitted aren’t even paying their full share of their educational costs. Those kids ought to be paying even more of a premium than they now do for the privilege of attending our universities.
Broad and Moeser, who hail from California and Nebraska respectively, clearly haven’t been here long enough to feel the mystic sense of value that North Carolinians place in their universities. William Friday, the university’s longtime former president, who grew up in Gaston County and whose very bones are made up of minerals from the soil of North Carolina’s Piedmont, would never have let this happen.
Broad and Moeser and their respective staffs would be wise to commit themselves to becoming better acquainted with the people who pay their salaries — getting to know the people of their adopted state and watching their chests swell with pride as they describe their children’s exploits at one of the state’s 16 public universities. Then they might be less eager to further dilute that pride for the sake of something so fleeting as better rankings from the national magazines.
