Nobody seemed to know on Friday morning, January 9, when the UNC Board of Governors confirmed his appointment. They knew his previous job title—provost at Purdue University—and a few other items from his official biography. But where did he stand on the issues? Has he made any controversial statements or decisions? Has he ever said anything at all except safe clichés and platitudes? What direction is he likely to take State? Nobody had a clue.
His appointment was leaked to the Raleigh News & Observer on Thursday, and the governors voted unanimously to confirm him the next morning. Rubber stamp, done deal, business as usual.
North Carolina is the last state higher education system in the country to keep the chancellor selection process completely secret, according to a 2008 Fayetteville Observer study. Most states make the finalists for a chancellor position public before the final decision is made. This openness permits the media and public to dig into the candidates’ records beyond the resumes, personal recommendations, and press releases that tend to be entirely favorable. This public vetting can turn up problems that are either missed in the search process or swept under the rug.
The state has seen enough unsavory things swept under the rug in recent years. It has been burned by the closed-door dealings on Jones Street and, with the Mary Easley job scandal, on Hillsborough Street as well. The people are clamoring for their right to know in everything, and rightfully so.
So now that Woodson has the job, what do we know, beyond the hype the audience was fed at his appointment ceremony? There, the audience was told how the governor of Indiana tried to stop the soon-to-be-former Purdue University provost on the highway to prevent him from leaving the state, and how the chancellor of Purdue offered to top the $420,000 salary he will earn at N.C. State, if only he remained in Lafayette. They heard of his popularity with faculty and his fund-raising prowess. And what a great fit he was for State: an agricultural researcher coming from a similar—but larger and more prestigious—land-grant institution.
UNC President Erskine Bowles, who made the final selection, cited Woodson’s extensive experience as one of his important qualifications. However, Woodson’s real administrative experience was as the dean of Agriculture, an important position, to be sure, but hardly the equivalent of provost, the number two job at a university. He was Purdue’s provost for only eighteen months. And now, one-and-a-half years later, he is making another big jump up to be the chancellor of a major flagship university that has been rocked by scandal.
Many people have managed to make such a transition, or even greater ones. Holden Thorp appears to have made the leap from one year as dean of the School of Arts and Science at UNC-Chapel Hill to chancellor without too much difficulty. But if experience is supposed to be somebody’s strong suit, he or she should have a lot more than eighteen months at one level below his or her new position. Lots of experience in this case suggests that the candidate has been a chancellor at another school for several years, or had served as a provost for more than five years—long enough to see some results of his or her policies.
And does he really “get it,” as BOG president Hannah Gage said? Does Woodson really understand the mood of the citizens of North Carolina, who have had more than a bellyful of the corruption in the last few years, when in his first introduction to the state, he joked that “the only problem with tainted money, is that there tain’t enough of it?” It was funny and folksy and charming, and he made it in reference to private industry’s funding of university research. But North Carolina is a state where the former head of the assembly House is in jail for accepting a satchel full of bribe money, and his predecessor as chancellor was rightfully thrown out of the job because of his part in the creation of a sweetheart sinecure for the former governor’s wife.
Such cluelessness and off-handed arrogance do not bode well for Woodson’s future decision-making. It is definitely not the perspective the job calls for. It suggests that he might “get” what the community of academics at N.C. State wants, that he might get what the insulated general administrators in Chapel Hill want, and that he might get what the coterie of politicians who make the decisions on Jones Street want. But that is not enough, not after State’s recent problems. His first appearance did not suggest somebody who is going to serve the best interests of the state and the university by confronting the sense of privilege that permeates academia, but rather one who is perfectly comfortable with the very attitudes that caused State’s ethical difficulties in the first place.
Woodson also may have been popular in Indiana, but popularity is no indicator of keen judgment. Oblinger was also a very popular man throughout the UNC system. But he gave the governor’s wife a job as a political favor, and then gave her a massive raise for additional unspecified duties. He denied his involvement in this affair until secret emails revealed otherwise, and when the political heat got intense, he gave the subordinate who tried to take the fall for him a big payoff at taxpayers’ expense. Oblinger failed miserably at one of the most important roles of a college chancellor—providing an impeccable example of ethical rectitude.
And he failed as a steward of the public trust. Bowles might be speaking a little prematurely when he suggested at the press conference after the appointment ceremony that the Easley-Oblinger incident is all in the past, and when he objected to a question by a reporter about her use of the word “tarnished” in regards to the effect of the affair on State. “Tarnish” is exactly what the incident did—it took a lot of the luster off of State’s (and the UNC system’s) local image.
Jay Schalin joined the Pope Center in August 2007. He researches and writes about higher education issues, primarily in North Carolina.
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