GOVERNANCE

Faculty Council news: Council gives Moeser send-off on a high note
Students ratchet up protest after committee decision

Council gives Moeser send-off on a high note

Everyone knew it was to be Chancellor James Moeser’s swan song, his final appearance before the Faculty Council before his retirement as chancellor. But little did he suspect there would be actual singing.

Two songs, in fact, were masterfully performed by soprano Terry Rhodes with accompaniment from cellist Brent Wissick. Both are Faculty Council members and professors in the music department.

The first song was the old Cole Porter standard “You’re the Top.” The second song was a modified riff on “Thanks for the Memory,” the signature musical sign-off of comedian Bob Hope. One modified stanza went like this:

Thanks Chancellor Moeser,

UNC’s much stronger now,

Because you brought the know how,

Your expertise, your wisdom,

You need to take a bow,

How lucky we’ve been…

Afterward, the room erupted in applause, but the standing ovation came much earlier when Moeser recounted his own good fortune to have been named chancellor eight years ago.

In his remarks, Moeser spoke about the difficulty of coming to Carolina as an outsider and the skepticism he encountered when, at his first meeting with Faculty Council, he spoke of his strong belief in faculty governance.

“Because I was a total stranger, there was an appropriate level of skepticism about whether I was committed to that or not,” Moeser said. “There was a kind of Missourian show-me attitude. That was absolutely fair.”

Moeser said he did a lot of homework after he was appointed chancellor, studying the history and traditions of the University to the point that he felt reverence for them by his first day on the job.

He also understood from the outset that the heart of Carolina’s quality was the strength of the faculty. That was true when he arrived and is no less true today, he said. That excellence has been reflected in the ranks of the faculty members who have become engaged in faculty governance.

“I cannot tell you how impressive that is to me because I know what the pattern is in most other places,” Moeser said. “I think it speaks to the fact that we take shared governance very seriously here. We honor it. We respect it. And in return, you have responded by being active participants in that process and I want to thank you for it.”

Competitive salaries

Making salaries more competitive with national peers to preserve the excellence of the faculty was the University’s top legislative priority when he first took office and will remain so long after he leaves, Moeser said. Money to increase the number of endowed professorships was a major focus of the Carolina First, fundraising campaign. Those efforts have born fruit, he said.

According to a faculty salary survey conducted by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the average pay for full professors in the tenure stream at Carolina, excluding clinical faculty in the School of Medicine, was $138,500 in fall 2007. That is slightly higher than the average offered by Georgia Tech and the universities of Michigan and Virginia, Moeser said.

The AAUP report said the national average in fall 2007 for full professors at public doctoral universities was $109,000, up 4.5 percent from the year before. By comparison, full professors at Carolina received an average pay increase of 10 percent from 2006 to 2007, Moeser said.

At the same time, average salaries for Carolina’s associate professors climbed to $91,000 in 2007, compared to $85,500 in 2006. Average salaries for assistant professors showed similar progress, increasing from $71,700 to $77,000.

Moeser described that competitive position as a “stunning accomplishment” given how far behind national peers Carolina’s faculty salaries had been. The achievement was fueled by generous state support and revenues from campus-based tuition increases through the lean years, he said.

Carolina’s long-term goal to reach the 80th percentile of the peer group approved by the UNC Board of Governors for tenured and tenure-stream faculty remains unchanged. That group includes prestigious public and private universities.

Moeser said he had just returned from a national AAUP meeting and heard about the heavy cuts in state support that university systems in Florida and California are about to face. Viewed in that light, he said, the modest pay state increases anticipated for 2008–09 do not look as bad.

Even when North Carolina was faced with serious budget shortfalls in 2002, 2003 and 2004, the UNC system and its flagship were treated favorably, Moeser said. He cited the state’s increasing commitment to need-based aid, which has grown exponentially during the past decade, and its commitment to appropriate $50 million in continuing revenues to support cancer research.

The rise in need-based aid, he noted, has allowed Carolina to create and sustain the Carolina Covenant, which allows needy students to graduate from Carolina free of debt. As for the support for cancer research, Moeser said, no other state has ever done that and no other state likely ever will.

Speaking of the events of the past year, Moeser said, “This has been a wonderful year, tinged obviously with moments of triumph and celebration, but also of great sadness. And I think in those moments as well we have seen and learned what the true spirit of this campus is in the beautiful way we pulled together for each other.”

Then Moeser paused to gather himself to deliver what he knew would be his exit line on the council’s stage. “The highest honor of my life has been to be your chancellor,” he said. “Thank you.”

Faculty elections

Of the 3,428 members of the voting faculty, 3,294 had valid e-mail addresses and received ballots for the 2008 faculty elections. More than 800 cast ballots, double the voter participation of the year before, said Faculty Secretary Joe Ferrell.

The results of the election are available at www.unc.edu/faculty/faccoun/Elections/2008/2008electionresults.shtml.

In other news, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Bernadette Gray-Little announced a search to replace Linda R. Cronenwett as dean of the School of Nursing. Cronewett is retiring July 31, 2009.

Students ratchet up protest after committee decision

Chancellor James Moeser began the May 2 meeting of Licensing Labor Code Advisory Committee (LLCAC) by drawing a line between the idea of supporting fair labor practices and the strategies that should be employed to achieve them. “I don’t’ believe there is any disagreement in the room about the principles and practices that this University is committed to,” Moeser said. “There is a disagreement on tactics.”

Minutes after the meeting ended, the dividing line over tactics became all the more real when five student protestors, who had been staging a legal sit-in inside the South Building rotunda from April 17 to the end of last week, occupied the chancellor’s office to protest the LLCAC’s decision not to endorse their demands.

The five students were arrested for violating the ground rules they had been given: to respect University property, not disrupt operations during business hours, not occupy any business offices and not exceed the fire marshal’s posted capacity for the rotunda.

 “We showed tremendous forbearance in a 16-day sit-in that was, until today, peaceful,” Moser said after the incident ended. “We made it clear all along that any disruption of business or occupation of offices would not be tolerated. I regret the students chose to end the sit-in in this manner.”

The official goal of the meeting was for LLCAC members to recommend to Moeser what the committee’s charge for next year should be. But even as that charge was being debated, students representing Student Action with Workers (SAW) stood around the table in silent protest with signs reinforcing the demands of the sit-in, which was for the chancellor to endorse the Designated Suppliers Program (DSP). The DSP was proposed by United Students Against Sweatshops as a system to protect rights of workers who make university logo apparel.

It includes requirements for university licensees to source apparel from factories that universities have endorsed based on their independent verification that employees’ rights have been protected.

After asking the LLCAC to review DSP in fall 2005, Moeser decided in August 2007 to  reject the DSP proposal because of lingering questions about its feasibiilty and concerns about unintentionally hurting licensees. The DSP was not part of Moeser’s charge to the LLCAC this academic year.

The LLCAC’s charge for next year

In response to Moeser’s charge to set an agenda for 2008–09, the LLCAC passed a motion for the advisory panel to put under increased scrutiny the value of continuing the University’s affiliation with two groups, the Fair Labor Association (FLA) and the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC).

FLA, the oldest of the organizations, is a non-profit organization made up of corporations, non-government organizations and more than 130 colleges and universities. The WRC is a coalition of student and worker-rights organizations.

Specifically, the motion calls upon the FLA and the WRC to coordinate with each other to see how they can work together to help Carolina meet its objectives regarding acceptable labor standards. The second part of the motion calls for FLA and WRC to explain to the University what they plan to do to become more effective working together rather than separately.

LLCAC member Jack Evans, who is the executive director of Carolina North, said the demands placed on the two organizations would constitute a “shot across the bow” warning that Carolina was ready to pursue its goals without them if they could not demonstrate an ability to work together to achieve real and verifiable results.

The second motion, which was defeated, would have called on Moeser to endorse the DSP as SAW had demanded.

Wrestling with a moral dilemma

LLCAC members wrestled with Carolina’s stature as one of the premier trademark licensing programs in the country and the moral obligations that such stature brings. That will not be easy, though, because all the university licensing programs in the country combined constitute less than 1 percent of the global apparel industry. With that tiny fraction of the market, universities lack the economic leverage to force the kind of sweeping changes needed.

But many LLCAC members said that Carolina’s prominence in the trademark industry, coupled with its historic values, creates a moral obligation to do all it can to push for humane labor practices.

Altha Cravey, associate professor of geography and longtime member of the LLCAC, said, “We have an opportunity to wrestle with a moral dilemma and our chancellor has that same opportunity.”

Cravey voted in support of endorsing the DSP, arguing that it would be a step forward toward achieving something practical and reasonable rather than continuing with “tinkering around the edges” of the problem.

At the same time, however, Cravey agreed with administrators on the panel who said that the next chancellor must reserve the right to accept or reject the recommendation of the advisory panel, whether that recommendation was unanimously approved or not.

LLCAC co-chair Don Hornstein, Aubrey L. Brooks Professor in the School of Law, suggested to Moeser that the University could be a leader in this arena in the same way that it was in promoting access to qualified low-income students through the Carolina Covenant.

Hornstein said what Carolina did through the Covenant was “path-breaking and historic.” It is now a national model that has been replicated more than 80 times.

He said this issue marks another opportunity for the University to blaze the path leading to a solution to a huge problem that could then be replicated by other universities.