At their July 29 meeting, the UNC Board of Governors announced a salary bump for the UNC System’s 17 chancellors, after an hour-long discussion in closed session. NC State Chancellor Randy Woodson, along with six others, received an additional “market increase” on top of the 1.5 percent raise mandated by the NC General Assembly’s Appropriations Act of 2016. Woodson now receives a taxpayer funded salary of $617,376.
UNC System President Margaret Spellings emphasized that the raises were intended to stay competitive with other institutions, relative to ranges determined from a market survey conducted last year by Buck Consultants.
“From here forward, we are going to be looking at performance oriented increases,” said Lou Bissette, chairman of the UNC BOG. “But we needed to get everybody at least to the bottom part of their ranges.”
The reason for this being a closed session was due to legal and personnel reasons.
Despite a raise of 13.5 percent in November and this most recent raise of 4.64 percent, Woodson is still considered below the market range for a chancellor of a university the size of NC State. However, Woodson is also eligible for an annual stipend of up to $200,000 paid for by the private nonprofit NC State University Foundation.
Madeline Finnegan, president of the UNC Association of Student Governments and junior studying economics, described her views on the chancellor pay raises as “conflicted.”
“Chancellors make hundreds of thousands of dollars and when students struggle to pay for college,” Finnegan said. “It brings up some questions as to why we’re paying chancellors so much. How is that fair when we could be providing additional merit-based aid, or what else could that money go to? Though the other side is: Do we value the leadership of the chancellors that we have now and how would the university suffer if we paid them less and then lost them and got different chancellors that would agree to pay?”
As ASG president, Finnegan holds a seat on the Board of Governors. However, due to her status as a student, she is not allowed to vote.
“There are definitely people in the room who believe that a voting student member on the board is a conflict of interest,” Finnegan said. “Because if I’m voting on tuition increases, I’m voting on tuition increases for myself. I see that, but I also see that in all other forms of government, like if you’re looking at the United States Congress, they make decisions that affect them. I don’t think that’s necessarily bad.”
According to Finnegan, the previous ASG president, Zack King, worked last year to try and secure a vote on the Board of Governors for the position in an effort to expand the effectiveness of student representation. Finnegan plans to continue working toward this goal, but given the president’s one-year term, this can prove difficult.
“I only have a limited amount of time, a limited amount of meetings, to get my point across and make it all happen because if it doesn’t happen by the end of the year, it’s really hard to continue that work,” Finnegan said.
