I stumbled across a rather intriguing essay by former chancellor Marye Anne Fox yesterday. I was supposed to be working on a project, but I ended up on an hour-long wikibinge that led me to the Wikipedia article discussing UNC-Chapel Hill. I couldn’t help but notice that the article (at the time I read it) described Chapel Hill as the flagship institution of the UNC system. Notice the singular article.

I was, of course, aghast. I am fairly certain that both N.C. State and Chapel Hill are considered flagships of the UNC system. For those of you unfamiliar with the UNC system, it governs and administrates the sixteen different public four-year institutions in the state of North Carolina, including NCSU, the various other UNC’s in different cities, etc.

Anyhow, I immediately started scouring the Web for references: I was trying to find official confirmation of what I know to be true before I changed the Wikipedia article. Instead, after searching for NCSU and flagship in Google, the first hit that popped up was a link to the NCSU chancellor’s Web site archiving an editorial Fox wrote for an issue of American Scientist back in 2001 entitled “Roles and Responsibilities of Flagship Institutions in Multi-campus Public University Systems.”

As both a distinguished chemist and a capable political scientist (in the sense that successful scientists nowadays often need a mind for the politics of funding) it was generally understood that, during her tenure as chancellor, Fox was doing a great deal to enhance the status and prestige of NCSU in terms of scientific research and academics.

Now, I don’t have space for a long detailed summary of the essay, rather I’d encourage you to go read Fox’s editorial if the topic interests you. The basic gist of Fox’s essay is that the UNC system should spend proportionally higher amounts of money on its flagship research institutions because of both the higher cost of running graduate-level research institutions and the tendency of these flagships to give more back economically and socially to the wider community.

For the past couple of years, political action committees representing interests from the UNC system’s two flagship schools have pushed for increased monetary independence from the rest of the UNC system. More recently, these PACs have pushed to allow the flagship universities to set their own tuition rates, rather than have their tuition increases approved by the UNC Board of Governors.

This has been met with considerable opposition, and perhaps rightfully so. From my own observations of NCSU’s Board of Trustees and administration, fiscal responsibility and the financial plight of the average student are not usually topics of great importance when tuition and fee increases are discussed each year. For the chancellor and the trustees, it is far easier to reach into pockets of students to get the money they need than to lobby the state legislature for new funding.

With the final say on tuition increases resting upon the UNC system governors, at least the system as a whole can bring the weight and interests of the entire 16-campus system to bear upon the legislature to lobby for important funding increases.

Do flagship research institutions offer more to the state, both economically and socially, than other universities more focused on education at an undergraduate level? Yes, I believe this is ultimately the case. Cutting edge research in science and technology at NCSU (and medieval literature at Chapel Hill, I guess) leads to vast improvements in the state’s economy and quality of life and raises the academic credibility of not only the flagship institutions, but also the entire system.

However, we have to ask ourselves whether these contributions are truly distributed uniformly. While I believe that NCSU is committed to serving the entire state of North Carolina through its outreach, it is undeniable that the areas surrounding and directly associated with the flagship institutions (namely the Triangle) have seen a disproportionate economic benefit from said schools in comparison to more rural parts of the state. This is a largely unavoidable but sobering consequence of the centralization of research in the UNC system.

The issue of disproportionate funding will play a significant role in the future of the UNC system as the non-flagship campuses start to demand larger pieces of the tax-payer pie to fund their own institutions’ quests for national academic credibility. While we must fight for the continued funding of our established research programs, our campus must do this with a sense of humility towards other UNC institutions. We need an instilled abhorrence towards the kind of elitism that plagues Chapel Hill’s campus and fuels much of our own community’s insecurities towards our sister institution.

The spirit of our public, land-grant, flagship University was born from the egalitarian movements of the twentieth century. With the support of the state, our University and others like it will continue to surpass the private ivies in terms of both educational quality and value.

Marye Anne Fox’s original editorial can be found at http://chancellor.ncsu.edu/speeches/roles_and_responsibilities.html.

Let Ball know what you think at viewpoint@technicianonline.com.