news-record.com

Good thing some very smart people work for the University of North Carolina.

It may take all of their collective brainpower to explain how the 17 UNC campuses nearly doubled the ranks of their top administrators over the last five years, even as budgets tightened and the economy soured.

Growth in administrators has, in fact, outpaced both the growth in faculty numbers and student enrollment on UNC campuses, reports The News & Observer of Raleigh.

UNCG, The News & Observer added, increased positions whose job titles included the words "provost" or "chancellor" the most. Those jobs doubled to 50 at UNCG, and total administrative positions grew on the campus by 71 percent in five years.

UNCG officials attribute much of the increase to the school's explosive enrollment growth, which will reach nearly 18,000 this semester, a new capital campaign and more research grants.

In an interview Thursday, Chancellor Linda Brady said the university still ranks academics as the top spending priority. Thus, academic affairs had seen smaller budget cuts (8.9 percent) than other areas, including business affairs (10.5 percent), information technology (10.5 percent) and university advancement (13.5 percent).

Sponsored research, she said, grew by 20 percent between 2000 and 2008, creating a need for proper oversight. "We spend a tremendous amount of time making sure that we're in compliance," she said.

Brady also noted that even where an administrator was added in IT, the department's management was actually reduced through the elimination of a supervisory position.

Other campuses may cite similar cases. But the numbers simply are too high, and some positions are much harder to defend. For instance, how to account for N.C. State's employment of 100 communication specialists?

Overall in the UNC system, positions containing the titles "provost" or "chancellor" swelled from 312 in 2005 to 418 in 2008. The results mirror an earlier report that found the flagship campus, UNC-Chapel Hill, spent more of its $2 billion budget on administrative costs than on classrooms.

To their credit, UNC leaders seem fully aware that this needs to change as the system seeks to cut $73 million in spending this year.

"If you are looking at the cuts we are making, they are heavily, heavily weighted on the administrative side," UNC President Erskine Bowles told The News & Observer.

And that's as it should be. The core mission of these institutions is teaching, research and scholarship, not building bigger bureaucracies.