WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH (July 18, 2025) – The financial and political attacks on universities are both extreme and broad-based. The collateral damage being done to our nation’s scientific capabilities is still impressively underestimated.

The latest chapter in the decline of American science is the US Housing Department’s (HUD) brazen take-over, without previous warning, of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) 19-floor headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. The NSF and the National Institutes of Health are of course the principal funders of university basic science research, amounting to billions annually for the three major Triangle universities in North Carolina. No provisions have been made for NSF’s displaced staff. 

Some of this harm has been self-inflicted. Tone deafness about university spending and hiring priorities and censorious political correctness have been principal culprits. The university’s failure to act in the face of major scandals or to respond to long-standing managerial, ethical, and financial challenges led to external intervention, to a loss of university control and independence.

Insensitivity to public sentiment and wrong-headed spending are not the monopoly of university administrators. University boards must accept much of the responsibility.

Tone deafness uninterrupted

According to North Carolina’s governor, the state is “approaching a fiscal cliff that threatens our ability to invest in rebuilding western North Carolina, strong public schools, people’s health, infrastructure, and other services ….” 

The state’s public universities have been directed to freeze salaries and hiring. Numerous science grants have been rescinded by the Trump administration, resulting in withdrawn offers of assistance to graduate students and termination of important research efforts. 

Amid major fiscal retrenchments, the UNC system endorses ill-considered projects like NCInnovation and Project Kitty Hawk and awards huge bonuses for “performance” to senior administrators.

The UNC system president, who previously served on the university’s board, has received over $1 million in bonuses over the last three years, essentially for doing the job for which he was hired. Meanwhile, most of the North Carolina’s counties lost population, its K-12 teachers are among the lowest paid in America, and professorial salaries at its public universities continue to fall further behind those of their private and public university peers.

There are good men and women on our university boards, but these bonuses are imprudent and optically challenged. The so-called “metrics” used to determine the massive bonuses have little relation to presidential usefulness or to extraordinary performance.

Explosion of administrators and their salaries

Not that long ago, salaries of administrators were not different from those of senior professors at the same institution, after accounting for the 9-month salaries of professors and the year-round or 12-month salaries of administrators. Faculty members who served as administrators were paid a separate stipend for their administrative work. When their administrative obligations ended, they either returned to their classrooms and 9-month salaries or retired or left the institution–no golden parachutes, no “retreating to the faculty” with administrator salaries and no teaching duties.

In the early 1990s major public university presidents made about 70 percent more than did senior professors at universities like UCLA, Texas, or MIchigan. Today that pay difference reaches 600 percent and higher. There’s zero evidence the artificially inflated salaries produce superior results.

What has changed?  More importantly, what has not changed?

What has not changed is the so-called “market” that supposedly commands overgenerous salaries. Universities don’t operate in Economics 101, perfectly competitive markets, nor did these markets suddenly or dramatically change 20 or 30 years ago when the administrative salary lunacy took off.

These are artificial markets, where funding comes from tax dollars and tax-deductible contributions, where facilities are erected upon state-owned land using donor and government funds, where endowment income isn’t taxed, where many employees (e.g., athletes, graduate students) have not historically been paid or not paid very much.

To suggest that such markets demand exaggerated salaries, either for university presidents or football “strength” coaches, is disingenuous.

What has also not changed is the complexity of universities. Many institutions are bigger and fund-raising is more prevalent, but administrative challenges are not more difficult, just different.

Years ago President Bill Friday dealt with speaker bans, major student riots, attempts by the feds to control the university, and FBI-investigated basketball scandals. During the anarchic 1960s, the average tenure of presidents was three years; Mr. Friday considered leaving several times. More recently, another UNC president, Erskine Bowles, dealt with administrative bloat in the system’s central staff and with restoring seriously eroded legislative support. 

What has changed is the escalation of administrator salaries, influenced by the millionaire salaries of big-time athletics and trends in the corporate sector, where CEO pay has surged to 400 times that of their employees. Celebrity contracts for administrators also have contributed to a spiraling fraternity of soaring salaries and bonuses, a fraternity that attracts politicians, lobbyists, and board members. Ironically, the college athletic scandals that frequently derailed presidential careers have mostly vanished, since most things that used to be illegal are now allowed.

Back to Athens

With apologies to Heraclitus, who philosophized that things are ever changing, in a state of flux, some 75 western enterprises recognizable today existed over 500 years ago. These institutions retain similar purposes and unbroken histories. They include the Parliaments of England, Iceland, and the Isle of Man; the Roman Catholic Church; the Bank of Sienna; the governance structures of several Swiss cantons; and 61 universities, some of which are over 1,000 years old. 

Universities may recede toward the spartan days of Socrates and Plato, when students paid teachers whom they wanted to teach them. There were no associate provosts for student success or vice deans of global engagement in ancient Athens.

Universities won’t soon disappear, though one hopes unwise “performance” bonuses will.

Dr. Art Padilla splits his time between homes in Wrightsville Beach and Raleigh. He served as a senior administrator at the University of North Carolina System headquarters and later at NC State, where he was chairman of the Department of Management. He has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, and the University of Arizona, winning several teaching awards and recognitions, including the Holladay Medal, the highest faculty honor at NC State. He recently completed the 2nd edition of his book Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments.