Who is William Woodson? And how did he get to be the chancellor of North Carolina State University?
Nobody seemed to know on Friday morning, January 9, when the UNC Board of Governors confirmed his appointment. They knew his previous job title—provost at Purdue University—and a few other items from his official biography. But where did he stand on the issues? Has he made any controversial statements or decisions? Has he ever said anything at all except safe clichés and platitudes? What direction is he likely to take State? Nobody had a clue.
His appointment was leaked to the Raleigh News & Observer on Thursday, and the governors voted unanimously to confirm him the next morning. Rubber stamp, done deal, business as usual.
North Carolina is the last state higher education system in the country to keep the chancellor selection process completely secret, according to a 2008 Fayetteville Observer study. Most states make the finalists for a chancellor position public before the final decision is made. This openness permits the media and public to dig into the candidates’ records beyond the resumes, personal recommendations, and press releases that tend to be entirely favorable. This public vetting can turn up problems that are either missed in the search process or swept under the rug.
The state has seen enough unsavory things swept under the rug in recent years. It has been burned by the closed-door dealings on Jones Street and, with the Mary Easley job scandal, on Hillsborough Street as well. The people are clamoring for their right to know in everything, and rightfully so.
So now that Woodson has the job, what do we know, beyond the hype the audience was fed at his appointment ceremony? There, the audience was told how the governor of Indiana tried to stop the soon-to-be-former Purdue University provost on the highway to prevent him from leaving the state, and how the chancellor of Purdue offered to top the $420,000 salary he will earn at N.C. State, if only he remained in Lafayette. They heard of his popularity with faculty and his fund-raising prowess. And what a great fit he was for State: an agricultural researcher coming from a similar—but larger and more prestigious—land-grant institution.
UNC President Erskine Bowles, who made the final selection, cited Woodson’s extensive experience as one of his important qualifications. However, Woodson’s real administrative experience was as the dean of Agriculture, an important position, to be sure, but hardly the equivalent of provost, the number two job at a university. He was Purdue’s provost for only eighteen months. And now, one-and-a-half years later, he is making another big jump up to be the chancellor of a major flagship university that has been rocked by scandal.
Many people have managed to make such a transition, or even greater ones. Holden Thorp appears to have made the leap from one year as dean of the School of Arts and Science at UNC-Chapel Hill to chancellor without too much difficulty. But if experience is supposed to be somebody’s strong suit, he or she should have a lot more than eighteen months at one level below his or her new position. Lots of experience in this case suggests that the candidate has been a chancellor at another school for several years, or had served as a provost for more than five years—long enough to see some results of his or her policies.
And does he really “get it,” as BOG president Hannah Gage said? Does Woodson really understand the mood of the citizens of North Carolina, who have had more than a bellyful of the corruption in the last few years, when in his first introduction to the state, he joked that “the only problem with tainted money, is that there tain’t enough of it?” It was funny and folksy and charming, and he made it in reference to private industry’s funding of university research. But North Carolina is a state where the former head of the assembly House is in jail for accepting a satchel full of bribe money, and his predecessor as chancellor was rightfully thrown out of the job because of his part in the creation of a sweetheart sinecure for the former governor’s wife.
Such cluelessness and off-handed arrogance do not bode well for Woodson’s future decision-making. It is definitely not the perspective the job calls for. It suggests that he might “get” what the community of academics at N.C. State wants, that he might get what the insulated general administrators in Chapel Hill want, and that he might get what the coterie of politicians who make the decisions on Jones Street want. But that is not enough, not after State’s recent problems. His first appearance did not suggest somebody who is going to serve the best interests of the state and the university by confronting the sense of privilege that permeates academia, but rather one who is perfectly comfortable with the very attitudes that caused State’s ethical difficulties in the first place.
Woodson also may have been popular in Indiana, but popularity is no indicator of keen judgment. Oblinger was also a very popular man throughout the UNC system. But he gave the governor’s wife a job as a political favor, and then gave her a massive raise for additional unspecified duties. He denied his involvement in this affair until secret emails revealed otherwise, and when the political heat got intense, he gave the subordinate who tried to take the fall for him a big payoff at taxpayers’ expense. Oblinger failed miserably at one of the most important roles of a college chancellor—providing an impeccable example of ethical rectitude.
And he failed as a steward of the public trust. Bowles might be speaking a little prematurely when he suggested at the press conference after the appointment ceremony that the Easley-Oblinger incident is all in the past, and when he objected to a question by a reporter about her use of the word “tarnished” in regards to the effect of the affair on State. “Tarnish” is exactly what the incident did—it took a lot of the luster off of State’s (and the UNC system’s) local image.
And that luster will not be restored by acting as if nothing happened; it will only be restored with greater transparency and greater vigilance. Even this summer, after Oblinger quit, there was another controversy at State that screamed for a more open culture. Acting chancellor Jim Woodward’s termination of NC State Alumni Association Executive Director Lennie Barton after the school’s alumni magazine published an article in which alumni and professors openly discussed problems at the university raised a lot of eyebrows.
It is likely that Woodson will live up to or exceed expectations as a fundraiser. And it is highly probable that State will be chasing every possible research dollar, whether the source is the federal government, the state, or private industry. Indeed, the word from a public health professor at Purdue is that Woodson was something of a superstar as a research administrator. While he was dean of Agriculture, the Purdue faculty won two World Food prizes (“the ag equivalent of a Nobel”) and was also “the driver to create a new health sciences college.” These are notable achievements, but research money can create an ethical minefield—State should be exceptionally cautious at this point in time. And an emphasis on research is very likely accompanied by a de-emphasis on undergraduate education—in education, as in many other endeavors, it can be difficult to serve two masters at the same time.
Politically, there is at least one bit of evidence to suggest that Woodson has strong liberal tendencies. The Purdue Climate Change Resource Center is often cited as Woodson’s major achievement there; he apparently was integral to its founding. Climate change is a controversial theory, and one’s perspective on it is a good indicator of one’s political beliefs, and Woodson described it at the press conference as “one of the grand challenges we face in society.” The center at Purdue is best known for a highly dubious study about how global warming will cause devastating affects in the Third World. The study was left-wing politics, not valid science.
Perhaps Woodson will rise to the occasion and become a truly great administrator. Now that he has the job, he must be given a chance. He has some good qualities: according to the public health professor at Purdue, he took a strong, “even-handed” approach in favor of free speech, defending both Bill Ayers’ right to speak on campus and a librarian “who came under fire for speaking out against the gay rights movement in a private blog.”
But it still would have been best to know all this ahead of time, before he was confirmed. Instead, he appeared to be something of a stealth candidate, and the state of North Carolina deserves a better than that. While it is too much to open up the search process from the start and release the names of all applicants for a chancellorship, the names of the three finalists should be made public as soon as they are known. Let the public sort them out for all to see before the final decision is made. Or at the very least, the job should be treated like an appointed cabinet position, with the choice for the new chancellor announced several weeks before the Board of Governors votes to confirm him or her, so that his or her true nature can be brought to light. That is hardly too much to ask.