UNC President Search is California Dreamin’

There’s an old North Carolina joke about bad ideas in California taking 10 years to arrive here. But one seems to be making record time. Exponential salary growth for public-university executives has the UNC president search committee California dreamin’.

Readers will recall that last year Marye Anne Fox, then chancellor of North Carolina State University, left Raleigh to take the same position at the University of California at San Diego. The West Coast school had offered Fox $102,000 a year more than N.C. State paid her. Fox was making $248,000 a year here; she picked up $350,000 in San Diego.


‘Price creep’ on chancellor pay extends from California to Carolina

This spring Chancellor Marye Anne Fox surprised folks at North Carolina State University and the UNC system when she announced that she had accepted the chancellorship at the University of California at San Diego. It didn’t take long, however, for people at UNC to find an old foe to blame for Fox’s departure: low pay.


The tragic life and death of a poster boy

He was held up as the poster boy of racial preferences in the fight against California’s Proposition 209, the ballot initiative outlawing preferences passed overwhelmingly in 1996. An ardent defender of preferences, in 1995 he was profiled as their best defense in the pages of The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.