Seven Questions with Chancellor Jim Woodward
Thanks to everyone who submitted questions for Chancellor Woodward. We spoke with him Monday about everything from tenure to athletics to transparency to e-mail. An edited transcript follows. We hope to announce our next “Seven Questions” subject soon.
1) You talk a lot about transparency. Can you explain what that means to you, why you think it’s important and what you plan to do to spread that mindset throughout the university?
It really goes in two directions. Let me talk internally, because that’s a lot easier to speak to. The campus community needs to understand [and] needs to have reasonably full information on how major decisions are made and, where appropriate, an opportunity to participate in those decisions. To some degree, I’m talking about faculty, but there are other organized groups on campus—students and staff—as well. Internally, transparency [means] that key decisions will result after there is appropriate consultation. Once decisions are made, they will be carefully explained. That’s not to say that you make, say, budget decisions based on a democracy. That’s not it. This is a hierarchy. But the faculty, staff and students need to understand, for example, how the budget decisions we’re now confronting are made and why and, when appropriate, have a say so in [them]. We have a process in place for doing that. Transparency internally means that you open up the decision-making process so that the key constituents internally can understand and, where appropriate, participate in those decisions.
To some degree, it means the same thing externally. We need to be prepared to explain what we do to our external constituencies—that’s certainly our alumni. But more broadly, it’s the people of North Carolina. The vehicle for doing that is through the media. We need to be prepared to explain why we do what we do on this campus, and when we make a mistake to admit we’ve made the mistake [and to] produce all material that relate to decision-making here so it can be reviewed. We need to be available for follow-up questioning. . . . I don’t want to be in a defensive mode. I want to be in a partnership mode. To do that, we have to open the information flow from the institution. We will continue to get inquiries about specific decisions within this campus. That’s an appropriate thing. We need to fully answer those inquiries. . . . We need to prepare ourselves internally to answer [them], but I need to ensure that the key points of contact within the institution understand that we are obligated as a result of being a public university to be available for questioning, to produce thorough responses.
[W]ithin the first week [I was here], I met with all the key people on campus that serve a communications role. You heard me try to explain [in that meeting] the way we were going to do business. The interesting thing, when I said we were going to answer the intent of the [questions people ask], I looked around the room and I bet half the room was nodding. What that told me was that the people in those key positions understood and embraced what I was saying. Rather than getting pushback from the people that are in these key roles, they will embrace this. With vice chancellors and deans, I have had this conversation. There I’m talking principally about internal transparency. I just came out of two budget meetings this afternoon with two colleges, and in both cases, we talked about how they are to go back and make sure they have fully communicated with their colleges not only what the budget reductions are going to be, but how the decisions are being made in those colleges. The way you [spread the practice of transparency] is to constantly speak to it and the other way is to be an example. I’ve done more interviews in the three weeks I’ve been here than I did in the 16 years I was at UNC-Charlotte.
2) Can you explain how tenure works in a case like this, when a chancellor and provost have stepped down under these circumstances, and what it would take to prevent someone from returning to the faculty?
I fully understand when people who read or hear about tenure, in some instances, say, “Gee, that’s not right.” Tenure is an element of what I consider to be a foundation principle for higher education in the U.S. I’m someone who has worked in industry. I’m not naïve about what tenure means and the difference that you find in companies. But I believe that principle is one of the reasons we have the greatest higher education system in the world. It simply permits or encourages, principally, faculty at all levels to debate more senior faculty on topics, to debate administrators on any topic and not feel as if their jobs are threatened. There is not administrative freedom on a campus. There is academic freedom. . . . If you look at the derivation in this country of the so-called “tenure principles”—what does it mean to hold tenure, how is tenure rescinded—you’ll see that there is a national organization that has dealt with it for years—the American Association for University Professors (AAUP). [It] has endorsed or embraced both what tenure means [and] the justifiable reasons for terminating tenure. The UNC System has adopted those principles, as has every major university in this country. It basically says you can eliminate a tenured faculty person or terminate tenure for certain cause, and that cause is high-level. For example, if you stole money. If you had a grant contract and you stole money for personal gain. It’s a fairly high hurdle, as I think it should be, or otherwise it doesn’t mean anything within a university setting. And there is a very lengthy procedure you have to go through to rescind tenure. You have to demonstrate that that hurdle has been exceeded by the person who is losing tenure. If you didn’t go through a process or procedure and the institution is obligated to justify that action, then you can very well end up being censured by AAUP. If you go on their Web site, you’ll see that some smaller colleges around the country have been censured for various reasons. It is a horrible blow for a university to be censured for violating tenure principles. It impacts tremendously your ability to recruit faculty and administrators. If you’re a potential faculty member someplace, and you see NC State has been censured by AAUP for violating tenure principles, you’re going to think twice about being a candidate here.
My view is that if a university steps out and violates the conditions of tenure, you bring great risk to that institution’s ability to hire and keep good faculty, and to some extent, administrators. There is a real difference between tenure earned by a faculty member and tenure earned in the public school system. I think it could be explained as follows: Within a good university like NC State, a junior faculty member comes here, say, right out of graduate school, they have to accrue and present a record that justifies them being awarded tenure to this institution. They either have to be awarded tenure by the institution within 7 years or they’re out. It’s an up or out thing. Within the public school system, you find tenure but in general, what happens there is a teacher gets tenure if the school system has not accrued a record that justifies them being terminated. The hurdle for getting tenure at a good university is much higher. And the hurdle the institution has to meet in order to terminate or rescind tenure, is much higher, as well. What happened in my case, I was a tenured professor in engineering. I then moved into a dean’s job, into an academic vice president job, into a chancellor’s job. You never lose tenure if you do that. So, when I stepped down as chancellor, I went into a phased retirement program and taught for three years. Theoretically, I could have gone back as a faculty member, and I would have picked up the full responsibilities of a faculty member.
Tenure is difficult to get for a faculty member. Tenure is difficult to take away. I personally think it’s a very good thing. . . . [I]n companies I either worked in or served on boards of . . . , what you tend to do is keep somebody unless they’re bad enough to fire. A university doesn’t keep faculty unless that faculty member has accrued a record and presented a record that says I’m good enough to be given tenure—a permanent faculty position at this institution. This campus is very, very tough on the award of tenure. So it should be tough to take tenure away.
3) What kinds of changes in NC State’s structure and policies will come out of recent events?
Some folks say [universities are] loose confederations of colleges. That’s probably a good description. As universities such as NC State have grown over the years, and because of the decentralized nature of universities anyway, what you frequently find is strong, independent colleges that offer superb academic programs. That doesn’t harm the university until you get into broad institutional challenges: this communication thing I talk about; what’s the appropriate strategic direction for the university; just dealing with the budget cuts this year. One of the things that I would hope that we accomplish this year, as well, and to some extent it has been pointed to as a weakness in the institution, is more appropriate cohesive direction at the central level.
I want to emphasize appropriate. That does not mean all decisions should be made centrally. But what it does say is that the management of the institution that should be exercised at the central level is being carefully exercised. Communications is one of those areas. We clearly didn’t handle the communications challenge when the problems started to unfold. To some extent, it was because we were highly decentralized in the way we dealt with communications. I like decentralization with certain types of communication issues, but with broad institutional matters, there’s got to be careful, careful management at a central level. I [also] think the good thing that comes out of all of this in many ways is a recognition that we’re a public university. We’re beholden to the people who support us. We’ve got to be available. We’ve got to be accessible. I have heard in the past from some folks within universities that we do the work of the university and therefore we ought to make key strategic decisions. My argument there is you don’t own the university. I don’t own the university. The people of North Carolina do. I think it will help us renew, or strengthen, our looking externally [at] what the people want from us as far as programs are concerned. What the people want from us relative to how we make decisions, how we deal with matters internally, how we report those. I think we’ll be a better university for doing that.
A lot of this stuff is procedural. You review the procedures for making appointments. You review the procedures for getting board approval on things. One of the things I did this morning was review where we are in archiving e-mails. We’ve recently gotten creamed on that. The fact is, we are no worse and probably better than most large public universities in the country. I was talking with Mark Hoit, our chief information officer, this morning. He came here last year and one of his responsibilities is to put together a coherent system. He said, in 2004, we had, I think, 25 different e-mail systems and their standalone servers on campus. . . . There was a policy issued at that time that we were to retain e-mails in concert with the way we were obligated to maintain written records. . . . There has been some progress made, including the aggregation of a separate administrative IT system on campus and an academic IT system. . . . The outcome of this is going to be a single server for e-mails on campus. The outcome is going to be—except for student e-mails—we will archive all other e-mails that come into this university. We will be able to centrally control the requirement that we satisfy all laws and also that we can reasonably respond to any subpoenas we get to deliver information. It is extraordinarily difficult to do that now.
What happened with the recent batch of e-mails was our people put in literally hundreds of hours trying to respond to the original request for information. [It was] a legitimate request. Nothing wrong with it. That required us to search storage devices. We searched file cabinets and the whole kit and caboodle. We did the best we could. Then some external e-mails came after we had responded that gave us a hint as to where else we might look, so that second search was initiated by us. It didn’t come from anybody else. I was here about the time we started that search. I said, “Here are rules: Whatever comes out of this will be sent to the DA and we will release it to the public 15 minutes afterward.” The other thing we decided at that time is we were going to bring in a forensic IT expert that didn’t work for the university, that was selected by external counsel, who would review in total what we had done to try to find all e-mails. His report, good or bad, will be released to the public immediately, so you can see what we did. I’m comfortable, and I think his report will confirm, that we have done a thorough search to the best of our ability. But it will also confirm we have had a poor system for archiving e-mails. I won’t point to any other universities, but I will tell you there are no good archival systems right now that I know of. [Hoit] came from another public university that, instead of having 25 to 30 separate e-mail servers, has about 150 e-mail servers.
The result of the problems we’ve had will, I think, improve internal operations that will help meet this commitment to transparency. In the future, when the media comes to us and says give us all the e-mails that related to Mary Easley between 2005 and 2009, you can go do a single keyword search and come back with those. That’s my goal, and we’ll be there probably by the first of the year.
4) What motivates a person to come out of retirement into a situation that seems to be a huge headache and presents a challenge at every turn?
I’ve said this, and it’s really true. I would not have done this for any other university in the country. There were two reasons. One is a personal reason. I started my career in public higher education here. I’ve always had a personal affection for this institution. I’ve had many friends at NC State over the years, even before I came back to North Carolina. Perhaps the more important reason: I think this is the most important university in the state of North Carolina to the future well-being of our people. I say that because, if you look at the array of programmatic activities here and think about what our people need in the future, there is a close, close correlation. Obviously, there are some other great universities in our state. But I think NC State has a unique role in helping the people of North Carolina and the transition to this new integrated world economy. I couldn’t not do it. Even my wife knew I couldn’t not do it.
5) Do you see yourself as a caretaker of the university or do you have greater ambitions to advance policy and NC State’s mission?
I’d be violating my responsibility to NC State and to the people of North Carolina if I only saw myself as a caretaker. [UNC System President Erskine Bowles] made it very clear, when he asked me to serve and announced I would do it. An important job to me is, of course, maintaining the effective day-to-day operations. But it is also to identify those strategic directions that are being pursued or need to be pursued and ensure we move along in those directions vigorously. A couple of those are as follows: This institution has emerged as a major research university in areas that are critical to the future well-being of North Carolina. What we’ve got to do this year is to continue to push the development of those research programs. We can’t sit here and twiddle our thumbs and lose a year, lose our competitive edge. In research, we’ve got to continue to push very hard in selective areas. The other is we know, like any other big university now, you’ve got to increasingly raise private gifts. A big university will cycle through major campaigns every seven or eight years now. We’ve got to make sure this year we move down the path toward another major campaign. That includes the continued work with our development capabilities on campus, an area I’m extremely pleased with but where we need to put additional focus. I am not a caretaker. I’ve been asked to serve as chancellor for NC State this year. One of my major responsibilities is to ensure we continue to move toward the important strategic goals that have been set for this institution, and I intend to do my best to do that.
6) What effect does an athletics program have on the health and reputation of a university?
Except in the last couple of months, most news coverage this institution gets would be as a result of its athletics program. In reality, the athletics program is the principal window through which most people see a university. If that is the case—and I know that’s the case—a successful athletics program, that operates with honesty and integrity, helps present the university as a successful university that operates with integrity and honesty. I think it has that level of importance. The other thing an athletics program does is to help create, while students are here, a sense of being part of the family of NC State, and, so frequently, these emotional attachments last forever. It’s important to the university long term that its alumni stay part of the family of the university. Obviously financial gifts are important. But it’s beyond that. . . . Internally, an athletics program helps create a sense of family. Externally, it really is a window through which so many of the public sees the university. I vigorously support the athletics program at NC State and will give it my careful attention. And I’m looking forward to football season. We’re going to have a great football season. We’ve got a great coach.
7) What are your top priorities?
One is to ensure we aggressively pursue strategic goals we set for this campus and we don’t lose a year. That’s extremely important to me. A second is that we will review the administrative structure within the university this year and begin to make any changes that might seem warranted. A third, extremely important priority for me is to set us on the road to recovering the trust that I believe the people of North Carolina have long had in this university. I would hope our actions in this coming year will move us down the road of recovering that trust. This is a superb faculty here. I continue to be astounded every day by the people who do the real work of the university, and they deserve the confidence and trust of the people who support us. I will do my best to help achieve that during the time I’m here.
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[...] Jim Woodward stopped in at football practice recently to talk with the players and coaches. In our “Seven Questions with Jim Woodward” post from July, he said something to us that he repeats here: “[An athletics program] is a window [...]