Okay, nosey people. Our salary database for the UNC system has been updated to reflect 2010-11 salaries.

I'm sure you'll all use this strictly for academic and educational purposes and not simply to snoop on your co-workers.

That said: here you go.

Are the cases of Butch Davis and Bonnie Yankaskas similar? Were the two UNC-Chapel Hill employees, each quite well-regarded in their respective fields, treated equally?

Should they have been?

News & Observer Executive Editor John Drescher raises these points in a recent column comparing the way UNC-Chapel Hill Holden Thorp dealt with two high profile cases.

One: Butch Davis and the UNC football situation. The other: Bonnie Yankaskas, the epidemiologist harshly sanctioned by the university because a cancer research database she oversaw was infiltrated by a hacker.

As Drescher points out, there were plenty of similarities between the two cases, and yet, the results were quite different.

Read on.

Charlie Nelms has little patience for the 15 percent cut to Pell Grant funding proposed by House Republicans.

The proposed spending bill would cut millions in federal research and financial aid funding and would reduce the maximum Pell Grant - the primary source of federal need-based aid for college - from $5,500 to $4,705.

The $845 in lost potential funding per student could have a significant impact, Nelms said Wednesday.

"It would just decimate the whole notion of access and opportunity," he said. "We cannot afford to go backward."

At NCCU, 65 percent of students - more than 3,000 in all - receive Pell funding. The reduction would surely keep some from college, he warned.

"It is the base of our financial aid package," he said. "The people who are impacted are the people who can least afford to be impacted."

The House proposal is part of a budget-cutting plan that would trim $100 billion from President Obama's spending request for the remainder of the current fiscal year.

When rock group Bon Jovi takes the RBC Center stage tonight in its Live 2011 World Tour, eight NCCU students will be able to say they were “with the band.”
 
The students, all members of the Lambda Pi Eta Honor Society, were selected to shadow the Bon Jovi crew as they prepared for tonight’s performance, according to an NCCU release. Students spent this morning helping unload and build the stage before returning in the afternoon for a tour of the arena, sound check and testing.
 
Bon Jovi, voted the No. 1 worldwide touring act by Billboard and Pollster, presents a spectacle that includes 1.5 million pixels on the high definition video screens; 8,400 amps required to execute one arena show for lights, audio, video, rigging, motion control and robots, and 950 separate video cues during the show to correctly display the show on the video screens.

According to NCCU's Charmaine McKissick-Melton, today's experience is educational driven. The students participating are mass communication and music industry majors.

In the 1940s at East Carolina University, Amanda Etheridge was everywhere.

She played five sports. She was the student government secretary. She was on the honor roll.

And then, in what should have been her senior year, Amanda Etheridge vanished.

The story of this fascinating Manteo native is detailed here in East Carolina's alumni magazine. It's the tale of a young lady who dared to challenge authority, and lost, badly.

The quick summary - Etheridge was running student government when then-ECU president Leon Meadows ran afoul of the law for misusing student funds.

She offended the wrong people and eventually got kicked out of school for the unforgivable sin of....are you ready for this? .... failing to sign out of her dormitory one day when going to meet a professor.

The horror!

Read the story. It's fascinating.

What's going on all of a sudden with college basketball in China?

First, we had Duke broadcasting a basketball game over the Internet in Mandarin using native speakers from its student body.

Okay.

Next, Duke says "the heck with just a radio broadcast" and lines up an actual trip to China. The trip will be in August, and the Blue Devils will play three exhibition games and conduct some hoops clinics there before hitting Dubai - why not? - on the way back to play a fourth game.

This isn't coincidence. One of the China games will be in Kunshan, where Duke in 2012 will open a campus.

Not to be outdone, Carolina and N.C. State are jumping on the China bandwagon as well.  The Feb. 23 game between these longtime foes will be televised in Shanghai, China, to an audience of up to 16 million people.

It will be the first regular season college basketball game televised in China.

Again, not a random decision. American universities clearly see China as a growth market. In North Carolina and beyond, a lot of universities public and private are forging partnerships with Chinese universities and setting up their own campuses there.

Gov. Beverly Perdue’s budget proposal, unveiled Thursday, includes $23 million for enrollment growth at UNC system campuses.

That’s about half of what the UNC system requested, even though Perdue and the university each base their dollar figure on the same projection of 2,337 new students next fall.

Here’s the discrepancy: Perdue’s $23 million is based on her staff’s calculation of what it costs strictly to provide classroom instruction to each of those students. The UNC system’s projection is based on the cost of classroom instruction as well as other services provided to students like the registrar’s office, financial aid and public safety, according to Joni Worthington, a UNC system spokeswoman.

“The funding formula has multiple components and [Perdue] funded a piece of it,” Worthington said. “It would be up to the other institutions to fund the rest.”

Perdue also proposes sending $34.8 million to the UNC system for need-based financial aid. Here too, Perdue and the UNC system are far apart; UNC requested $71 million.

Overall, Perdue proposes a 9.5 percent cut to the operating budgets of the UNC system and its campuses. She said that cut would actually scale back to about six percent once the revenue from a series of tuition increases approved last week is factored in.

Perdue's math there assumes campuses would receive 75 percent of the revenue from those tuition hikes, because she stipulates campuses use 25 percent for financial aid to help offset the extra financial burden created by those tuition increases.

But on some campuses, tuition revenue will be significantly less than what Perdue projects because they already use more than 25 percent of tuition increase revenue for financial aid.

At Fayetteville State University, for example, campus leaders this year plan to use 70 percent of all tuition increase revenue for financial aid.

For more on Perdue's higher education funding plan, click here.

UNC system President Tom Ross is concerned about the damage that could be done if Gov. Beverly Perdue's budget proposal wins approval.

In a statement released this afternoon, Ross said the loss of nearly 1,500 jobs, as Perdue has projected, will do severe damage to the university.

"With fewer faculty, staff, and course sections, many more students would not be able to obtain the courses and academic services they need to graduate on time," he said.

Here's the whole statement:

Given the economic climate and the size of the projected revenue shortfall, Governor Perdue had to make some very difficult decisions in order to balance her proposed state budget.  All of us in the University appreciate the challenges she faced and are grateful that she identifies potential ways to avoid even more severe cuts that certainly would cause permanent damage to our institutions.

We are particularly thankful that she recognizes the critical importance of our enrollment growth funding and need-based financial aid, although those needs would be only partially met, as well as operating reserves for new buildings.  In addition, revenues from tuition increases would stay on the campuses to provide more need-based financial aid and help reduce the impact of proposed budget cuts.
 
As our state struggles to work its way out of this recession, affordable access to higher education has never been more important to North Carolina’s economic recovery and long-term competitiveness.  That’s why I am deeply concerned that additional cuts of the magnitude proposed would place academic programs across the University in jeopardy and require the loss of more than 1,500 jobs. 

With fewer faculty, staff, and course sections, many more students would not be able to obtain the courses and academic services they need to graduate on time.  Given that the University has already absorbed $620 million in cuts and mandated reversions over the past four years, requiring the elimination of over 900 administrative positions, it is simply impossible to absorb further budget cuts without adversely affecting the quality of the academic experience for our students.  

While the Governor has proposed a small pool of funding for statewide repairs and renovations, I am also increasingly worried about the $2.1-billion backlog of unmet R&R needs across the University.  University facilities are valuable state assets, and unless we are provided adequate resources to maintain them properly, we put that taxpayer investment and public safety at risk. We stand ready to work with the Governor and the legislature to preserve both access and educational quality.

Gov. Bev Perdue's proposed budget has been a hot ticket today and has been slow to upload from the state's website.

I've attached a copy here.

Have at it.

Just click the pdf below.
 

Documents:

Gov. Beverly Perdue's proposed budget would bring a relatively modest 6 percent overall cut to the UNC system but also prompt the elimination of more than 1,400 jobs across the state.

Perdue actually proposes a 9.5 percent cut to campus operating budgets, but then allows revenue raised through recent tuition hikes - approved last week - to mitigate part of that.

"When carrying out personnel reductions, campuses are encouraged to abolish non-essential positions first," a line in Perdue's budget reads.

For at least the last year or so, UNC system and campus leaders have said there's little fat left to cut in terms of personnel, so this should be an interesting budget season.

The 6 percent cut seems modest in relation to Perdue's proposed cuts to other state agencies, which range from 7 to 15 percent. And it would be less than the 10 or 15 percent cut level university officials have speculated about in recent months.

"I hate to see any budget cuts but I think what the governor is proposing overall is reasonable," said Hannah Gage, chairwoman of the UNC system's Board of Governors.