Trustees at UNC-Chapel Hill voted this morning to raise tuition 6.5 percent.

That's the maximum allowed by the UNC system. For in-state undergraduates, it's another $313 a year on the tuition bill.

With the increase, in-state tuition and fees next year would total $7,025. That doesn't include room, board, books and other expenses.

Carolina is one of a number of public universities setting tuition rates this week. They do so against a backdrop of some uncertainty, given the state's ongoing budget mess and a change in leadership within the General Assembly.

(Image courtesy of thinkplaninvest.com)

University leaders at UNC-CH said this morning they'd like to keep tuition low and point out that Carolina is still less pricey than a lot of its peer institutions.

But the tuition hike this year is necessary, Chancellor Holden Thorp said. The university will glean about $15 million from the tuition increases, to be used for student aid and to provide academic resources.

"You have to be realistic about the environment we're in," he told trustees. "Tuition revenue is one of the only sources of funding to deal with the challenges we face."

So you think North Carolina is the only state where budget cuts for higher education gets people wound up?

Check this out- The University of Kentucky's board of trustees recently approved a retro-active pay hike for its president, Lee T. Todd, Jr., a $157,000 bump said bring his salary more in line with what his peers earn.

Here's the thing: It came at a time of great budget angst in Kentucky; university faculty and staff haven't gotten raises in several years, and folks there are pretty riled that the president got the big pay hike.

Oh, and it's effective last year, a turn-the-clock-back move that will let Todd draw more when he retires.

It's not a raise, trustees insist. It's a "reclassification."

He now earns more than $511,000. By comparison, Chancellors Holden Thorp at UNC-Chapel Hill and Randy Woodson at N.C. State earn $420,000.

So here's where it gets good. Some enterprising soul in Kentucky put the whole raise, er, reclassification issue into perspective, youtube style.

Enjoy.

A former trustee at UNC-Chapel Hill has run afoul of the law for illegal political contributions to former Gov. Mike Easley and Marc Basnight, who heads the state senate.

Rusty Carter, a Wilmington businessman and big Democratic fundraiser, has pled guilty to making illegal campaign donations.

Carter served for several years on the UNC-CH trustee board, to which he was appointed by Easley, his fraternity brother.

Andy Curliss has the story.

There's a mess brewing within the athletics program at Florida State, and a campus trustee is right in the middle of it.

Florida State used to be one of the kings of college football but of late has fallen on hard times, relatively speaking. FSU is no longer a perennial national title contender and many believe longtime Coach Bobby Bowden is to blame.

Bowden, who has headed the program for 34 years, came under attack recently from an unlikely foe: Jim Smith, chairman of the university's board of trustees.

Smith opened fire on Bowden in two local newspaper articles following the Seminoles' recent loss to Boston College. In the second interview, with the St. Pete Times, he actually compared Bowden to a loyal old dog that  you have to put down.

"You know it's the right thing to do but you sure feel bad about it," he said.

Yikes.

Smith holds a position of great power at Florida State, but as Inside Higher Ed reported this week, he appears to have overstepped his bounds a bit. Trustees, you see, are not supposed to meddle in athletics affairs. Or, at least not publicly.

Here's the story.

There were some strange, tense moments Wednesday during a meeting of N.C. Central University's Board of Trustees. It was not this governing board's finest hour, at least in terms of understanding and following rules of order.

This was a telephone meeting, so all trustees called in from afar while Chancellor Charlie Nelms and his administrative staffers on campus spoke using a speakerphone.

The first blip came when Nelms and his staff requested that the board approve the staff's list of preferred designers for a renovation of a campus recreation complex. This is the sort of vote that campus trustee boards do routinely and generally without comment.

But this time, members of the board's building committee went back and forth for more than 20 minutes trying to figure out what they had jurisdiction over, when and if they get to review the list of designers, and whether they could hold an impromptu committee meeting as the full board was meeting.

The board was not prepared to approve the request, vexing Nelms, who at one point blurted out that the university needed this decision made and not delayed.

How's this for ambitious: some at UNC Chapel Hill now want to offer an undergraduate minor titled "Solving the World's Problems."

Here's the background: Trustees John Ellison and JJ Raynor have for several months now led a campus work group that has published a report titled "Carolina: Best Place to Teach, Learn and Discover." Basically, the duo interviewed people all over campus to figure out what students, faculty and staff want from the university and how people think it can get better. It illustrates what people want from Carolina - academic excellence, small class sizes, and an environment that fosters and encourages learning.

Click the attachment below to read the entire report.

The new proposed minor is an attempt to piggyback on the audacious and idealistic desires of top students who arrive at Carolina thinking that they can, indeed, change the world, said Raynor, the board's student representative.

"Students want a way to apply what they're learning to the world," she told me today. "They want to know how academics connect."

To solve the world's problems, UNC would need to hire a full-time advisor and program director. Add in some program overhead and resource costs, and the Raynor/Ellison team projects the cost of this new major to fall in the $100,000 to $150,000 range annually. 

Seems a small price to pay to solve the world's problems.

Documents:

At UNC Chapel Hill today, the buildings and grounds committee of the university's board of trustees was humming along with standard business, signing off on the hiring of architects and approving designs for proposed buildings.

And then, a screeching halt when the group began to review plans for a large new parking deck near Kenan Stadium.

This is a place that takes aesthetics seriously and has a real taste for red brick. This new, 755-space parking deck to be built where the Ram's Head parking lot is now would be built not with brick but with precast concrete. Those are pre-made slabs of concrete in a variety of light colors, either flat-surfaced or textured.

Why? The price is generally right. In this case, the $28.4 million project would be at least a million bucks more if brick was used rather than precast concrete, and, as planners pointed out, this project has a tight budget with no wiggle room.

But trustees weren't exactly, um, how should we put this - enthralled - with the idea of a massive new building all in concrete plunked in the middle of this heavily-brick campus. In fact, a coming expansion of Kenan Stadium and its football center will be done heavily in brick. 

As trustee Nelson Schwab put it:

"With its material and color, I just think it's going to stick out."

This is no small project, so trustees signed off on the design only after creating a contingency plan. If the university, in going out to bid on the project, happens to get lucky thanks to these tough econonic times and gets a winning bid considerably under budget, campus planners may shift gears and infuse at least some of the new parking deck's facade with brick.

Once construction begins, it will probably take about 16 months.

Durham Technical Community College has some new trustees.

Mary Ann Peter remains chair of the board, while Lee Johnson becomes the new vice-chairman. Anne Barnes was reappointed to the board as well.

In addition, the board has four new members. They are David Dodson, Barker French, Valerie Foushee and Willie Covington. 

Peter is the former nursing director at Duke University Medical School. Johnson is the retired president of Mechanics and Farmer's Bank. Barnes is a former state legislator.

Dodson heads MDC, Inc., a research firm. French is a retired investment officer. Foushee is a retired administrator at the Chapel Hill Police Department, and Covington is Durham County's Register of Deeds. 

There's an interesting media story simmering over at Duke. This might be quite a lot of inside baseball interesting primarily to media folks, but I think it's worth a mention.

Duke has tweaked its policy governing the open portion of its trustee meetings. The Duke Chronicle has reported on it, and you can read about it here and here.

Since Duke is a private institution, it can essentially do what it wants in terms of open governance and decision-making. That's the law.