For much of the decade, N.C. Central University flung its doors wide open, welcoming scores of new students - prompted by a UNC system mandate to increase enrollment.

Problem was, those students weren't all ready for college. Plenty dropped out, leaving NCCU with a stain on its graduation rate data. From 2004 to 2008, just 18 percent of NCCU students graduated within four years. About 38 percent managed in five years, and about half did it in six years.

Now, university leaders are re-making the undergraduate academic experience, shifting from the enrollment model from quantity to quality. They're slowing the enrollment growth, a move necessary in part because the campus infrastructure can't withstand continued expansion, and looking for ways to admit better students.

At N.C. Central University, Chancellor Charlie Nelms continues with the message he's been thumping since his arrival in Durham two years ago.

NCCU students, he continually insists, must be better communicators. They must be masters of the spoken and written word.

Such was one theme of his State of the University address, given last week during the university's convocation.

Nelms has long held that the success of college students hinges in large part on effective communication skills. Here's part of what he had to say in his address:

Helping our students learn to communicate properly must be a campus-wide effort.  

The English Department cannot do it all on its own. Faculty, whether you teach trigonometry or abnormal psychology; we need you to commit yourselves to improving the quality of the written and oral presentations of our students.

Staff, when students speak to you using improper grammar, correct them.

It’s a competitive world out there and for our graduates to have a fighting chance, we must help them gain the soft skills they need to succeed.

Nelms' address also hit on a number of campus highlights. One Nelms favorite: a recent U.S. News ranking that tabbed NCCU as the top public historically black university in the nation.

You can click on the attachment below to read Nelms' entire speech.

Documents:

A UNC system policy guaranteeing chancellors a one-year leave at full pay when they leave the top job plays a key role in recruiting top talent, the leaders of five of North Carolina’s public universities said Thursday.

This group of campus chancellors, which included UNC Chapel Hill’s Holden Thorp and N.C. Central University’s Charlie Nelms, spoke today at a workshop for members of the UNC system’s Board of Governors, which is likely to scale back the four-year-old “retreat rights” policy in the coming months.

The current policy allows a university president or chancellor retiring after at least five years of service a one-year “retreat” at full administrative pay, followed by a return to the faculty. Their salary then would be 60 percent of what they earned as chancellor or president.

Rosemary DePaolo, now in her seventh year as chancellor at UNC Wilmington, said the retreat rights policy, while difficult for those outside academia to digest, is a critical piece of the compensation package for people considering a leadership post at a public university. These are difficult, stressful jobs, so potential chancellors want to know they’ll be taken care of it they become unpopular on their campus.

“We do need a cushion upon which to fall back, because falling back is all too likely,” said DePaolo, who is the second longest-tenured chancellor in the UNC system, behind only John Bardo, Western Carolina’s leader since 1995. “These are high-risk jobs with high turnover. You might not like [retreat rights] philosophically, but this is a business and we have to compete.”

The "retreats right" policy has been employed broadly at North Carolina's 16 public universities, UNC records show. Over the past five years, taxpayers have paid about $8 million to 117 administrators who either returned to the faculty or left the university. In 24 cases, the payouts were for $100,000 or more.

A recent News & Observer review found that these agreements, along with other transitional payments, offered sizable sums of money with few or no strings attached, in at least three cases violated UNC system policies and in some cases rewarded administrators with as much as a year's salary for a job poorly done.

For more on this story, read Friday's News & Observer.

 As an undergrad at N.C. Central University half a century ago, Timothy McIntosh had an entire campus counting on him.

McIntosh was the campus bell-ringer. Five times a day, seven days a week, for four years, McIntosh would pull the rope on the old bell that stands in the center of campus, signaling to students that it was time to wake, eat, or go to class.

For that, he earned sixty bucks a month.

“It was a good job; it got me through college,” McIntosh quipped Tuesday. “That was my main source of income.”

McIntosh came to NCCU from Wilson, where he grew up. He studied mathematics and went on to a career doing civilian financial work for the Army.

McIntosh, now 69, retired and living in Maryland, was among scores of proud NCCU alums who returned to campus Tuesday to commemorate their alma mater’s Charter Day, the 100th anniversary of its incorporation.

McIntosh kicked off Tuesday’s event — and a year of planned activities celebrating NCCU’s centennial — with one more ring of the bell.

“At six in the morning, he was none too popular with the folks in the residence halls nearest the bell,” quipped NCCU Chancellor Charlie Nelms, who presided over Tuesday’s events and spoke at length of the importance that bell played in the life of the campus.

UNC system President Erskine Bowles spoke as well. He spoke of NCCU's long legacy as a partner to the Durham community.
"Looking back and reliving such historic moments helps reconnect each of us to this university, and this university to its roots," Bowles said.

He spoke of the pride felt by alums; at least twice, he mentioned Ben Ruffin, the proud NCCU alumnus who would become the first African-American chairman of the UNC system's Board of Governors before dying unexpectedly in 2006.

And he spoke quite well of Nelms, the chancellor Bowles hired in 2007 to replace James Ammons.

He said Nelms [pictured, left] has set high standards for faculty, staff and students alike - through initiatives like a customer service initiative and the raising of academic minimum standards.

"Charlie Nelms has that same kind of vision and that same kind of courage shown by NCCU founder James Shepard," Bowles told a packed house at the B.N. Duke Auditorium.

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.

 At N.C.Central University, housing officials are scurrying to find spaces for several hundred more new freshmen than the university originally anticipated.

With applications up a whopping 40 percent this year, officials now expect more than1,500 new students in the freshman class; it originally projected about 1,100 new freshmen.

"There are always problems, but they're manageable," said NCCU Chancellor Charlie Nelms.
Housing officials expect to squeeze some of those unanticipated students into on-campus rooms. But campus trustees Wednesday also gave the go-ahead to seek bids for off-campus housing.

NCCU is looking for 300 beds somewhere in the community and may end up in a situation similar to that several years ago when it had to relocate hundreds of students due to the discovery of toxic mold in residence halls.

"It could be a hotel," said Jennifer Wilder, NCCU's director of residential life. "If we could find something that fit our needs that is not a hotel, that would be better."

Earlier this year, NCCU dissolved its relationship with Campus Crossing, an off-campus apartment complex it had contracted with in 2005. The deal was a money-loser for NCCU; under the terms of the contract with Campus Crossing, NCCU had to pay the rent on each of 564 units, regardless of whether they were occupied by NCCU students.

Across American higher education, enrollment is booming this year, likely the effect of the weak economy and a desire by people to seek more education and job re-training.
 But Nelms, the NCCU chancellor, credits the enrollment spike on his campus to a more aggressive recruitment strategy that places a new emphasis on in-person interaction with prospective students.

"We have completely restructured our approach to the recruitment of students," he said. "We're becoming more personal and responsive."

Also Wednesday, trustees took a large step towards resolving the long-running problem with Eagle Landing, a privately-owned residence hall just off campus that, when built, was riddled with deficiences. A 2006 state analysis found violations and needed fixes totaling $9 million.

Those deficiencies prevented NCCU from taking ownership of the facility then; but NCCU has now completed all the required improvements and is now entereing into a lease agreement with the NCCU Real Estate Foundation, a private non-profit that bought the building on the university’s behalf and has operated it as a private enterprise.

Once NCCU begins running the dormitory as it does its others, officials expect to reap $200,000 in annual savings through insurance, waste disposal, utilities and other services that were previously outsourced.
“It will be exactly like all our other residence halls,” said Alan Robertson, NCCU’s vice chancellor for finance.

A few tidbits from the weekend....

So now that the dust is starting to settle over at N.C. State, the university has to go out and find itself a new chancellor.

Chancellor searches, even at public universities, tend to be intensely secretive affairs. The folks running them swear that if any information leaks regarding candidates, the sky will fall. But experts say the NCSU job is a plum, untarnished by the recent unpleasantness that led to James Oblinger's recent resignation as chancellor.

Jay Price reports.

Over in Durham, N.C. Central University is revving up for its centennial. There, Chancellor Charlie Nelms wants the commemoration to do some real academic good by hosting a massive conference on the future of historically black colleges and universities.

HBCUs make up just three percent of the nation's colleges and universities, and yet account for 22 percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded to African-Americans.

 Rob Christensen, the N&O's veteran political reporter, writes Sunday about UNC President Erskine Bowles and his handling of the NCSU dust-ups.

Christensen puts Bowles' work in some historical context, pointing out that the one-time White House chief of staff has surely dealt with pressure before - like deciding to fire missiles at Osama Bin Laden.

And up north a bit, longtime University of Virginia President John Casteen has announced his retirement. Casteen has been at UVA for nearly 20 years.

UNC system President Erskine Bowles is hoping to keep the university system's budget cut for next year to top out at 5 percent.

Likely? Perhaps not.

Read on.

After two years and $13 million in renovations, N.C. Central University's campus dining hall has reopened.

The new W.G. Pearson Cafeteria seats more than 1,200 and includes features like plasma televisions and a cyber-cafe.

It houses a convenience store and the university's ticket office.

It was a long time coming. Even the temporary cafeteria NCCU used during construction was saddled with delays and cost overruns.

The university will hold a brief ceremony Tuesday at 1 p.m. welcoming the cafeteria back to campus.

It is located on Lawson Street.

One sure sign that economy stinks: N.C. Central University’s finance officials see a silver lining in a 21 percent hit to the institution’s endowment.

NCCU’s three endowments - two that invest money for professorships and a third that manage scholarship funds - collectively took a 21.36 percent nosedive in 2008, a loss in real numbers of more than $4 million.

“That compares to a market that’s down about 50 percent from a year ago,” commented Alan Robertson, NCCU’s vice chancellor for administration and finance. “I know it’s pretty sad, but they are outperforming the market.”

Robertson’s comments came during committee meetings of NCCU’s Board of Trustees and were indicative of the conversations finance staffers are having at universities across the country. State funding is in peril, endowment values are sinking fast, and private donations are slowing.