Oral history interview with Fred Drake, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Fred Drake
INTERVIEWER: William Link
DATE: February 15, 1990
WL: I would like to start today just by asking you a little about you background—where you
were educated, where you were born, and how you came to arrive at UNCG [The
University of North Carolina at Greensboro].
FD: I was born and raised in southeastern Virginia, farm background, and went into [military]
service and left the service [after] four years, attended the University of Alabama
[Tuscaloosa, Alabama], graduated in 1958 with a bachelor of science in business—
accounting major, worked for six years with Ernst & Whinney [accounting firm], left
there in 1964, went back to my alma mater in a financial management capacity as a chief
accountant and held a number of positions until 1969, when I was made vice president
and treasurer. And I worked in that position for five years and then, at the board’s
request, I went to the system office and was the chief financial officer for the system.
After four years of that—it was a new system, just formed, with three campuses—I left
there and left Alabama and went to the University of Houston [Texas], central campus,
with a very specific mission of restoring the financial management and fiduciary control
of that campus that had been undergoing some major problems at that time in 1978 when
I went there. I stayed there for two and a half years and came here in 1980. So I have
been in a position of chief financial officer for about twenty-one, twenty-two years and
have about twenty-eight years total experience. So that’s basically it. Most of my life has
been spent in higher education and financial management, basically in this kind of
position.
WL: What were your first impressions when you arrived here? What sort of administrative
system did you find here? What kind of situation did you discover?
FD: I found a university that basically was living in the Dark Ages [period of intellectual
darkness that supposedly occurred in Europe following the collapse of the Western
Roman Empire], as it relates to its management and planning and its fiscal structure, but
was—academically at least the reputation of the institution was very, very good, so there
was a dichotomy here that I didn’t think would last very long. It was—I don’t see how
you can have a good academic institution and have all of the infrastructure to be not
adequate. I didn’t think that would last very long, so that’s basically my feelings about it.
WL: Can you be specific, a little more specific, about what fiscal nature of the financial and
administrative structure—how it was crumbling, what—?
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FD: Well, let’s talk about the physical campus first. The physical campus was very—it was
very evident there was no planning about the development of the campus in relation to
academic programs. There was no indication that the needs of the students and faculty
and staff had changed over twenty years. There was no indication that there was a
direction that we wanted to go. Let me give you an illustration of that: the very limited
recreational opportunities for the students [unclear]. The campus itself was very
constricted by the city, and, therefore, the planning had been only to the extent—put the
building where you can buy the acre of land that you need to put—no long-term view of
zoning the campus, general functions, residential versus teaching and research and those
kinds of things. There were no indications that anyone had given any long-term thought
to housing, residential needs of the students or to updating the facilities with respect to
the food service capabilities, and yet we had forty percent of our students living on
campus.
Worst of all, there was a deterioration of the academic facilities in a functional
sense. That is, the buildings were dysfunctional in relation to program needs. There was
no—as an example of that: the chemistry and the physics departments were operating in
totally inadequate facilities. Their labs were not appropriate. The School of Human
Environmental Sciences, which has become in modern times to be a science-based
program, not a cookie-sheet kind of operation—there were no facilities that recognized
that in place, and yet they had the heaviest doctoral commitment on campus, of any
program on campus. And not only that, it had a land-grant mission, and so it was a pretty
important program for the university. There was no attempt to stop the deterioration of
the quality of the incoming freshman students here [unclear]. In fact, I think that all of the
things I’ve mentioned gave rise to that deterioration because it did not provide the
students with the kinds of environment that they needed in a college or university—the
kind of environment that they could get at a [University of North Carolina] Charlotte or a
[University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill.
So therefore, in all honesty, the physical deterioration caused a quality
deterioration in students and a quality deterioration, I think in programming. Now the
fiscal aspects of the university, budgetary aspects—the thing that impressed me most was
that there was absolute line item control at the state level on all budgets, and that was to
me again another dichotomy. You were asking—you were trying to bring in people that
can administer the programs, but you weren’t letting those people make decisions that
would allow them to utilize their resources to achieve quality programs because you tied
their hands by saying—you had such tight line item control. That was number—that’s the
first problem. And that was an opportunity also. That presented an opportunity for us to
learn how to manage within the system, and there are ways to do that, but those ways
have not been adequately explored by the financial people over here.
WL: Is that still the case—absolute line item—?
FD: No. We have explored about everything we can explore and are doing so every day.
WL: But we’re still under that constraint?
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FD: We are still under—it is a more limited constraint now than it was then. There has been
some flexibility achieved, but the biggest flexibility is not in the line item budget but in
the way this office relates to the budget of the state, and the way we do our staff work and
present the needs and ask them to help us find the solutions. And that has—and also,
there are ways to work the system if you are willing to get in there and really understand
that your job here is to provide the resources for the university and not to worry about the
reversion of resources to the state. And so you have to tackle the first of those and let the
latter one take care of themselves. There is somebody else out there worrying about that
one. So what we’ve done is to change our fix from not being—we don’t want to be state
fiscal officers; we are university financial officers and have the responsibility first and
foremost to this university, this campus of this university. And secondarily we will live
within whatever rules and regulations that are required of us to accomplish that, but we
are going to do everything we can to achieve financial flexibility within that set of
circumstances. So, in effect, we work the judgment areas of the system.
WL: Does that mean that sometimes, most of the time, you’re working in conjunction with
state officers and other times you are working perhaps in a different direction?
FD: In a large number of instances we will be working hand in glove with the state. In other
times we are making independent decisions that we believe to be correct, and we’ve
properly documented why we make those decisions and, so far, those decisions have
proved to be good decisions in a large way.
WL: Is this a change? Was the previous administration different in its attitude towards state
financial officers?
FD: Yes, I think the—not the previous administration of the state—I think the financial
officers that were previously here had their background not in other campuses and how
they operated but in the state of North Carolina at the state level. Therefore, they had an
unusual loyalty to the state bureaucracy and considered themselves an extension of that
bureaucracy. We do not consider that here to be the case. We are officers of the
university functioning under the chancellor, and we are trying to assist him in reaching
his goals and those of the board of governors and the board of trustees that have been set
out for us. Basically, the goals we are trying to reach now are those that [Chancellor
William E.] Bill Moran discussed with me in some very long conversations in 1980. We
have not changed our direction. We are basically on the same track.
WL: What sort of financial set up did you find here when you came? How was this office
organized?
FD: We had a large number of people that were functioning at inappropriate levels of
management for the size and complexity of the product that they needed to produce for
the faculty and students. I’ll give you an example. We had—well, accounting seems to be
a simple enough place to start. But basically in a financial management situation, if you
don’t have an appropriate information system that is geared to generally acceptable
definitions of higher education and if you don’t understand the relationships of those
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definitions, then how can you assist the campus in financially managing its resources?
The accounting system was nonexistent in the sense that it did not serve the university’s
needs. It served the state’s requirements. The state’s requirement is one of control of
dollars, not of understanding how you use those dollars and whether it is appropriate to
the mission of the university and feeding back that information to all levels of the
administration that needed to understand it. So what we did was to bring that up to a
modern accounting system that provided us with the data that we needed to assist in
managing of the campus and, at the same time, to overcome some of the problems that
were existent in the line item budgeting systems being promulgated by the state. When—
in 1980, my estimate of the situation is that the state budget office knew more about what
we were doing than we did ourselves.
What I have tried to do is to turn that around and to advise the budget office that
they are not close enough to make the detailed decisions that they did, in fact, make. And
that was apparent in every level, and it had to do—level—I mean every area of this
office. It had to do with the individuals that were here and their lack of understanding of
higher education in general. They understood state government, but they didn’t
understand higher education generally. And I think that if you don’t understand that and
if you’re not committed to it, then I don’t see that you can function in this environment at
all. Higher education is a very unique kind of management environment from a financial
perspective, and it is not a business. The bottom line is very nebulous. It is the quality of
the students you produce and whether or not you are producing the knowledge that—to
continue the process. And it’s just different, and if you don’t recognize that and deal with
that difference, you are not supporting the mission of the university.
WL: Would you and your predecessors deal directly with the state? Do you—it actually goes
directly to the state budget office? Is that the way the system works?
FD: General Administration of the University of North Carolina [GA] has—as it respects a
budget, is responsible for one thing, and they are very clear about this. They make—they
formulate and present the budget requirements of the system. Once that budget is adopted
or amended or whatever by the legislature and given to the governor for execution, then
our dealings on the campuses is not with GA; our dealings is directly with each
component of the executive branch of the state government, and we are allowed to
negotiate with whatever we can do within the context of the legislative budget. And what
happens is that it puts the state government and a campus one on one, which means that
you’ve got sixteen of my counterparts out there operating one on one with the state
government, just like the highway department, and each campus functions sort of
independently. Now we’re vulnerable in one way, but it gives you a bit of flexibility in
another way because it allows the individual sitting in this chair to make some judgment
calls in those areas where it’s reasonable to make judgment calls at all—move back and
forth and find the place that fits your needs the best. As long as you can rationalize it and
defend it, you have accomplished something for the university. Nothing can be—
regulations will never be written tight enough to control—to eliminate all judgmental
opportunity, and what I’m doing is just finding the niches where we can utilize judgment
opportunities to make the most of it for this university. That’s basically what I’m doing.
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WL: Putting the budget together originally—the budget that was submitted to the general
assembly. What’s the nature of that process? Your office is obviously involved in that as
well.
FD: I think before I arrived here the process was basically this—that GA sets a set of policy
parameters. Those parameters may be general, in the sense that you can develop the
numbers, or they may be number specific. They may give you a number that you can
request in a category. In any event, they give you the policy guidelines. Those policy
guidelines are discussed and debated at the board of governors’ level. Then we request
against that policy. Those—and internally the chancellor can allocate within those policy
guidelines for the areas of the university. He would say to [Provost Donald] Don DeRosa,
“Let’s worry about—of the amount that I can allocate from, I’m going to give sixty-five
percent to the instructional units.” And the department heads to determine, within these
general guidelines, where do you want to put that? What do you want to spend it for? So
Don goes off and works with the deans and comes back with an approach to that. And
basically then, that is just combined and sent back to GA. It is the details that support the
policy decisions that were relayed to us from general administration. That’s all it is.
We have gotten a little bit more sophisticated internally in that we look at more
things than just the state budget. We look at the state budget, and then we look at
discretionary budgets, and we don’t make decisions on one without having some
understanding of how the other one is going to be affected. That way we can cover
problems from more than one source, and this office simply acts as staff for the
chancellor, and the chancellor’s cabinet debates issues along with the university budget
committee. From that standpoint, we are probably much more democratic in the debate of
the budget process than was prevalent in 1980. In fact, I know that we didn’t have a
budget committee in 1980—very little discussion or information flow really from either
this office or the chancellor into the faculty governance structure, but now we make the—
we listen to the budget committee; we listen to everybody else, and we come up with a
budget, and then we feed back the results of that decision back into the budget committee
and to the university community. It’s discussed in cabinet—academic cabinet and also
made available to the general faculty and anybody that wants to come in here and go over
it with me, I would be happy to do so. I don’t think those kinds of communication
devices were there. Now there’s a lot of pluses that go with that, but there are also some
minuses. And budgets are things that have become very emotional, and so you tend not to
have all of the right answers or the answers that people want to hear, but you have the
institutional posture—at least what you can do.
WL: How have relations with general administration changed, if at all?
FD: I think we are much more involved with general administration now than we were ten
years ago, and it has come about as much from asking advice—I frequently, for example,
go down and ask advice—I’ve got a unique problem or a problem I’m not sure which
way to go. I utilize those people that have spent years down there, and I think you don’t
do that though once a year. You’ve got to have a reason to be there and interface with
them more than—. You’ve got to do it once a month. They’ve got to see you very
frequently. So my posture is that I visit with the officers of general administration about
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monthly, and then when I go down with particular problems or information that they need
to understand, it’s not foreign to them. They don’t raise the question of why are you
going to do.
It also helps me in understanding how to approach state government itself.
There’s a political linkage there that I like to keep clear and fresh because I don’t want to
do anything that hurts GAs chances of getting something done during the budget process.
Neither do I want them to do anything that will hurt me, prevent me from getting
something approved at the executive level that is very important to me. So I kind of keep
them informed of major decisions for the students. The other thing we do is make sure as
a campus that when we develop long-range plans that they are briefed totally on it. An
example of that: We spent three different visits with them in letting them understand the
implications of our long-range fiscal plan that we developed in 1984, I guess it was, and
once the board of trustees approved it, we made a formal presentation to them. Now
when we send materials down for action on the board of governors, everything is related
to the context of that plan, and it makes it so much simpler. We don’t surprise them—
they don’t surprise us—and especially important in land acquisition and capital project
matters. It really is helpful to us.
WL: Has more force and seems more rational—plan—?
FD: That’s right. What it does, it gives them a basis for relying on our staff work. It’s just a
fundamental basis for their reliance on our effort. They buy into the concept in the front
end rather than buying into a particular later without understanding what the long-range
application is.
WL: As—a long-standing complaint of this campus, which I’ve heard during these interviews,
is that UNCG’s share of the state financial pie is small from the beginning, and it’s
continued to be small, and it—. In fact, thirty years ago was the poor sister—I suppose
the poor brother and sister now—is that—how true do you think that is?
FD: Well, I’m going to talk generally—and it’s not the argument necessarily that I would
make with a GA, but it is a fact that I would have to admit in making it. Greensboro has,
in my opinion, one thing that is extremely significant to its ability to deliver up a quality
educational program financially—that is its faculty/student ratio. I don’t know what the
perfect ratio is in this type of institution, but nationally, if you look at our peers,
Greensboro probably has one of the very best student/faculty ratios. Now the average
faculty salary on which that is based has become somewhat deteriorated from ten years
ago, but it’s still right about the average nationally.
WL: It used to be a little better than average here?
FD: It used to be a little better, and we used to rank a little better with Chapel Hill and NC
State [North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina]. There’s been a general
deterioration in the state, but then there’s been a little bit of deterioration of Greensboro
in relation to the other two doctoral-granting institutions. I think that can be overcome to
some extent, but that factor—that is, the student/faculty ratio is—gives us a faculty base
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that is almost unheard of today in our education, and that’s the most important thing I
think we’ve got going for us.
WL: What sets that? Why is that?
FD: Well, it was set many years ago at the time that the sixteen campuses were brought under
the board of governors, back in the early ’70s. That’s my understanding of it, and that
formula was based on the doctoral mission and the debate over the doctoral mission of
the three campuses, so our ratio is very much like that of Chapel Hill and NC State,
maybe even a little better than NC State. When you leave that particular segment of the
budget, and that represents today about forty percent—maybe a little more than forty
percent of our total budget. The faculty salary lines—when you leave that point, then we
are in trouble. We believe that, measured against our peers with like missions and
generally-like campuses, that we are very short in the non-salary component of the
budget in the academic units. It is a fairly significant amount, but in the eyes of the state
it shouldn’t be a very large amount because relative to salaries, it’s nothing—it’s about
two million, three million, four million dollars, in that category. Now I think if we had
that taken care of, then the instructional function would probably be in pretty good
condition.
Now, if you move away from the academic units, you get into much the same
problem overall that you have in the academic units for non-salary. We talked about that.
It is my own belief that you cannot long have a good university without all the
components being reasonably good that are necessary to that university. I’ll even go so
far as to say that if you have a bad accounting office, eventually it will tear down the rest
of it because if you can’t justify that accounting office in terms of its fiduciary and
informational and transactional processing to meet state requirements and to meet your
own internal requirements, it shouldn’t be there anyway. And so if we get into trouble in
a fiduciary capacity with the state auditors, it will so tarnish the image of this university
that it will affect all sixteen, not just us. Look at A&T [North Carolina Agricultural &
Technical State University, Greensboro, North Carolina]. A&T had a problem when I
came here, in a fiduciary sense, and that affected everybody else. It affected the campuses
with the state budget office.
WL: With the legislature too?
FD: With the legislature. “We wouldn’t give you that money; you don’t know how to use it
once we give it to you.” Okay. I mean, it’s the old political clichés that come out in large
groups of people without saying or admitting that ninety-nine percent or ninety-seven
percent of the world is reasonable. It’s only that one or two or three percent that you have
to worry about. So I think that the areas of general support for the university are short—
major dollars in this university. I think it’s easier to find solutions to those kinds of
problems that don’t require dollars than it is to find it in the teaching and research
functions. And I think that’s why you see so much of—if you measure it against the good
universities—I went out there and picked—let’s pick on [College of] William and Mary
[Williamsburg, Virginia]. If I measured my capability to manage financially against
William and Mary’s capability on paper, they are far superior. In actuality, we’re better.
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And I think we’re better because we have to do things with more ingenuity, and I think
we’ve got a better and more mature management record, more experienced management
so—
WL: They have a more flexible system, perhaps?
FD: Well, they have a more flexible system, but also, they have more dollars, and more
dollars creates a lack of resolution of problems. Chapel Hill—let me just use those as an
example—in a $500 million budget, a $5 million problem can be resolved. Also you can
buy talent to solve any problem or cover up any problem that you want to cover up. You
know, you can pay somebody to come in to prevent a problem from being solved. And
from the outside looking in, it appears as if you don’t have a problem. but, in fact, you
have a problem. The problem didn’t go away—it’s just the sense of the problem has been
pushed down away from the surface, and you’re keeping it under control.
And it’s—I am not being so critical as I am—it’s general in the public sector—if
you have no need to define a bottom line in a support—for a support purpose, then you
tend to spend everything you can get. And you tend not to let problems be raised because
problems that are raised in support sections are normally tied to our—or you try to solve
them in the same way that you try to solve a research or a teaching problem, and that’s
not the way that you do it. You’re not searching for truth over here; we are trying to
manage. You are doing something entirely different on the faculty side, but I’m trying to
manage with the least possible resource and the least possible deterrent to the main
purpose of the university.
WL: So if you are resource poor, you have to be ingenious?
FD: You have to be a bit ingenious, and you have to rely on talking with people one on one,
those kinds of things. Now we have a problem on this campus in that the depth of the
management is not there. So five years from now, somebody is going to have to
recognize that. If you don’t give me the resources to build the right attitudes down at the
detail level, you’ll never solve the problem of the faculty’s perception of our willingness
to support their needs.
WL: Because the faculty comes in contact with the detail?
FD: Right. And I can’t sit down with six hundred faculty. If I could, I could convince them
and solve their problems, but I can’t do that. So I guess what I am saying is there’s more
to the problems that had existed in 1980 than were apparent to anyone except those of us
that walked in and tried to get some things turned around. And I think what we are trying
to do is to leave it just a little better than it was when we got here.
WL: You’ve got to have—of course, recently been affected by the budget crisis. In my
memory, an equally serious budget crisis hit in 1982, do I have my year—?
FD: In 1983, right.
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WL: A similar set of conditions, a recession—a worse recession really—but a budget shortfall.
How was that situation different? And that was fairly early in your—three years after you
arrived here. Perhaps the—your management system that you just described wasn’t fully
in place. You were working on getting it in place.
FD: That one fact alone was a major problem in 1983; that is, our lack of understanding and
our lack of a capability to deal with the understanding—with getting the information to
understand it quicker. I think the difference between 1983—the substance of the problem
in 1983 was different in one major respect: I think in 1983 there was a major political
motivation. I don’t think it was primarily economical.
WL: To what purpose was the—?
FD: Well, he was looking—at that time, as I recall, the governor had just been elected for
another term. He was trying to build a—he was trying to utilize his executive power to
get the legislature to approve his program from a political standpoint. And one way you
do that is to show that there are resources available in the general fund from tax revenues
to support all these worthy programs—education, prisons, healthcare, Medicare
[American health insurance program for those with disabilities or over age sixty-five],
Medicaid [American health program for people with low incomes and resources],
whatever it is. You know, he had a program starting in his second term in office. I think
the difference between that and the current situation is that in this year, I believe there is
more focus factually on an economic downturn, and I think there is less—in fact, the
motive is not to build a reserve. The motive is what the executive budget act says the
governor’s responsibility is, and that is, “Let’s get the expenditures to equal the revenue.”
That’s what he’s trying to achieve, so that political motive that was there is not there. I
think this is a pure constitutional question of balancing revenues and—with expenses.
WL: In 1983, perhaps, they were trying to squeeze more out than they would, even in this
situation.
FD: No. They were trying to build reserves. There was no lack of revenue, and that—. Let me
tell you why that was important—because when I reacted, when the campus reacted, to
their cash allocation reduction, we reacted as though it was indeed a shortage of revenue,
and we said, “Nothing is going to cure that shortage.” This year we’re acting differently,
we’re reacting the same this year because we believe it is an economic problem, and the
facts seem to bear that out. But if you go back to ’83, in the fourth quarter—. Let me tell
you what we did in the second and third quarter. In the second and third quarter, we had a
faculty meeting—I don’t know whether you remember or not—in which the chancellor
stood up and said, “These are the cuts we’re going to take.” And we did the same thing
that came out in the paper that happened at NC State.
We cut temporary appointments, maybe even reduced the number of [class]
sections in some cases. We took some major, major cuts all across the university, even
down to taking library books, which are almost sacred, out of the library budget. This
year we didn’t rush out and do that. If you’ll notice, we were very calm, and we simply
went in and understood the problem first, and then we began to build a case of if it’s this,
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this is what we could do. If it’s this, this is what we could do. We looked at our options;
we simply protected our options, and we began to draw up a plan.
And, if you notice, we gave flexibility in the way the plan was put into effect. We
didn’t say, “You must cut this and you must that.” We said we believe the problem
measures out to this many dollars. The chancellor allocated that problem to the vice
chancellors. The vice chancellors, then, had great latitude in how they corrected or how
they changed their budgets that meet that requirement. The time before, we told them
what to do. We didn’t say, “You decide.” We told the deans, we told the vice chancellors
exactly where to go—bad approach. Part of that is experience; part of it is a change in
substance. I think I understand the state better and how to work through these problems,
and I think I understand how to, from a timeline standpoint, not take the action all at
once, but take the action as you get the facts. And that’s a little maturity in there too. It’s
a maturity within the context of the state of North Carolina because if I were somewhere
else—if I were in Tennessee, I’d probably work it differently [laughter]. So—
WL: You’re working with a—you have a different sort of relationship with the state as well?
FD: Right.
WL: In terms of?
FD: Much, much better, much more—my credibility is probably triple just from working with
them over a long period of time.
WL: Did they—? In 1983, were they very specific in what they told you to do? Was it—did
you have less flexibility that year?
FD: Yes, we had somewhat less flexibility because we were in a no-grow situation. When you
don’t have faculty salaries, unfilled faculty positions, we are in a real detrimental
position, so that was another fact.
WL: Yes.
FD: That’s a very good point. The other thing is that certain lines in the budget have
represented large non-salary components, one of them being utilities. We’re under
budgeted on purpose at the state level, and they allowed us to use salary reserves to cover
utilities. Now our utilities are budgeted reasonably, and, not only that, we are in a period
of temperature that is unbelievable, and the difference in what we spend for utilities in a
sixty-degree January and a thirty-degree January is a quarter of a million to three hundred
thousand dollars. That’s thirty percent of your problem right here.
WL: That really helps.
FD: It does. And all I need is two more weeks, and I have just—I think I am on the verge of
seeing something that will bring the money back to the budget. I don’t know. I’m betting
that if the state doesn’t change the rules on me and we continue to have warm weather,
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then I see one way that we can cut our losses in the fourth quarter. But I’ve got to get the
state to give me the case before I could do it, and that’s the problem too. So it is a very
complicated set of circumstances that we’re working with in a very complicated political
environment which already has a governor versus legislature component. [laughter] So
that means that the budget office—. It’s clear where their posture’s going to be—it’s got
to be over here—whatever the governor wants. If the governor said, “Cut that cash
allocation another five percent next quarter, that’s what’s going to happen because the
governor has the constitutional authority to determine how much money can be received
in tax revenues and make judgments on that basis.
WL: The governor has the—actual executive control of the budget?
FD: That’s right. Under the executive budget act. It says in that act that the governor shall
determine how many dollars of tax revenues will be collected—
[End Side A—Begin side B]
WL: We have a revenue crisis—we’ve had a crisis of a different kind. In both cases the
governor’s office had virtually absolute control, I guess, over determining what the
budget was and what your revenue situation was. 1990, you’re dealing with a different
political situation, perhaps, that might be more advantageous in the sense that you’ve got
two parties, two different parties, controlling—
FD: Let me say that 1990 is better for us than 1983 because we are better capable of
managing the situation. We know more about our budgets; we understand how you can
manipulate certain things in the system legitimately in order to achieve the more
important things that you are trying to achieve, and we also have, I think, a knowledge
that the budget office is dealing with us in a way that is indeed reflective of the economic
situation, rather than a political situation. And those are easier facts to deal with than a
political situation because then I can play the hand out for six months, rather than what I
did. The other mistake I made was I literally took what they told me in the budget office,
and I acted on it. They then changed the rules in the fourth quarter by giving me all the
cash I wanted, but we had already so gotten the campus used to not doing anything that it
was hard to get them geared back up to spend the money, even though they needed the
money. That’s a very strange thing, but it’s a process. Once you stop the process from the
day-to-day transaction base—. When you say “Go,” it takes a certain length of time to
start it back up and to fill the pipeline, and that’s what happened to us too. This year,
we’re saying we’re going to plan for that. We are right now planning what happens if we
get money in the fourth quarter that we don’t now believe that we can get.
WL: Still have certain ways of spending it?
FD: That’s right. We already have started talking about the strategies we’re going to to use
and how we fill the pipeline and get it done and it’s—it was one of the things that we
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thought through from the front end, rather than waiting for it to happen. So, it’s a more—
it’s better understanding of the system, better working relationships with the state
government and probably a better factual base than we had in 1983. That is why I don’t
like to look at other campuses and how they handle their own situations. I would rather
make those judgments ourselves and not worry about what they’re doing. We’re better
off to do it our way.
WL: Do you operate pretty much deliberately in isolation from the other campuses?
FD: Not in isolation, but I don’t base my judgments on what somebody else does.
WL: Yes, for example, North Carolina State?
FD: That’s right. I just think I want to never operate in that mode; that is, an arm-waving
mode that can do nothing for this office with the state budget office but get us in very
deep, and it will—just makes people mad for no reason. What you’re doing is fighting
with the budget office when you don’t need to fight; what you need to do is to look for
the solution. If you start fighting with them, then they begin to take sides, and I’m telling
you, Greensboro is not the place they want to take sides. They’re looking for ways to gear
up with the politically strong campuses—NC State and Chapel Hill—and that’s exactly
what I would be doing. So I’m looking for ways to stay with the only political
environment that we have—state budget office.
WL: Is Greensboro not a politically-strong campus?
FD: I don’t think it’s a politically strong because I don’t think the delegation in Greensboro is
a strong delegation and it’s divided—it presents a divided front. There are other problems
associated with it also, but there is no leadership at the state level that comes out of the
Greensboro delegation. And as soon as we get somebody to a point that they’re ready to
assume leadership, they leave. And I think that’s where East Carolina [University,
Greenville, North Carolina] and the western part of the state and Charlotte all have it over
us.
WL: They’re in there a long time?
FD: The leadership in those areas have been running the state for many, many years. Chapel
Hill and NC State, because of their status as campuses and not the least of which is NC
State’s ability to use their agricultural program, which is all over the state—it’s like
having a little political office in every county. They are able to carry lots of weight.
WL: Do you think the sixteen-campus system is going to survive? Is it? Established in 1973, it
seems to have taken on a certain degree of strength. But now, of course, you are hearing a
lot of discussion of deconsolidation.
FD: It will probably survive. It might not survive in the same form, I don’t know. But I would
think without a system in this state, I don’t know how one controls the political infighting
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and the pork barreling of a very important thing. There is a certain amount of that that
goes on right now. I mean, if you took away the board of governors from the leadership
of the president, you take away all the holds on every campus being represented in the
state legislature. And being down there, we would have to do the same thing. We would
have to go down and say, “A&T doesn’t need it; let me show you why A&T doesn’t need
that money. We need it more than they do.” And then you put your legislators in a
position of getting all kinds of social issues and other political issues involved in the
education process. And so this kind of gives us a focus—a professional focus, I think. It
also kind of gives us a program focus that—to my way of thinking, the purpose of a
system is to do long-term planning for the education, anyway, of its citizens, not to
manage the campuses.
I think that one of the problems that we have is that there are too many people
trying to have hands-on management of everything right there in the state of North
Carolina. The concept, however, of one focus for higher education is right. I didn’t used
to think I would ever say that, but I think the focus ought to be on program mission, that
kind of thing, not on how you manage or how many dollars you give faculty. That’s not
the issues that can be decided in Raleigh [state capital] or in Chapel Hill. It ought to be
decided in Greensboro, and so I would opt for a different kind of system. Although, if
you look at our neighbor—Georgia has had a system in place that has been very visible
for fifty, sixty years, 1931. And they somehow have managed to not get involved in the
management of the campuses, but they stay on a mission level, and they stay on a
focused—. They do the politicking in the state, and they keep the legislature out of the
campuses, so it’s served a very useful purpose. And it’s very much organized like ours,
so it’s just a difference in the nature of—the legislature here has great power in relation to
the executive branch. In Georgia, it has less power in relation to the executive branch. I
think it’s a lot to be said for the other.
WL: Let me ask you about the facilities and capital improvements. This seems—the 1980s
seem to have been a big decade of construction and capital planning and capital
improvement projects on this campus. [Did] most of this come out of post-1980 era?
FD: Basically, Chancellor Moran had an agenda for me when he came here. As I understood
it, his agenda was, “Give me good financial management. Let’s work the system with the
state and get all the flexibility we can logically, legally, and reasonably get out of the
system. Let’s improve the facilities and the conditions on the campus, so that you have a
different environment for students and faculty. And let’s make sure that that achieves
bringing in the right quality of students and providing those students with what they can
get at any quality university.” Now starting with that as a framework, everything we’ve
done from—everything we did from 1981 until 1984 was to set the parameters. From
1984 to now, it’s getting money for those prioritized projects and trying to solve those
that we can solve internally. Do it ourselves as a focus.
And I’m going to say it this way—I think we’ve done things that if we had done
them quicker, you could see, but we’ve done them over a long period of time, probably
with less money, and you can’t see them. Landscaping on this campus—if we remember
what it looked like as you came on Spring Garden Street in 1980—I remember it clearly.
I was ashamed that this campus was in that condition. And if you look at it now—if you
14
can just visualize those two points and forget all the things that happened in between—
there is a major difference. It’s not nearly where we want it to be, but we’re a lot closer to
getting there than we were five or six years ago. It’s a very methodical way of doing it.
I guess what I’m saying—we’re doing it within the context of the available resources.
Nothing we’ve done has drained or taken away from the educational programs.
Everything we’ve done has been out of our hides.
If you look at physical plant staffing, the staffing—up to the point that we put the
last three major facilities into [unclear] staffing and physical plant was two more than it
was in 1985, except for the new PAC [Physical Activities Complex] building, new art
building. That’s how many increases we had in physical plant. Now, I defy you to look at
any place, any college or university or school on the campus, and tell me that.
So, what I am saying is that we’ve done it as we could, but with a plan. We have
done less in the academic facilities for the simple reason we’ve had more difficulty
getting state appropriations then we have managing our own affairs with student fees and
revenues. We have put—right now, I just the other day scheduled out for the next five
years the projects that are going to be coming up for funding that are non-state-appropriated
projects. There’s going to be $28 million worth where construction will
either begin or be completed during that time.
WL: Where does the money come from?
FD: It comes from student fees, and it comes from revenues that are generated from all
sources, whether it be housing or whatever. And the state has not had to give us anything,
but they’ve give it to A&T, and they’ve give it to Fayetteville State [University,
Fayetteville, North Carolina]. They appropriate money for residence halls. Now
conceptually I think that’s wrong. I really disagree with that approach, but anyway that’s
their business. The problem that we’re having is trying to put some kind of order to the
priority process for the academic facilities. We are standing—we cannot seem to get our
biggest renovation project off of dead center—that’s the McIver Building. We can’t seem
to get the next big new structure that we need, the music building. And until I get those
two, I can’t solve the problem that we are beginning to see now of additional students
causing a little bit of cramping in our general classroom area and faculty office space. I
want to see us build a new classroom building for a couple—for departments so what you
relieve is some of the pressure of the McIver Building, but I can’t seem to get that log
jam broken at the state level.
WL: That’s in the legislature?
FD: Right. And we’ve got right now—on the next biennium we’ll put forth the music building
for the second time, third time, and we’ll put forth McIver for the second time—well-defined
projects—well thought through. The dollars are reasonable in light of what we’re
trying to do for them. And then when you can get those kinds of dollars, then think of all
of the hidden things—the utilities, the asbestos removal, those kinds of problems—floor
coverings on this campus—you know, just carpet replacements and tile replacements—
it’s astronomical. We’ve spent $175,000 last year—got two and a half million square feet
of floor space to take care of. We’re not getting any money for minor renovations—
15
removing a door, reconfiguring an office to meet the needs of the program. We just don’t
do it. There’s no way to get it all done. We need $40 million very badly in the academic
side of the house, but if I had it all next week, we couldn’t run program and do the
renovation. As a matter of fact, it scares me to think what we are going to do if we have
to close down McIver Building.
WL: That’s what I was wondering. I teach in McIver—have trailers or something. [laughs]
Where would you put everybody?
FD: I think we’d have to do it in phases, and I think we’d have to utilize some space that we
are doing right now for human environmental sciences to take care of faculty offices.
We’re going to renovate the Park Gym. We’re going to put sixty office spaces in there.
It’s going to be quality; it’s not going to be makeshift—it’s going to be very good-quality
spaces and the dean’s suite—so that that building now can be used in future years in
future projects for other transitional space.
WL: That would be converted more into office—more office spaces?
FD: Right. What we do is—see, that human environmental sciences project will last eighteen
months, so we move the faculty back into that building and try the next building—try to
renovate the next building. The only problem is we can’t get the money from the
legislature. We’ve done our planning; we understand the problem; we’ve set some
priorities and parameters. And if we go to a science-based program, heavily involved in
graduate work in chemistry and biology, that’s another project, that’s a $20 million
project, and I think we have to build a new science building rather than renovate Petty
[Science Building]. I think we can renovate Petty for general classroom use, as a matter
of fact. So that’s the kind of thing we’re dealing with with facilities—made a tremendous
stride—we’ve inconvenienced a lot of people; we’ve caused a lot of trauma on campus,
but nevertheless, I don’t know how you can do it otherwise on campus.
WL: But all of it’s been done with very little state support—what you’re saying—essentially
only two buildings that have received—
FD: It’s kind of been out of our hide, as a matter of fact. And you know we’ve got the student
recreation building coming on line, coming up for construction here in the next eighteen
months. We’re going to have the soccer stadium. Those are things that the students really
do get excited about [unclear]. Just talking this morning presents major operational
problems for us. It’s been fun; it’s been exciting for the ten years I’ve been here.
And I’m telling you the things that were outlined in 1980 in June in Bill Moran’s
office for me is still what I’m working on. And I’ve probably still got sixty percent left to
do. I think we have a good management structure; we’re not deep as we need to be. We
have an excellent, I think, relationship with faculty, considering where we started. We
have excellent external relationships with the state government and other agencies. We
are highly respected in the state as financial manager, business managers. We have
changed the nature of the physical campus. We’ve worked out some major problems with
the religious centers. We have self-examined more than probably the campus has been
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self-examined in years, probably twenty or thirty years, and we’re looking every day for
new ways to do things and that kind of thing, just like the faculty are looking for the new
areas that they want to move into.
And that’s what I think is so vital about the support functions. If you don’t move
on the same way that the faculty are moving, forget it. The faculty can’t get there. I’m
sorry—you can’t do it without us, and we can’t be here without you. So it’s the whole
philosophy—the whole attitude that we take is: provide quality for as many people as we
can provide it for and do it well—everything done well. And that’s Bill Moran’s
approach—if we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it well. And that’s what I want to do.
He and I could not be any closer together on the things that are important, that I deal with
on this campus. I have really enjoyed working with that man. Fantastic person—fantastic.
[End of Interview]