Opinion
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Oblinger's outrage
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Published: June 18, 2009
One of the many egregious points about the scandal at N.C. State University is that James Oblinger, who resigned as the chancellor last week, will get six-months' leave at his current annual salary of $420,000 before starting work as a teacher at a lower salary. Such arrangements have been common in the University of North Carolina system; the chancellor of the UNC School of the Arts received a similar deal when he resigned under fire in 2005. System President Erskine Bowles should lead his board in setting new policy that's tighter with the purse strings.
Oblinger resigned as more revelations about the school's 2005 hiring of then-first lady Mary Easley to a $170,000-a-year job surfaced. The governor's office basically leaned on the school to create a job for Mary Easley, as stories by the Raleigh News & Observer make clear. As the newspaper said in a recent editorial, Oblinger "betrayed his duty to defend the university against politically powerful, self-serving meddlers."
Mary Easley was fired from the school June 8. McQueen Campbell, the chairman of the board of trustees, resigned last month, as did Larry Nielsen, the school provost. The university released documents last week that showed Oblinger had sweetened Nielsen's payout deal "on the day before Nielsen quit, in apparent violation of university rules," according to the Raleigh paper. Interim chancellor Jim Woodward has since ruled Nielsen's deal invalid.
Oblinger, until now a well-regarded chancellor, insists that he has done nothing wrong in the Mary Easley matter and declines further comment because of a federal grand-jury investigation.
In 2005, Wade Hobgood resigned under fire as the chancellor at the School of the Arts in Winston-Salem in the wake of a state audit that found significant financial irregularities. He'd had his share of successes as chancellor. But the buck stopped with him. He could have done better at confronting the scandal and talking about it. But instead of a pay cut that might have underscored that message, Hobgood was allowed to keep his chancellor's salary of $172,250 for a year as he did research to prepare for a teaching job at UNC Asheville that paid 60 percent of his old salary -- and still made him one of the highest paid faculty members at the school.
We noted on this page in 2005 that leaders who leave short of firing often get plush compensation packages, whether in academia or business. But the recession demands a harder look at those packages. Bowles seems open to that possibility.
Hobgood is now the dean of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Peck School of the Arts. We're all for second chances, and we hope Oblinger finds a new niche. But taxpayers shouldn't have to reward mistakes with such large compensation packages.
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