CHAPEL HILL – Interim UNC System President William Roper knows our state’s public universities have endured budget cuts. But he also knows great organizations constantly look for ways to improve efficiency.

“Higher education is expensive,” Roper says in the accompanying video. “If we were to create a great university today from scratch, I don’t think we would build it exactly the way we are currently situated.

“So we owe it to ourselves, from the ground up, to examine everything we do. One of the things that people often look at is how much of the money that we spend is actually spent in classroom instruction, versus all of the administrative costs that go with it. I think if we are going to cut things, we surely ought to cut administrative costs.”

Roper points out that some administrative costs are required by state and federal mandates. One example is Title IX, the federal civil-rights amendment designed to prevent sex discrimination.

“A lot of the things we do in administration, we don’t [do] just for fun. We do it because people have layered on laws that impose requirements on us, and we have to do things and then report things to others,” Roper says.

“Please understand: I’m not saying we are powerless to take a whack at the cost of higher education.  Far from it – I believe we must do that. But it shouldn’t be a meat-axe approach. It should be a thoughtful, again, bottoms-up examination of how we do things, how can we do them better and less expensively.”