Employees at other schools describe positive relationships with Follett

As protests continue against the potential privatization of UNC Student Stores, UNC administrators are still months away from a decision.

Follett, a company that operates more than 1,000 student stores nationwide, presented an unsolicited proposal to Matt Fajack, vice chancellor for finance and administration, more than five months ago.

Fajack said the offer is being considered in the face of harsh budget realities.

“We’re not going to get any more money from the state — they’re either going to be flat or declining, and the Board of Governors won’t let us raise tuition that much,” Fajack said. “If we want to give raises, increase the number of faculty, smaller class sizes, all those things, it’s going to have to come from us being smarter at what we do.”

Fajack said he has seen other institutions’ student stores succeed with privatization. He was previously employed at Kent State University and University of Florida, which have both privatized their student stores.

He said employees were generally satisfied with pay after the transition.

“I didn’t interview every one of them, but for the most part they seemed to be very happy because the pay was about the same,” he said.

Student activists who have protested the privatization were unavailable to comment before press deadline.

Anne Brown, associate vice president for business and administration services at Kent State University, began working for the University just after Fajack left.

Kent State had already privatized the stores before Brown and Fajack came, Brown said — she thought that the University outsourced to Follett in the 1990s. She said they were pleased with the relationship with Follett, which continued for several years until a recent switch to Barnes & Noble College.

“We hadn’t found people who were control freaks who were going to come in and say, ‘This is our system. We’re going to take over,’” she said. “When I first came to Kent State, walking in the bookstore, it was Kent State’s bookstore. Nothing about it seemed like there was an outside presence.”

Brown said Follett was required to keep university employees working in the stores if they wanted to stay.

State employees got to keep their state retirement program by continuing to be directly paid by the University even after the stores were outsourced, Brown said. Follett would then reimburse the University for these costs.

“We didn’t want any of those employees to get in a weird place approaching retirement,” she said.

Brown also said Follett offered an unprecedented level of expertise and resources to the stores. She said that since they were a larger company, they were able to negotiate textbook prices with publishers.

“When you have a Follett or a Barnes & Noble, they have all these other resources to bring to the table.”

Around the same time, in the late 1990s, Follett privatized the student stores at the University of Florida, said the university’s senior director of media relations, Steve Orlando.

Orlando was working for the university at the time of the outsourcing and said it was a smooth transition.

Follett allotted 12 months after the outsourcing to determine whether they would keep the University employees in the stores, Orlando said.

“It’s my understanding that most all of them did stay on,” Orlando said.

Orlando said Follett agreed to provide similar benefit packages to full-time employees.

“They have been very good partners,” he said. “They’ve always been very supportive of the university.”

Senior Writer Sofia Edelman contributed reporting.

university@dailytarheel.com