Both emerged from the applicant pool as candidates resolved to “live and breathe” the University’s endeavors to become a destination for global scholarship.
And after interviews with the two finalists for associate provost for UNC Global, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Bruce Carney came to his decision.
“But I hesitated,” Carney wrote in a memorandum sent Thursday to the International Affairs Advisory Council, a group of 37 officials charged with guiding the University’s global initiatives.
Carney said he was nearly ready to extend an offer. But in the end, he decided that the appropriate candidate was not a finalist from the internal search but rather his neighbor inside South Building.
In a move that was symptomatic of the state’s looming $3.7 billion shortfall and budget cuts, Carney looked instead to Dr. Ron Strauss, the executive associate provost who has served as interim chief international officer for more than a year.
“In a time when I’m asking other units to cut and cut at some fairly deep levels, I didn’t think adding another senior administrative position, good as it is, was really a good idea,” said Carney, who could not reveal the names of the two finalists. “In the end, I have a really good person doing the job.”
The decision came in the wake of an additional 2.5 percent budget cut Gov. Bev Perdue imposed on all state agencies, which some interpreted as an attempt to dull the steep cuts projected for the 2011-12 fiscal year.
Although Perdue did not specify the UNC system as part of those cuts, system president Thomas Ross and his predecessor, Erskine Bowles, endorsed them. Citing the timing of the cuts, Chancellor Holden Thorp imposed a permanent campuswide cut of 5 percent effective July 1.
“If you give back two-and-a-half percent in the middle of the year, that’s the same thing as having 5 percent,” he said on Tuesday.
