The Friday interview

If you’ve wandered by South Building without a clue about what goes on inside, Bruce Carney would forgive you.

“When I was a faculty member,” he admits, “I knew who the (senior administrators) were, but didn’t know what they did.”

Now, needless to say, that has changed: Carney, an astronomy professor at UNC for more than 30 years, has spent the past three as executive vice chancellor and provost, number two to Chancellor Holden Thorp.

I ask Carney what he thinks of the fact that UNC’s top leaders are both scientists — he the physicist and astronomer, and Thorp the chemist.

It might seem a pragmatic choice of advocates, given the challenge of defending state funding for the humanities to skeptical lawmakers. But it’s surely not representative of UNC’s strong liberal arts core — and I’ve heard some humanities faculty talk openly about feeling neglected by a science-heavy innovation agenda at UNC.

Carney sidesteps the question: “We’re not entirely hard scientists,” he says. “If you look at Holden, he’s an accomplished musician, and my leisure reading is history.”

It’s not difficult to see Carney as a lifelong academic, though the sober figure he cuts on first impression is belied by his open and unassuming manner as we sit down to talk.

Two years ago, Thorp ignored a shortlist of candidates from other universities to tap Carney, the interim provost, for the job.

“I was a very happy researcher,” Carney says. “I did my duty as department chair.” He pauses. “I did not expect to end up here.”

“Here” is responsible for overseeing all of UNC’s academic operations, libraries, the various centers and institutes on campus and crafting UNC’s budget.

Carney’s role as budget boss attracted him the ire of some students last semester, after he forcefully argued for a 15.6 percent tuition increase before the Board of Trustees.

But Carney finds these objections unconvincing. He offers accessibility and educational excellence as the two metrics he is concerned with, and is adamant that UNC is doing “what it has to” in order to preserve both.

On the issue of accessibility, administrators seem to have been reacting off the back foot.

Against a narrative that tuition increases mean sacrificing affordability for quality, I wonder if Carney and others could have tried harder to highlight UNC’s record at reducing student debt in the past decade, as UNC Trustee Wade Hargrove did in a recent op-ed in The (Raleigh) News & Observer.

Instead, Carney focused at the time on presenting threats to excellence — a bleak faculty retention scenario in the absence of further funds — before the Board of Trustees, as did systemwide campus leaders at the Board of Governors meeting last month.

The reason is clear: “I take the budget cuts personally,” he says.

This surely would have been a tough tenure for any budget chief, telling deans to plan with fewer resources and no pay raises, while also aiming high with the academic plan for the next decade.

But strong feelings aside, the budget cycle goes on. The tuition increase approved by the Board of Governors last week will be followed by the departmental budget process through the spring and early summer.

“If you look at recent provosts at UNC, the average tenure in the job is three years,” Carney says. But, he tells me, he’s not going anywhere quite yet.

Mark Laichena is a columnist for the Daily Tar Heel.