It’s difficult for a college or university board of trustees or governors to do its job without reliable information. The sad fact is that the administrators resist any oversight and try to make sure that the board rubber stamps whatever they want to do.

In a piece for the Martin Center today, Jay Schalin writes about a proposal that would have given the University of North Carolina Board of Governors an independent source of information — new staff to provide the BOG members with information and analysis outside of the administration. He explains:

This summer, the N.C. legislature included in the budget a provision permitting the Board of Governors to hire up to three staff members. If hired, the staff would be directly responsible to the board and provide badly needed independence from the system’s general administration. It would also enhance the board’s ability to control its own agenda. The board currently lacks those capabilities; the general administration plans the board’s meetings and is the board’s primary source of information—all to the administration’s great advantage.

And how do you suppose this fared? The Board’s governance committee said, “No thanks.” Why? Schalin writes: ”The voting process indicated just how badly the state’s education establishment wishes to prevent a truly independent board. The fourth vote against the measure that prevented its passage was cast by the chairman of the entire board, Lou Bissette. While the board chair has the ability to vote in committees, the exercise of that ability is a rare occurrence reserved for matters of great importance.” Bissette said that hiring an independent staff would be “divisive.” Yes, it might be — by showing that ideas from the system are bad ones.

Behind this, evidently, is UNC system president Margaret Spellings. Schalin points out that ”there has been a steady stream of objections to the idea of an independent board staff by Spellings’s surrogates in the media and on the board itself. They seem to wish for the good old days when the board and the general administration marched in perfect unison. But that does not encourage good governance—it is merely the way to get agendas rammed through after one-sided dialogues.”

What we see here is an example of regulatory capture. We set up some agency and expect it to oversee an industry in “the public interest,” but the industry (in this case, public higher education in NC) manages to get enough influence on that agency so that it can’t operate with independence. Too bad for NC taxpayers since, as Shannon Watkins wrote recently, the UNC administration has some frightful plans in mind.