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Hello reader! Welcome back to Higher Stakes, where we explore what drove the news in higher education this week. I’m your host, Jane Winik Sartwell.
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Now that Memorial Day weekend has passed, it’s officially summer vacation. It’s still my absolute favorite time of year, even though I no longer have one. Just because classes are out of session, that doesn’t mean the higher ed news stops.
Here’s what I noticed at the UNC System Board of Governors committee meetings Wednesday.
The way UNC-Chapel Hill analyzes the biggest risks to its mission is not sufficient, according to Chancellor Lee Roberts. As it stands, the university surveys leaders across campus about their biggest concerns.
That results in a list like the one the trustees were presented with at their May meeting, one that included stagnant compensation, the ServiceFirst initiative, federal funding pressure, the development of Carolina North, and the pace of AI advancement.
The Board of Trustees elected not to hear a planned presentation on these risks or adopt them into their strategic plan because many deemed them irrelevant.
“I think it represents more of a gripe list than it does actual risks,” said trustee Marty Kotis.
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Case in point? Cybersecurity was absent from the risk list. Just one week after the Canvas hack that left UNC’s data in the hands of hackers.
Cybersecurity “doesn’t appear doesn’t appear anywhere on the survey, but it’s obviously an important risk as we saw last Friday,” Roberts said. “This is an inferior risk management approach — it’s what we’ve been using for some time.”
“You’re going to expect to see in a process like that the things that that affect the survey response respondents on a day-to-day basis: things like working conditions and salary levels and recruitment and retention, that’s entirely to be expected,” he continued. “That’s worthwhile feedback. [But] in the example of cybersecurity, that’s less likely to be captured in a survey like that but remains a significant risk, as we saw with the Canvas outage that affected us and thousands of other schools that are clients of Canvas.”
Roberts says he’s focused on updating the risk assessment methodology, and that this will be the last time the board sees a list like this.
Oh, and just for fun, check out my colleagues’ rankings of North Carolina sweet teas. Also, meet our new breaking news reporter, Faith Wardwell.
Thank you for reading Higher Stakes. See you back here next week.
— Jane Winik Sartwell
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