At many colleges and universities, the trustees are just ornamental; they get a few nice perks and approve of whatever the president wants to do. It’s not supposed to be that way, however, and occasionally you find trustees who feel obliged to dive into the school’s operations and fix the problems they find.

That happens to be the case at UNC, where there are enough activist trustees to cause leftists to whine that they’re trying to burn the university down. In today’s Martin Center article, Jenna Robinson interviews one of the trustees, John Preyer.

Preyer, a businessman, was amazed to find that there was no single budget for the university system, but just budgets for each separate unit of the system. That was leading to a river of red ink, but he and other trustees managed to change that.

Asked about his views on university spending, Preyer replied, “And if I could wave a magic wand and get one thing instilled in the administration at UNC, it would be to treat dollars—that are either appropriated from the General Assembly, or come in through gifts, or come in through research grants—as if it were money that you yourself had to go and borrow and sign a personal guarantee [for] with a bank—that you were going to do what you’re supposed to do with that money and you’re going to pay it back. And that sort of mentality is not really there . . . in certain places.”

Preyer is also eager to get the new UNC School of Civic Life — the innovation that has the campus left all riled up because it isn’t in line with all of their “progressive” notions — up and running as soon as possible. Preyer said, “I think that the UNC administration needs to put together a timeline for the hiring of a dean for the School of Civic Life and Leadership and [for] letting the dean hire key staff. In order for it to really become a presence on campus, there needs to be someone who is in the head of it, in charge of it. I would love to see a dean named sometime this fall. And that dean [should be] given the latitude to do the hiring and the things that one would expect to launch and stand up a new school like that.”

Getting good people on a board of trustees can make quite a difference.