RALEIGH -- As the Atlantic Coast Conference works to add two schools to the league, and as NCAA and UNC-Chapel Hill officials consider football program sanctions, Tom Ross, president of the UNC system, maintains that decisions about athletics are best made at the campus level.
The head of the 17-campus University of North Carolina system sat down with editors and reporters at The News & Observer this week to talk about that and other challenges in higher education.
Ross said he talked with UNC-CH Chancellor Holden Thorp a number of times about the Tar Heel football program, but it was the chancellor's decision, not his, to fire Coach Butch Davis.
"I did not give any advice to him one way or another," Ross said.
Years ago, the UNC Board of Governors relinquished control of athletics to individual campuses, and Ross was not advocating change.
"We are not ignoring the blend between academics and athletics," he said. "They can coexist, and you can excel at both, and that's what we want all our institutions to do. That doesn't mean the right place to make decisions is at the system level. I think it's better to make choices closer to where the action is."
Ross, UNC system president for the past nine months, said athletics is an important part of college life.
"We have kids who attend our institutions because they want to be fans. They want to be part of an institution that has that experience," he said. "So I really value it. I think it's a really important part of what we do, but we've got to be careful."
The UNC system in January launched a study of its academic support programs. A report was issued this past summer with recommendations for making them stronger, strengthening controls while effectively delivering those services to student athletes.
He worries that basketball and football, the big-money sports, drive league expansions and decisions in the NCAA that can have unintended consequences on sports and teams that don't generate high revenue.
None of the decision-makers behind the recent expansion of the ACC to include Syracuse University and the University of Pittsburgh contacted Ross, although N.C. State University and UNC-CH are two ACC schools in the system he oversees.
Like many sports fans, he has heard the rumors about the possibility of the ACC becoming a super conference. But he said he had no inside knowledge of how many teams ultimately would be in the conference.
"Clearly there's a lot of disruption in the NCAA right now, and I don't think anybody knows where it's heading," Ross said. "Whoever the schools are in any conference, what I worry about is the effect on the student athlete in terms of how much time they're out of class and the travel distances and those sorts of things."
Although he was more concerned about the travel distance to Syracuse than Pittsburgh, Ross said that if the league were going to expand, the schools were the kinds that would mesh.
"You want schools that are comparable to you academically and athletically," Ross said.
Although Ross expressed concerns about big money driving college athletics, he said fixes need to pull in players beyond the academic communities.
"I'm not sure, given where we are, that we're going to solve it without involving the professional leagues," Ross said.
