DURHAM - If you work at N.C. Central University and aren't interested in improving your telephone skills, you may want to think about finding a new job. That's the message from the chancellor's office, where new NCCU leader Charlie Nelms is ratcheting up his expectations for the 1,500 people who work at the historically black public university in Durham.

Laziness is out; courtesy is in. When the phone rings, answer it.

Or else.

"It ensures your ability to keep your job," Nelms said recently of his new customer service mandate. "There may be people who prefer not to do something. But a condition of one's employment is to represent [the university] in the best, most positive way you can."

As universities expand enrollment and the competition for top scholars becomes increasingly fierce, some historically black institutions have found themselves in a dogfight for students they haven't always had to work so hard to impress. In some places, that competition has exposed service and ethical deficiencies that administrators are moving aggressively to correct.

When Nelms arrived at NCCU last summer, he soon realized that the campus had some problems. Phone messages went unreturned. Simple questions went unanswered. And frustrated students had low expectations of their university.

Nelms quickly launched his "Quality Service" plan, a series of mandatory employee training courses aimed at changing the university's collective attitude, behavior and culture. Such a formal undertaking is rare within academe in North Carolina, though two of the state system's other historically black universities have, in the past two years, provided ethics training for employees in the wake of embarrassing financial crises.

At least one state has made better service a formal priority. Two years ago, Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue mandated a sweeping customer service initiative for all state departments, including the 35 public universities. Each campus has at least one ongoing service-related project. At Savannah State, a historically black institution, for instance, employees are working to improve the registration process. At Valdosta State, they're tackling telephone etiquette. And at the University of Georgia, faculty and staff are trying to more closely link online registration with the purchase of textbooks.

Reinventing themselves

The push for better service dovetails with a renaissance for North Carolina's historically black colleges and universities that are public institutions. Charged by the University of North Carolina system to increase enrollment, administrators at NCCU, N.C. A&T University, Fayetteville State University and other HBCUs have spent the past seven years in a recruiting frenzy, putting up billboards on major highways and generally invading one another's territories in pursuit of students.

All the while, the game was changing. HBCUs were once the default destination for promising black high school students; that is no longer necessarily the case.

"HBCUs like Fayetteville State University and NCCU are losing the niche they've had historically," said John Mattox, a physics and astronomy professor at Fayetteville State. "Campuses are wide open for the best black students. It used to be that black students preferred the HBCUs because they didn't feel welcome at white institutions. But that's no longer true. So we have to reinvent ourselves."

This reinvention is taking varied forms. At NCCU, it is the proactive effort of a new chancellor responding to a clear message from students sick of professors who don't respond to their calls and e-mail messages, and staff members who don't make it easy to, for example, pay a bill or get a copy of a transcript.

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