U. of North Carolina Campuses Under Fresh Scrutiny for Hiring Practices

State lawmakers and a state employees’ association are expressing concern about the University of North Carolina system’s hiring practices in response to a newspaper investigation showing that some of the system’s campuses often hire people without formal searches. The Asheville Citizen-Times gathered data on the campuses’ hirings since 2007 and found that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University had each made more than 300 permanent hires without searches during that time. North Carolina State was recently rocked by a controversy over its hiring of the wife of a former governor without a search.