To date, UNC's renewed process for building a new airport has been somewhat secretive and less than fully honest. When the University is not forthright about a project with the scale and impact of building an unwanted private airport in a presently bucolic, rural environment, the University's integrity as a benevolent institution of higher learning is at risk of being undermined by the University's insatiable appetite for amasssing an ever-larger endowment.
The revival of UNC's plan to site a new airport in rural Orange County coincides with the start of the current UNC "capital campaign" which has a goal of raising $4 billion, the largest goal to date set by a public university (Google: "UNC eyes new campaign with $4 Billion goal"). UNC tells us that the official need for the airport is to provide a base for AHEC (UNC) medical staff to fly around the state to provide medical services. However, consultants already hired by Unversity to rate possible sites for a new airport listed existing Raleigh-Durham Airport in nearby Wake County as the site best satisfying the criteria stipulated by UNC.
Siting a new airport for UNC in rural Orange County has way less to do with the convenience of UNC medical personnel, a number of whom already work in Wake County, than it does with a desire to provide extreme upscale hospitality by catering to the convenience and pleasure of a small but elite group of current and prospective donors who have the means to jet in and out of Chapel Hill for a few football or basketball games each year. These are donors who support the University's fundraising programs with donations sometimes in the millions of dollars. And the University's fundraising process is ceaseless. The last capital campaign ($2.6 Billion) had barely reached its goal when the new $4B campaign was announced.
The plan for UNC to build a new airport is driven not so much by a mission of providing education or health services as by a massive financial enterprise (UNC) which is evolving to become less an institution of higher learning than a money-raising machine. UNC's dishonesty in both the process and rationale presented for the need to site an airport in rural Orange County is a sad departure from the honorable mission of facilitating the quest for and disseminatiion of knowledge.
