Southern part of heaven finally catches some hell.

• Author: McMillan, Alex Frew
• Position: University of North Carolina school system compete with tar-heel power brokers for funds

For more than 200 years, Carolina has gone unchallenged as the fair-haired child of Tar Heel power brokers. Now it's got real competition. But it's not from the usual front - the 15 other schools in the University of North Carolina system that compete with it for funds.

Carolina's long-time allies find themselves with divided interests. The state's other obligations - prisons, roads, social programs - take up a lot of its time. More important, they take an increasing share of its money. Raleigh gave the public schools a grilling for decades and is turning its attentions to higher education.

It would be easy to say there's a new three R's - reading, 'riting and Republicans. Education makes up more than 50% of the state budget, so it's an obvious place to look for savings. But education isn't a partisan issue: Everyone's for it. The means to the end are different.

Public universities face increasing pressure to run like businesses and to do more with less public money. North Carolina supports its system well, but that can change. Other states struggle to keep strong systems and are switching to public-private models. In North Carolina, there's the nagging perception that UNC has gotten more than its fair share of the family fortune. Ivory towers don't come cheap, and the universities couldn't be so good without a cost to K-12.

"That is not the truth," says John Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation, a conservative think tank in Raleigh. He has numbers to prove it - over the last 20 years, inflation-adjusted spending per student has gone up 84% for the public schools, 25% for community colleges and 21% for the universities. The education piece of the pie has been eaten away, but that's because other spending has grown faster.

For free-market conservatives, the public universities are better than the public schools because of competition and autonomy - necessity, not money. UNC Chapel Hill and N.C. State have Duke right next door. The schools need similar pressure, not just more money thrown at them.

But the competition keeps getting tougher, and the General Assembly is upping the gain. Teachers are happy to spread that wealth. "I think they're starting to feel some of the pain that we associate with K-12," says Cecil Banks, president-elect of the North Carolina Association of Educators.

The General Assembly's cuts to the UNC system last session ended up more bluster than bite, but the message was clear: no more free rides. Raleigh broke...