The governor's wife gets a good position at a state university and a hefty raise months before her husband leaves office. The people who are supposed to scrutinize such decisions on behalf of the public are left in the cold, in violation of state policy.
That's a poor way to do business and the wrong way to keep a capable and potentially valuable set of skills on the state payroll.
That mistake has tarnished the image of a university that's one of the state's solid assets. The criticism N.C. State University now faces should be a lesson to other public institutions that do not attend to the details precisely – or recognize that personnel decisions with political overtones must be disclosed and vetted if they are not to breed suspicion.
Read the full editorial at CharlotteObserver.com.