Way to go, UNC. You’ve pulled off yet another secret search for an executive who will be paid by the citizens of North Carolina six figures a year and receive a huge pension for the rest of her life — but these citizens deserve no say, not even the courtesy of knowing who you were considering, because you have made it crystal clear through the years that anyone under consideration for the honor of leading the Oldest Public University is necessarily terrified of public scrutiny.

You’re still No. 1 in the nation for most secretive hiring practice for top university officials:

“North Carolina is the only state in the nation that selects the top leaders of all its public universities in secret,” Johnson wrote. “In 49 other states, the names of the finalists for university president or chancellor positions are made public, a Fayetteville Observer study shows. Six states release the names of all applicants.”

The Observer survey involved 118 university systems or individual schools. It found some states with “no single governing policy” and others with universities that did have closed processes, “but at least one school or university system in every state, except North Carolina, selects leaders in public.”

This revelation shreds a cherished UNC fiction. UNC officials had made it seem that secrecy in chancellor selection was de rigueur. As UNC President Molly C. Broad put it before the Associated Press in 1999 (during the last search for a new leader of UNC-CH), “These people are putting their careers on the line for you. It doesn’t take much to get them spooked.”

The process used by NC State in 2004 to select Chancellor James Oblinger was so secretive that search committee members boasted of having signed confidentiality agreements.

Were I not in such a charitable mood, I’d point to how some of these hush-hush hires have ended — executives leaving under clouds of scandal when secrets come to light. Why, it’s almost as if they come into the job with the belief that keeping public scrutiny at bay is the way things are done in the public university system. But don’t worry, UNC; no one will complain because they don’t want to be smeared as Hating Education by the leaders of a top institution of higher education (i.e., presumably smart people who ought to know better). Such bullying is, of course, one of the cheaper ways to keep scrutiny at a minimum.