Doing Away With Transparency At Our Universities

Daily Update - May 12, 2026

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Episode summary:

The North Carolina General Assembly is moving to hide how much top-paid student‑athletes at UNC System schools are making, even though taxpayers are footing much of the bill for the programs that support them. In this Daily Update, I walk through what the proposed records changes would conceal, why “competitive advantage” has become the new excuse for less transparency, and how that turns basic accountability on its head. We look at the irony of the NFL openly sharing player salaries while public universities try to lock theirs behind a legal firewall. And we talk about what it means for North Carolina families who pay for the facilities, housing, and infrastructure that make these programs possible in the first place.

What you’ll learn / Key moments

00:00 – Why hiding public records on athlete pay is a bad idea.
00:08 – Setting the stage: Today’s Daily Update and what Raleigh is trying to change.
00:13 – The bill that shields high‑paid student‑athletes from salary disclosure.
00:30 – Rep. Wyatt Gable’s argument about “staying competitive” in the talent arms race.
00:45 – How the bill rewrites UNC records law to hide three major budget categories.
01:05 – Reminder: Student fees can’t pay athletes, but taxpayers underwrite the system around them.
01:25 – The real cost: facilities, housing, food, utilities, and support funded by the state.
02:20 – The irony: NFL salaries are public, but UNC wants secrecy for publicly funded programs.
02:56 – Final takeaway: If we pay the bill, we deserve to see where the money goes.

What you can do

North Carolina taxpayers should push back hard against any attempt to hide how public institutions spend our money. Call and email your state legislators and demand that any bill touching UNC budgets and athlete compensation keep those records open to the people who pay the bills. Talk with friends, church members, and neighbors about why transparency matters more than winning another recruiting battle, and share this episode so more folks understand what’s happening in Raleigh. Public universities belong to the citizens of North Carolina, not to bureaucrats, lobbyists, or athletic departments, and it’s time we reminded them of that.

Decreasing the transparency of any publicly funded institution is never a good idea.

This is the Wilmington Standard Daily Update for Tuesday, May 12, 2026.

The North Carolina General Assembly is working on a bill that will effectively shield some of the highest paid employees of the state – student athletes at our major universities some of whom make millions of dollars a year – from having to disclose how much they are being paid to play. Wyatt Gable – Republican Representative out of Onslow County, told the GA’s Higher Education Committee that such a move keeps North Carolina competitive in a national bidding war for student talent by not making salaries public.

According to the Carolina Journal:

The records provision would amend the state’s confidentiality statute to shield three categories of records held by UNC-system schools: the institution’s overall revenue sharing budget, allocations of that budget by a team or program, and allocations to individual student-athletes.

North Carolina specifically prohibits student fees from being used to pay athletes. Additionally, the budget that is used to cover the salary of football and male basketball players – who receive the vast majority of the checks – is usually covered by sports events revenues. Here is the problem – those facilities where they play, the housing where they sleep, the cafeterias where they eat, the utilities they use to keep the lights on, and the administrative support they get as students are all partially or fully underwritten by state funds.

Meanwhile, the salaries in the National Football League are effectively an open-book. It is the apex of irony that a private institution like the NFL has no problem releasing player pay stubs, but a public institution is working to hide them.

If we are to continue in this quite ridiculous climate of paying students to play sports at our public institutions – an activity that at one time was considered a privilege and not a minor league contract – we must also remember that the University of North Carolina and other state schools are exactly that – state schools that are supported in a variety of ways by North Carolina tax payers.

We pay the bill – we want to see where it goes.

For the Wilmington Standard, I’m Reuel Sample. Thanks for listening.

Reuel Sample is the Editor-in-Chief of The Wilmington Standard. A graduate of Grove City College and Princeton Theological Seminary, he has served as both a Presbyterian Pastor and a Navy Chaplain. He is the product of a classical liberal arts education combined with real world experience in politics and business and conservative Christian worldview firmly rooted in the Reformed tradition. He is the host of several podcasts including the NHC GOP Podcast, the Pastor's Voice, and co-hosts the Nikki and Reuel Podcast Experience. An avid sailor, he has sailed around the world as a youth and to the Azores as a teen as well as extensive trips up and down the east coast of the United States. He is honored to be married to his wife Pam and makes his home in Wilmington, NC.