RALEIGH - Should North Carolinians be given first shot when top jobs open up? It's a question that pops up every time there's a vacancy, and we're hearing it right now.

N.C. State University, the system's largest campus, is in search of a new chancellor to replace Marye Anne Fox, who is leaving to head University of California, San Diego.

Already, some N.C. State partisans are airing the names of two familiar leaders and alumni: retired Army Gen. Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Jim Hunt, governor of North Carolina for four terms.

Technician, the student newspaper on the West Raleigh campus, endorsed Hunt for the job just the other day, arguing that the campus would benefit from a combination of a "strong non-academic chancellor to set the course of the university for the next 10 years and a strong academic leader in the provost's office."

The early interest in Hunt for the post may stem partly from the recognition that another pro-education governor, Terry Sanford, led Duke University through dramatic changes when he became president of that private school. The interest in Hunt also reflects a long-running tradition of looking to home-grown leadership for N.C. campuses.

Whether the university's current leadership shares that affinity for down-home connections is another question. The recent record suggests that it does not value the hometown connection nearly so strongly as in the first 25 years of the 16-campus university system.

When he was president of the system, William Friday recalls, he looked for chancellors from within campus administrations and sometimes his own general administration office. He thought it was valuable to have proven staff leaders who already knew North Carolina's cultural, political and educational traditions.

"In a public institution of any size, it takes from three to five years to find out where your metes and bounds are if you are a newcomer," Friday says. "You have to learn who the legislators are, who the state's major decision makers are and so on."

By Friday's count, he selected only two chancellors who had no connection to the university system or to the state, and about 20 who did (including chancellors chosen before the 1972 creation of the UNC system).

Friday's successor, C.D. "Dick" Spangler Jr., also appeared to favor chancellors with strong N.C. connections. Former UNC vice president D.G. Martin thought roughly two-thirds of Spangler's appointees also had N.C. ties.

Under current UNC system President Molly Broad, that tradition has changed. Broad, who came to UNC in 1997 from California, has appointed 13 chancellors -- five of whom had strong connections to UNC or to the state.

"It is a very strong plus factor, especially when they are an alum," says Broad. "But it is not the most important one."

There once was a time when a faculty member or administrator could be elevated to the chancellorship without a problem, Broad says. "but the job of a UNC chancellor these days has become so complex that you cannot risk someone in that position making a mistake, especially so early in their tenure, because it has consequences not just for that chancellor but also for that institution."

The president of the UNC system doesn't make that choice in a vacuum, of course. Campus-based search committees screen candidates and make recommendations of at least two candidates to the UNC president. The president can then choose from among those candidates, or insist on another candidate, but the UNC Board of Governors must make the formal decision.

When the UNC Board of Governors was created 32 years ago to run the new 16-campus University of North Carolina, the idea wasn't exactly to take politics out of higher education. Legislators wisely recognized that was unlikely to happen, and they were right.

If anything, the idea was to consolidate leadership of N.C. higher education in one place and make good policy decisions for all its campuses and their tens of thousands of students.

It also provided a more formal process for selecting, hiring and sometimes firing the scores of chancellors who have the job of running individual campuses.

In the Friday and Spangler years, those jobs usually went to North Carolinians. Sometimes the results were excellent. The campus at Chapel Hill got N.C. native Bill Aycock, for example, whom Friday has long regarded as among the best chancellors anywhere. Spangler persuaded Julius Chambers, a former Charlotte lawyer, to leave the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York to take over his alma mater, N.C. Central in Durham.

Those were inspired choices. But so were some who had no previous N.C. connection. The hiring of John Caldwell at N.C. State, for example, was a superb choice, as was bringing Jim Woodward to UNC Charlotte. Neither appeared to have been hampered by arriving on campus without an N.C. drawl or a deep understanding of the nuances of Eastern North Carolina barbecue versus Piedmont style. Whatever disadvantage they faced, they quickly overcame it.

"Having North Carolina connections is almost always a big help for a chancellor...," says D.G. Martin. "But the nationwide pool of `outsiders' brought us some great talent and some folks who had learned how to become `insiders' very quickly," he added. Newcomers such as Charlotte's Woodward "brought experience and an ability to put new ideas to work. And sometime that quality is what universities need more that someone who knows his or her way around North Carolina."

In other words, it's more important to get the right person, regardless of where the candidate was born, lived, went to college or worked.

Still, North Carolinians like it when one of their own is promoted from within -- or brought back to the state.

"Some people say that's pure provincialism," Friday says. "But I said no, you build your dean structure and your faculty structure and offset parochialism by recruiting everywhere (in the world) and building in quality."

He adds, "In a university as large as this one, if we don't have people qualified to lead them, we are in bad shape.... The first test ought to be, is there someone within the shop who deserves it?"