Earlier this week, Andrew Young was in town to give the Martin Luther King Jr. lecture. He was kind enough to sit down with me for a few minutes to talk about his life and his take on our complex world.
There aren’t many people who worked with Dr. King on the civil rights movement, served as Mayor of a huge city, served as a congressman, and served as Ambassador to the UN. It was a thrill to talk to him about all of these things, and he had some great advice for students.
In addition to playing one of their songs at the gala concert (see earlier post), I also had the chance to talk to Alan and Marilyn Bergman in the studio about their careers and their advice for students. They were in town for Alan to receive a Distinguished Alumnus Award at University Day.
Alan talks about why he came to Chapel Hill, what he learned, and how he and Marilyn started writing songs together. They both talk about how to get started in the business and how to write a TV theme song.
Please watch and listen to our conversation.
Last week, when we honored Carolina alumnus Alan Bergman at University Day, the music department held a gala concert where the students performed Bergman’s songs. Alan’s collaborator and wife Marilyn was also there. Their lyrics still sing perfectly, and their collaborators are the best in the business – Quincy Jones, Michel Legrand, Dave Grusin, Marvin Hamlisch and more. So, it was an evening of great songs and great performances.
I had the opportunity to accompany our student Emily Spokas who sang “In the Heat of the Night,” which was the theme song for the movie and TV show. Quincy Jones wrote the music, so it was fun to play. Emily is a student of our wonderful new faculty member Louise Toppin and also a star in the Loreleis.
Here’s a recording of our performance:
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University Day was a grand occasion in every respect. Tom Ross’ speech was uplifting and a great tribute to faculty, staff, and students and all they do for Carolina.
The honorees for Distinguished Alumnus or Alumna were magnificent examples of what a Carolina education can do, and it was a thrill to bestow the first Graham medal for public service on our friend and colleague David Owens.
The remarks from Employee Forum chair Jackie Overton were a highlight. Jackie does a wonderful job for us in public safety and in leading the Forum. Her talk made me proud to be part of the staff of Carolina. Here is the text of her talk:
Greetings.
To President Ross, Chancellor Thorp, Chairman Hargrove, Platform guests, Campus community.
While this University was celebrating its bicentennial in 1993, the Employee Forum was celebrating its first year of existence. After years of research, planning, protests and preparation, the Forum was formally recognized as a viable entity for staff employees on campus in 1992. Thank you Chancellor Hardin.
There were some fears in giving the Forum such status because it was felt that the staff would then want to run things. To be sure we wanted to run things: typewriters, errands, vacuums, bobcats, cash registers, parking booths, coffee pots and the like. We wanted to run offices, and labs; and direct clinics, projects, and programs. With a goal towards doing our part to making Carolina the best public University in the country.
The fact that we are having this program today is a testament to the collective hard work of a lot of employees: the grounds are beautiful, the buildings are clean, the electricity is running, the sound is clear, the parking is maintained, this auditorium is safe/secure.
I was fortunate to have been a part of the bicentennial planning team. We met and planned for many months to make that event happen. It would be a night event in Kenan Stadium with lots of flourish and fanfare because President Clinton would be the guest speaker. Prior to the President’s speech, we would hear from our native son, Charles Kuralt who so ably and aptly summed up the Carolina experience in this way: I paraphrase:
What is it about this place that makes us love it so much? Is it the bell, or the well, or the rocked walls, or the crisp October evenings? No, it is none of those things. It is because this place is as it was always meant to be, the University of the people.
That speech electrified the crowd to thunderous applause because it resounded a truth within us that was both familiar and familial.
The University of the People.
People who teach. People who learn. People who create. People who serve. People who care. Especially the staff.
Staff who have come from the mountains or the poor rural counties. Many came here as students — oftimes as first-generation college students — and stayed here because of better job opportunities.
Staff, almost 9000 strong. The Employee Forum, almost 50 elected delegates who represent everyone who is not a faculty or student member. To do our part to support the University’s teaching, research, and public service mission. And to support our Chancellor.
We are the Employee Forum. And we are Tar Heels.
Thank you.
On Friday, we unveiled the portrait of Chancellor James Moeser that will hang in the lobby of Wilson Library along with portraits of his eight predecessors. The portrait is a wonderful likeness of Chancellor Moeser and the spectacular Carolina blue robe that he, Michael Hooker, Paul Hardin, Bill McCoy and I have worn since it was designed in for our bicentennial in 1993.
James gives his remarks at the unveiling of his portrait in this photo by Will Owens.
Roger Perry and I talked about James’ legacy on this campus, which extends to its every corner. People always compliment me on the way the campus looks, and James and the Board of Trustees deserve most of the credit for the way that the implemented the construction program that came from the Higher Education Bond program.
James gave a great talk on Friday about the importance of a liberal arts university. Here are his remarks:
Chancellor Thorp, Friends and Guests,
This is a special moment for Susan and for me, and we deeply appreciate that so many of our friends and colleagues could be here this afternoon to share this event with us. As I look out over this crowd,
I am ever so conscious of the fact that everyone in this room is part of the Carolina story of the first decade of the 21st Century.
Roger, thank you so much for your kind words. Your leadership of the Board of Trustees is one of the high points of that story. Holden, your rapid rise through the ranks is another part of that story. I appreciate that you brought Susan up to the podium to share in this moment, because she was as thrilled as I was when we first came to UNC in the late summer of 2000. She has walked with me every step of the way.
When this portrait is hung in Wilson Library, it will join a great procession of my predecessors – Robert House, William Aycock,
Paul Sharp, Carlyle Sitterson, Ferebee Taylor, Chris Fordham, Paul Hardin, and Michael Hooker. I am so pleased that Paul and Barbara Hardin could be present today.
I am pleased that John Howard Sanden, the portrait artist, painted me in front of Daniel Chester French’s Spirit of Life sculpture, which stands at the center inside the entrance to Wilson Library, just to the right of the row of portraits. He chose this setting, he said, in order to depict my love of music, my first love and first professional calling, and this university’s commitment to the arts and humanities.
I like to think of this sculpture as representing the spirit of Carolina, a university with a proud, if imperfect history, rising from the same springs as the American Revolution; defending Constitutional liberties; leading the South into the modern age; becoming one of the great research universities of the world in the late 20th century with the audacious vision of being America’s leading university–all this while maintaining the essential humility and grace of its more modest creation by the people of a state whose motto is esse quam videre – to be rather than to seem. This is a proudly public university – the university of the people as coined by Charles Kuralt, yet a university with such a devoutly spiritual core that Gerrard Hall, the 1822 chapel right next door, has the words of Micah inscribed on it: “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.”
Thus, it was innate to our culture for the Carolina Covenant, which led the way for almost a hundred other institutions to create programs that guarantee a debt-free education to low income students, to spring forth here. It was a innate to our culture for Carolina to make a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion, to focus on the critical social issues of the times, racism, poverty, sexual orientation and identity. It was innate to our culture that Carolina was the first major institution to end binding early decision admissions, recognizing that students from the least affluent backgrounds were disadvantaged by this practice. Many followed us at the time, and sadly, many have also quietly reverted to their old practices while few were watching. It was innate to our culture that in the wake of Nine-Eleven, we should ask our students to read a book about the Q’uran, and it was equally innate that we should defend that choice against all attacks, just as Bill Aycock and Bill Friday had defended free speech against the Speaker Ban Law.
I appreciate that we are in my favorite space on this campus – Memorial Hall, which symbolizes this university’s great commitment to the arts, recognizing that a truly great university must have excellence in science and medicine, but also in the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts. I think this is the secret to Carolina’s greatness—that with all our investments and our success with big science, including a promising new investment in applied science, we continue to value and support the arts and humanities. This is why the Mellon Foundation, which just awarded $750,000 to Carolina Performing Arts for a signature celebration of the 100th anniversary of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, told us that UNC is the one public university that still celebrates the humanities.
When Susan and I were in South Carolina, we had the privilege of getting to know the late great poet, James Dickey. We invited Dickey to give the commencement address one year at South Carolina, and I still have that speech in my library, it was so memorable. In it he recounted the story of the famous debate in the Oxford Union over a century and a half ago between Thomas Henry Huxley, the biologist and public defender of Darwin and Matthew Arnold, the poet and Professor of Poetry at Oxford. These are Dickey’s words:
“Huxley contended that the future of education lay in confining the curriculum to technological subjects. These exclusively were to be taught, for the wave of the future was to be science, and education should recognize this and mold people to take their places within a culture not only dominated by science but created by it. . . . His opponent in the debate, Matthew Arnold, took the opposite view: the purpose of education, he said, is not to condition people to interrelate with machines . . . but to aid the student in becoming a certain kind of person, an individual with his own needs and potentialities, perhaps including scientific preoccupations but not limited to them.” Dickey continued, “it seems to me that Huxley was partially right, but that Arnold was entirely right. Arnold believed, with the poet John Keats, that life is a vale of soul making. He thought that life was given to him to find the right use of it, that it was a kind of continuous magical confrontation . . . derived from intuition, courage, and the accumulation of experience. It was not a formula of any kind, not a piece of rationality, but rather a way of being and of acting.” i
That is as good a description of a liberal arts education as you will ever find. It describes this place – a vale of soul making.
So when you look at this portrait, do not fail to see Daniel Chester French’s Spirit of Life in the background. That is the spirit of this place, this university that we love, this Carolina.
i Quoted in James Dickey, “The Weather of the Valley: Reflections on the Soul and Its Making, an Address,” [commencement speech at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C., typescript, no date], pp. 7-8, James Moeser’s personal collection.
Last week, Charlie Rose was in town to moderate a debate on the debt ceiling. I have always been such a huge fan of his show, so I was excited about getting the chance to meet him.
We talked a lot about news, science, and how being a talk show host is like working at a university, because you get to talk to so many brilliant, talented people who are creating the thoughts and ideas that will shape the future.
This post was originally published in the Chapel Hill Herald on August 31, 2011.
A successful democracy depends on an educated citizenry. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “With freedom comes responsibility,” and chief among voters’ responsibilities is keeping themselves informed on the issues.
Last week, the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University performed a valuable public service by hosting the roundtable discussion “The Debt Crisis and Saving Our Fiscal Future.” Convened by Senator Kay Hagan and moderated by the longtime PBS interview show host and journalist Charlie Rose, the roundtable featured experts in economics and fiscal and monetary policy. (Watch for a conversation I had later with Charlie on the University’s YouTube Channel.)
Even more impressive was the fact that the Koury Auditorium at Kenan-Flagler Business School was filled to overflowing with an audience of nearly 400. With the August 2 deadline to raise the debt ceiling looming, the roundtable could not have been more timely.
This isn’t the first time a group at the University has stepped up to address an important policy issue. The Kenan Institute staged a similar presentation a year ago before the debt crisis was making headlines. The UNC General Alumni Association has sponsored several “Think Fast” forums with experts to address topics like the Egyptian revolution, the financial crisis and response to natural disasters. Twice a year, the Friday Center offers its popular “What’s the Big Idea?” public lecture series featuring scholarship on timely topics. And back in March, Carolina hosted the first public forum of the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
But public events like these are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the University’s role as a policy resource. The Institute of Government (now the School of Government) was created to offer local government officials in our state the resources and training they need to govern more effectively. About 12,000 public officials a year attend these courses. The school also puts out a wide range of publications that keep officials informed about new legislation and research on public policy topics. The school’s Civic Education Consortium works with North Carolina public schools to teach young people how to be responsible citizens and voters.
The governor and the General Assembly often turn to the University for help to inform the discussion of policy issues. For example, research done by UNC faculty members on the feasibility of harnessing coastal winds for energy production helped to shape the discussion of that issue in Raleigh.
But the University’s influence on public policy doesn’t stop at the state border. Our faculty members are often called to Capitol Hill to offer their expertise and policy advice to Congress and the President. Earlier this month, Ted Zoller, executive director of our Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, testified to a subcommittee about the importance of access to capital for high-growth startups. Roberto Quercia, director of our Center for Community Capital, recommended lending reforms to Congress and to the Federal Reserve. And the list goes on.
At UNC, we take our commitment to public service very seriously. In a time when all too often policy becomes hopelessly entangled in politics, it is our role to provide resources and research on a nonpartisan basis to further the discussion of policy issues in a constructive, responsible way. Democracy thrives on such education.
***
Football update
Earlier this week, we announced a football coaching change. It was my decision to make with the full support of our trustees. I had lost confidence in our ability to come through our current challenges without harming the way people think of this institution. Our academic integrity is paramount and we must work diligently to protect it. The decision was not tied to new developments in the NCAA investigation, but hinged on the cumulative damage to the University’s reputation over the past year. In addition, I reluctantly accepted Dick Baddour’s offer to step down as athletic director before his planned retirement so that his successor could hire our next permanent coach. Dick has been a positive force at the University for 45 years, and has made so many contributions in Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Orange County. Please know how much we appreciate this community’s strong support for Carolina athletics. And bear with us during this transition as we move forward.
Israel’s high tech economy is booming, as described vividly in the popular book Start-Up Nation. On our trip, we had the chance to meet with Jon Medved, who is one of the leading figures in the Israel high-tech boom and featured prominently in the book.
Medved was born to a Jewish family in the US and became a campus radical at Berkeley in the early 1970s. When his classmates were heading off for the summers to work with Chavez, the only place his parents would pay for him to go was Israel. He had a life-changing experience and fell in love with the country and his faith.
After college, when he moved to Israel, he thought the best way to help the country was by contributing to a kibbutz. But his father said, “if you want to be a Zionist, you’ll build the high-tech industry in Israel instead of hanging out at the kibbutz.”
Medved built a couple of successful companies and used his contacts and resources to build the first major Israeli venture capital fund. Interestingly, the Hebrew name for venture capital is “danger capital.”
The statistics illustrating Israel’s rise have been documented elsewhere, but a couple of items are worth repeating. Israel is the second-best region in the world for venture-backed companies after Silicon Valley (and ahead of Boston, RTP, Austin, etc.). Also, the US is the country of origin of the most companies on US stock exchanges with China second and Israel third. The population of Israel is 7 million – 2.5 million less than NC.
Medved said that the reason for this was not native Jewish intelligence or great technical prowess in the public education system – Israel’s scores on science and math school tests are low and similar to the those in the US that everyone is always lamenting about. College completion probably plays a role – half of the high school graduates in Israel get four-year degrees compared to 28% in the US.
Medved gave four main reasons for Israel’s success:
1. Risk-tolerance and lack of fear of failure. Medved said that starting a company that might fail wasn’t nearly as risky as sending your kid off to the army or putting them on a school bus manned by an armed guard. And he said something that Buck Goldstein and I talk a lot about – betting on an entrepreneur who has failed is a good bet because the entrepreneur is resilient and has learned from previous experiences,
2. Immigrant culture. Israel is a country of immigrants, and immigrants are known to be great entrepreneurs. The big names of the recent US high-tech boom are Jerry Yang, Sergey Brin, etc. “If you are a successful immigrant,” he said, “you have already built a successful startup – it’s called your life.”
3. Informality and openness. Israel is a country without a lot of formal titles where you can get to know prominent figures easily. He contrasted this with Japan and some parts of the US economy where CEOs are highly protected. In Israel, the big-time politicians are referred to by their nicknames (e.g. Bibi Netanyahu). The open system allows companies to move freely from within and without Israel as needed for commercial success.
4. Military service. All Israelis are required to serve in the military. Military service teaches risk-tolerance and self-reliance. Medved said that in evaluating Israeli resumes, the first thing he looks for is the unit in which the applicant served in the army instead of the education.
In the US, we’re not doing a good job of following the lessons from Israel. We struggle to get talented international students into our universities and to gain permission for them to stay in the US after they graduate. Helicopter parents protect their kids from failure and delay the development of their self-reliance. Some of our economic policies are aimed at keeping companies in a particular region instead of creating an open, informal ecosystem optimized for success.
Fascinating first few days in Israel. The American Jewish Committee has put together an extraordinary trip. In the meetings, we have heard from political science faculty working in Israel, as well as one of the international lawyers who is leading the peace negotiations, Daniel Reisner, and the chief justice of the supreme court, Aharon Barak.
The speakers have done an excellent job of laying out the fundamental issues facing the region. We have heard about the Israeli-Palestine conflict but also about the other issues facing the region, including the conflicts in the Persian Gulf and the potential consequences of the Arab Spring.
It is one thing to look at the maps on the news, but quite a different thing to hear from the folks who have worked on the issues and see the places themselves. Yesterday we went up to the Golan Heights to see the borders with Syria and Lebanon. The hills are beautiful, and the valley separating Syria and Israel seems tranquil now due to the terms of the cease-fire, which prohibit military bases on the border. Tensions still exist, of course, and satellites now provide surveillance instead of sentries.
We have gotten to see some of the sights. Like most visitors to the region, the sizes of the bodies of water come as a surprise compared to the mental images. The Sea of Galilee is closer to the size of Jordan Lake than a sea, and the Jordan River is about 10-20 feet across. It makes the Haw River look huge.
We have heard multiple points of view on the big issues on the trip. I’ll provide a summary once I’ve heard from all of the speakers.
This weekend, Patti and I will head off to Israel with seven other presidents or chancellors. The trip is organized and paid for by Project Interchange, which is an effort by the American Jewish Committee to provide greater exposure to our group of the complex issues facing Israel and the region.
The trip is co-chaired by my colleague President Barbara Snyder from Case Western Reserve and David Warren of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. Joining us on the trip will be our counterparts from UC-Santa Barbara, Hendrix College, Drexel University, the University of West Georgia, Colgate University, and St. Edwards University.
The itinerary includes visits to the major cities, talks with higher education leaders, and meetings with political figures. I’m particularly excited about meeting folks from the entrepreneurial economy, because I’m such a big fan of the book Start-Up Nation, which talks about how successful startups are enabled by the history and culture of Israel. We’ll be meeting with Jonathan Medved, who is one of the leading venture capitalists in Israel.
I’ll be posting blogs and tweets from the trip.