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Thorp is the right choice for chancellor

Posted on May 15, 2008 by Staff

By Robert Dickson
I shuddered last fall when I read that UNC Trustee Roger Perry had said that the search firm hired to find the new chancellor knew every “player” in the country.

That description implied to me that our school was in for yet another development-minded leader and that the university of never-ending construction would continue its march across the Orange County landscape.

I yearned for an education-oriented chancellor, one who revels in the history of the place as well as in its future. What was needed, I thought, was someone who understands at his or her core what this university has meant to North Carolina.

These feelings of ownership of my university come quite naturally. An ancestor, William Dickson, was in the first class at UNC. In the past hundred or so years, there have been at least 20 of us to matriculate at UNC, including grandfather, great uncles, father, uncle, brother, wife, both daughters, cousins – well, you get the picture.

There’s a legend in my family that holds that my grandfather and his brothers (he had 12 brothers and sisters) kept the same room in Old East for 20 years running, from 1903 to 1923, when the last of them graduated. My father lived in a new dorm, Steele, when he came to Chapel Hill in 1933.

And my family is hardly unusual in our historical attachment to our university.

In choosing Holden Thorp as our new chancellor, the trustees have given all of us who love Carolina a great gift. The same trustees who are driving Carolina North like the Queen Mary up Bolin Creek have gotten this decision exactly right.

Having lived many years in Mr. Thorp’s hometown of Fayetteville, where his mother is nothing less than a force of nature in the arts community, I’ve marveled at his progress. From the banks of the Cape Fear, I’ve sat and listened to his music.

With Erskine Bowles as UNC president and Holden Thorp as chancellor of the flagship branch, it sure feels like our great university is in better hands than it’s been for a long time. We’ve now got two leaders who love this place like no other and who are likely to be around for a long time.

Sure, the building will continue, and that cruise ship of a development will be pushed into dock somewhere on the Horace Williams tract. As another famous alumnus of our university once penned, you can’t go home again. Just maybe, though, we’ve now got two fellows who can at least remember what home was like.

Robert Dickson, UNC class of 1973, is the publisher of The Carrboro Citizen.

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