The Moeser Years: A Timeline
2000
April ■ UNC System Board of Governors
approves Moeser’s appointment.
October ■ Moeser is installed on University
Day as Carolina’s ninth chancellor.
November ■ N.C. voters approve the Higher
Education Bond referendum. ■ Football
Coach Carl Torbush is dismissed.
December ■ John Bunting ’ 72 is hired to
replace Torbush. ■ Women’s soccer team
wins national championship.
2001
February ■ Construction begins on the Medical Biomolecular Research Building, first
major project under the Higher Education
Bond referendum. ■ Moeser announces a
$245 million public-private investment in a
campuswide genome sciences initiative over
the next decade.
September ■ Moeser discusses UNC’s major
challenges for the years ahead in UNC’s first
State of the University speech. ■ More than
10,000 people gather in Polk Place on the
day after the Sept. 11 attacks.
November ■ The University celebrates
50 years of African-American student enrollment. ■ Moeser heads a fact-finding tour to
Qatar in the Middle East — 51 faculty, admin-
istrators and trustees go.
December ■ Men’s soccer team wins
national championship.
2002
February ■ Moeser says “Carolina will not
move forward” with the Qatar proposal.
July ■ The Office of Undergraduate Admissions office drops the practice of binding
early decision. ■ Moeser decides to close
Horace Williams Airport.
August ■ In its fourth year, the summer reading program makes national
headlines with its selection:
Approaching the Qur’án:
The Early Revelations by
Michael Sells.
October ■ The Carolina First
Campaign officially begins
with a goal of $1.8 billion.
November ■ Moeser
decides to pay departing
General Counsel Susan
Ehringhaus ’ 66 for the
next two years.
December ■ Moeser apologizes for Ehringhaus decision.
2003
April ■ Basketball Coach Matt Doherty ’ 84 is
forced to resign. ■ Roy Williams ’ 72 is hired to
replace Doherty.
October ■ Carolina Covenant is launched.
December ■ Women’s soccer team wins
national championship.
2004
January ■ Moeser declines a potential bonus
of as much as $30,000 offered by UNC System President Molly Broad, citing a need to
“stand with the troops” during tough financial times.
March ■ Moeser calls for
full airing of the Cornelia
Phillips Spencer controversy.
April ■ UNC breaks ground
for the first phase of the
Carolina Physical Science
Complex.
August ■ Moeser says “no
way” West House, a small
building built as a private
student residence in 1935,
can stand in the way of the
new Arts Common.
UNC NEWS SERVICES
Campaign started two days after Hooker
died in July 1999. Kupec, whose office had
been on Franklin Street, soon was sharing a
wall with the chancellor. The campaign
boosted professorships, scholarships, special
academic programs and the laying of
bricks, and it included a couple of gifts
whose size made national news. Three
months before the drive was to conclude,
Moeser announced he would be leaving.
“I think the way we talk about [being
the leading public university] today is different from the way we talked about it six
years ago in the sense that it’s much more
of a perceived potentiality and even reality
than it was,” he said.
“So the campaign had a tremendous
positive dynamic on our own self-understanding as a university.”
Controversy, and the ‘North’ question
There was a brief period early on in
which editorialists wondered whether
Moeser was up to this. Overall his cruise
went pretty smoothly, with a handful of
exceptions.
■ In fall 2002, Moeser agreed to pay
Susan Ehringhaus ’ 66, the University’s
longtime general counsel, her $188,321
salary plus $40,000 in travel expenses for
20 months while she worked on research
in Washington, D.C., for eight months
with a planned return to UNC to teach in
The Carolina First Campaign boosted
professorships, scholarships,
special academic programs and the
laying of bricks, and it included
a couple of gifts whose size
made national news.
the law school for a year. Taxpayers howled
along with the UNC System president and
the chair of its Board of Governors. He
then arranged to make the payment with
funds from a private foundation, saying, “I
realize that I have some fence-mending to
do in my relationships with faculty, staff
and students at Carolina, and, indeed, with
the people of the state.” Recently he said,
“In most cases, the lessons I guess I’ve
learned over many, many years of doing
this kind of job … is that I take longer to
make a decision and I listen to more people before I make a decision, and in those
cases where I erred, if I’d taken a little
more counsel, perhaps I might have
avoided a mistake.” Ehringhaus took a
position with the Association of American
Medical Colleges and did not return to
the law school.
■ Fifty-one faculty, administrators and
trustees took a fact-finding trip in 2001 to
