Carolina Alumni Review - July/August 2008

inhibition that hints at mischief, that’s more the mien of a classroom teacher than a dean. When he wanted to make a point with his chemistry students, he made movies for them. Eight years ago when he found out the new chancellor was a serious classical musician, he worked up a mock Durham Bulls letterhead, wrote a note inviting him to come play the organ at the ballpark when he had time, and put the department chair’s signature on it. When he stepped to the podium on the day he became chancellor-elect, he looked like the man who was taken off the list of people to appear in the GAA’s new video because he wasn’t bubbly enough, and he said exactly what he was feeling: “Wow.”

THE NEWS & OBSERVER/SCOTT SHARPE ’ 83

Thorp was an undergraduate just 22 years ago, and in 15 years back in Chapel Hill he has gone from assistant professor to Kenan Professor, been decorated with teaching awards, made vice chair for undergraduate studies two years after he arrived, and spun two companies off his research. He spent four years rehabilitating a faltering Morehead Planetarium; went back to chemistry as chair; and was pulled out two years into the usual five-year term to be dean of the largest academic unit on campus, the College of Arts and Sciences. They didn’t wait for him to finish a year there; but then, there’s talk that Thorp, 43, whose wife said that when they were dating “his brain scared me to death,” was spotted for the big job a long time ago.

James Moeser, like his predecessors, was buttoned-down;Thorp is not far removed from the tennis shoes propped up on his desk. “I’m gonna be as much a shirtsleeve chancellor as possible,” he said.

On announcement day in May, Thorp, who started the job July 1 and will be installed in October, said UNC System President Erskine Bowles ’ 67 was pumping gas into his car in Greensboro when he made the offer official.

“I will never forget the Exxon on Wen-dover Avenue.” There’s the punch line, followed by what actors call the throwaway line: “It’s a good thing I didn’t run in to get some Nabs.” Big laugh, bigger laugh.

OK. The chancellorship is serious business, and the devil is in the details. He knows that.

“The night before, Patti and I argued about whether it should be Nabs, Cheer-wine or a Slim Jim.”

Above, a graduate student discusses a DNA experiment with Assistant Professor Thorp in 1995. He knew when to get out and play, too — opposite page, at the piano in Hyde Hall last spring. At right, he started as a techie in the community theater run by his parents, but he also tried acting, here with his father, Herbert ’ 54, and younger brother Clay ’ 90.

‘A nerd like me’

Thorp instantly identifies the weakness in his resume: In foreign languages he did only the minimum.

“I hate it because a nerd like me could have learned a lot of languages if I knew it was gonna be important.”

A nerd like him didn’t pass on too many opportunities to learn and explore. (“In 1974, I was honor camper at Camp Cheerio,” he told a gathering at a GAA board dinner in 2002. “When I got home my dad said, you know, we used to beat the hell out of the honor camper.”)

As a kid in Fayetteville, he had the run of one of the great platforms for self-discovery. His parents, Herbert ’ 54 and Bo

ONLINE: Related coverage, including archive articles from the Review, is available online at alumni.unc.edu/thorparchive.

’ 56, were organizing what would become the Cape Fear Regional Theater, and Thorp sampled the life of the technician, the musician and the actor. Music, in fact, tempted him to skip or delay college.

At 16, he and two friends took off for Boston and a summer program at the elite Berklee College of Music, where he studied jazz guitar. Soon afterward, while his friends stuck with music, Thorp veered toward science and filled out a single college application.

Tom Meyer, Arey Distinguished Professor of chemistry at UNC who was Thorp’s undergraduate mentor, had 20 or so students working in his research lab. Thorp, he said, “had me for a class, and he came to me, and he walked into that environment, and a whole world opened up to him.