SeminarFreshman
The honeymoon of Holden Thorp ’ 86 was brief — drastic budget
cutting made sure of that. He believes a slimmer UNC
will have to be a master of innovation.
ne thing you notice when you
talk to Holden Thorp ’ 86 is that
he rarely ponders questions. The
“?” is followed about a half-second
later by, “Right.” And then he’s off, like
the A student who wants to be the first to finish the
exam and move on.
Such as: What have you found different from what
you expected?
“Right. I think the thing that anybody who gets
one of these jobs may understand intellectually but
doesn’t understand in a tangible and tactile way is just
the sheer intensity of the fact that a lot of people associate everything that goes on with the University with
one person. And I’ve tried to deal with that by understanding as many details of what’s going on here as I
possibly can, because that’s what people expect.
“I told the story many times last year, move-in day
when I went to somebody’s room and told them I was
the chancellor, and they asked me to hook their computer up to the Internet. And there was an Ethernet
jack, and they had a cable, and I showed ’em how to
do it. Thank goodness it worked when we plugged it
in.”
For sure, the chancellor’s first year has been an
extraordinary one for learning — much of it about
delayed gratification. Thorp swept in from the chemistry classroom and the directorship of the Morehead
Planetarium and Science Center and his year as dean of
the College of Arts and Sciences with some ambitious
O
by David E. Brown ’ 75
ideas. He talked about UNC as a hub for solutions to
the word’s most vexing problems and about the need
to build an atmosphere in which everybody can be an
innovator.
He’s still talking a lot about those things, but now
it’s amid the most serious budget cutting in many years
— belt tightening that’s likely to hover over Chapel
Hill for some time to come.
In addition to the financial crisis that descended on
South Building shortly after Thorp’s elegant installation
in October 2008, he lost an especially close colleague,
Bernadette Gray-Little, to the chancellorship of the
University of Kansas — “We’re doing for higher education administration what Dean Smith did for the
NBA, and what Roy Williams is doing. A provost, if
they’re good at being a provost, especially if they’re at
North Carolina, they’re a target to be an AAU [Ameri-can Association of Universities] president, and if you
can keep them here for four or five years, then that’s
basically a win. So it’s crazy to think we need to get a
provost here who is going to be provost for 15 years. I
don’t think that’s realistic.”
The Tom Tancredo speaker shutdown brought the
University’s age-old tussle with the First Amendment
to Thorp’s door. Another student leader’s violent death
cast a shadow over the campus routine just as the new
year was starting. While private giving remained robust,
an expected capital campaign had to be postponed for
the economy.
