Oral history interview with William E. Moran, 1990

WL: This is William Link and the date is February 20, 1990. I'm in the office of Chancellor William E. Moran. I'd like to start just by asking you to tell me a little bit about yourself, where you were born and where you were educated and some of the - what you think the most important shaping influences that affected your educational philosophy before you arrived here in 1979?

WM: Okay. Well, I was born of immigrant parents who had come to this country in their late twenties. And that had some significance because immigrant Irish kept together; they stayed together. They didn't integrate all that well. I don't 00:01:00mean there were any special difficulties, but the people that I remember from my early childhood as being close-in were other Irish immigrant adults. And that made us a little different, I think.

WL: They all lived - was there, was this in a physical sense or, or just in terms of -

WM: No, I was thinking, I wasn't thinking of that physically. But just the sense of being aliens was very much present there. I don't mean that there was discomfort, but I grew up feeling a little different, I'd say, from those around me because I had that sense of having - of being a part of a family that was American but whose roots, in a sense, were still exposed. They were still in the 00:02:00air a little bit. But, in any event, it was a strong family and unified. And we lived together, and I went through public schools in White Plains, New York - very tough neighborhood which, over the years, my folks tried to improved by - insofar as they were able to handle it - making the environment a little bit less hazardous with every move. And so, I had a fine youth and a fine family around me with a brother and sister. And by the time I was in high school I 00:03:00really hadn't thought very much about what educational opportunities they lay ahead. We just didn't think in those terms. But partly through good luck, largely through good luck I think, [I] was able to go to college having found out about a scholarship program that eventually took me to Princeton - Navy ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] program. It paid all the bills, which was absolutely critical because we had nothing. There simply was nothing there that would cover college costs. So I was rather surprised and delighted to find myself, after having graduated from high school, in a wonderful university. And I couldn't believe it for about a year, year and a half, in fact, and sort of settled in there. But I had a wonderful undergraduate education at a fine 00:04:00university. I majored in English, a very good department at Princeton. Your dad is teaching there, isn't he, at Princeton?

WL: Yes. What was your class?

WM: [Nineteen] fifty-four. History, I know, was very good there, too, although I didn't - I didn't indulge much.

WL: Who were some of the people that you remember?

WM: Oh well, Carlos Baker was the chairman of the department there for a good many years. Willard Thorpe was a very significant figure in the department. The - there was a chap here recently giving a talk on Gerard Manley Hopkins who was a young faculty member in the department when I was there, and I - his name eludes me now. But it was a brilliant department. And it was a very exciting time to be studying literature, I think. All of the great Americans who had been 00:05:00writing from 1920 through 1945 and '50 were - well, they had just excited and stimulated English departments everywhere. No, they were in their last days - [T.S.] Eliot, and [Ernest] Hemingway was just finishing up; [F. Scott] Fitzgerald, of course, was gone. [William] Faulkner was still putting things out. Tennessee Williams was writing. And I really felt privileged, not only to be at that university, but in that field at that time and thought a little bit about graduate work, but - in English. I had to go into the [United States] Navy and serve three years because that was a part of the scholarship arrangement thing. When I came out, I had given that up. I had three very educational years in the Navy. Came out and, rather than heading for an academic career, I went up 00:06:00to the Harvard Business School and spent two years there, still really a little bit unclear about where I would devote my energies and how. I worked for a major consulting firm in New York for a couple of years and went back up to Harvard and began to think - went back up there because I began to think about universities as a place in which I might wish to live and work, although I didn't really know really how. So I went - having worked in New York for a few years-I went back up to the Harvard Business School to just get a sense of whether I might like to do some teaching or managing a university or to just get a sense of what it would be like to live and work inside a university environment, not as a student. And while there I pretty well decided that I was going to make a life for myself in some - within a university environment 00:07:00somewhere. So I went to - after having been back at Harvard a second time - I was there originally as a student - when I went back up there, I worked in admissions and budgets for a year or two. I did a little teaching over at Northeastern University in their evening MBA program and then decided to go out to [University of] Michigan and get into the doctoral program there and get a PhD, thinking I would either - well, I'd do something inside a university, maybe teaching or maybe something else. Still pretty unclear about the particulars. And I was there for three years - wonderful university. University of Michigan is just a first-rate place. I went back to work there later and learned how good they really were. But in any event, I finished the doctoral program in '66. I had gone to Ann Arbor in '63. And the first interesting thing that came along 00:08:00was, as I was finishing my doctoral program, was an opportunity to work for John Toll, who was the new president at SUNY [State University of New York] Stony Brook.

WL: That was a completely new university then?

WM: Yeah. Actually there had been a small campus there, but it was a new university in the sense that Governor [Nelson] Rockefeller [also U.S. Vice President], who was putting the SUNY system together, decided that was going to be one of the four research universities in the SUNY system. Buffalo was one, Albany was another, and Binghamton was the last. So I worked for John Toll there, the new president, for about five years. I did a little bit of teaching, but it was really a full-time administrative job. I was director of the budget 00:09:00there, and I was in charge of long-range planning after I'd been there a year or two or three and really enjoyed myself enormously. It was a very stressful time in that the campus was besieged in so many different ways. The Vietnam War was picking up speed between '66 and '71 when I left. There was terrific turbulence that was traceable in part to the stressed national environment and in part to the strains of a research university that was trying to get to that condition - to a mature condition - very rapidly. So it was growing very quickly, and all of the norms that lubricate a university were not in place. It was so different from year to year, that each year was a new experience. And it was very ragged, very tough time on everybody, I think - the students and the faculty and the 00:10:00staff. I don't know much about it now, but I hope it has settled down. It was really a very raucous period. The state police were on campus many, many times dealing with anti-war protests.

WL: The faculty was, had certain tensions and -

WM: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, every time the outside world would come in the whole place would just vibrate. I can recall so clearly at a - when there was a sit-in in the library there in about '69, and the state police came in very large numbers, lined up in two columns outside that library and moved everybody out. It was such a traumatic business. And there were other events like that. I mean that was just one of them. The police were on campus a lot. So when I left 00:11:00there, as I did in '71 - again with a sort of a surprise for me, it surprised me - and went to the University of Michigan-Flint, which was a small campus, one of the three campuses making up the University of Michigan, it was such a pleasant experience to, to leave that behind. I mean, Stony Brook was very interesting, but to go to the Middle West again was - I'd been there, of course, during graduate work at Ann Arbor - was to return to a kind of civility and serenity that I'd really forgotten was possible. We had a small faculty there. And we had some exciting times at the University of Michigan-Flint in the next eight years. But it was so pleasant to leave the east coast. I can still recollect the pleasures of leaving not only the features behind that I described to you, but 00:12:00the traffic and all of that. So in any event, in '71 I went to the University of Michigan-Flint, as a young chancellor and had the wonderful experience there of helping to build a new campus in the middle of that city. And how that came about was an interesting and complicated tale too. But we basically shifted the site of the campus. It had been targeted in one area, and I urged its movement to another right - I urged a movement right into the central city, and that's where the campus is today. Beautifully designed and I think a very nicely functioning campus there. Both at Stony Brook and at Flint I had really deep 00:13:00exposure to, to university planning. The - as I mentioned to you, the Stony Brook campus was simply explosive in its growth for the five years that I had there. And when I got to - got back to Michigan, University of Michigan-Flint campus, I was thrown right into very significant planning issues which led to the relocation of the campus and the re-planning of its mission. And I enjoyed that a great deal. As the chancellor of that campus I was also one of the eight or nine executive officers of the university, so I would spend most of my time in Flint. But one day a week I would be down meeting with the president and the 00:14:00vice presidents of the university and the two chancellors, fellow from Dearborn and myself. So I had a very good experience there, I think, in seeing the opposite of Stony Brook, seeing a really mature public university functioning very well. And I had, for the first time, the opportunity to meet monthly with the regents of the university - with the executive officers, and the president would meet with the regents monthly. So I really got a good look at public higher education for the first time from the very top all the way down to the departmental level as a result of my exposure there in Michigan. And I had a marvelous eight years there. I came here, as you know, in academic year 1979-80. And once again it was a wonderful transition. Both of the previous campuses that 00:15:00I had been affiliated with were - they weren't aborning [sic], but they were moving very rapidly from childhood into adolescence. And coming here was, once again, a great pleasure, as it had been to leave the east coast and go to Ann - go to Michigan because this place was mature. It was changing too, and, indeed, in some important ways that are still happening. But it was solid and mature in a way that neither of the other places had been. And I found that wonderful too. I mean, there were traditions in place and good academic expectations and standards. And I just enjoyed that enormously as soon as I got here. Now that's 00:16:00just one of the first impressions. There are other impressions I could offer to you, but I don't know whether I'm speaking now to the question that you really want answered.

WL: Yeah, well, maybe you could elaborate a little bit more about some really, really general impressions about the university - about UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro], about what you thought at the time the challenges were.

WM: Okay, I'll see if I can pick off the major ones for you. Well, I had mentioned to you earlier that as the son of Irish immigrants I felt a little bit separate from the Americans around me when I was very, very young. And I must say that there was a little bit of that coming down here too. It was no longer an Irishman in the midst of Native Americans - I guess there aren't any such 00:17:00things - but in the midst of persons who had been here a long time before my family got here. And when I came down here, I had some of that same sense again because I had really had never known the South before and didn't think about it very much. But, of course, when I came down here I had a sense that this was once again a very different culture form any that I knew. Not a, certainly not a hostile one, but different and puzzling in some respects. Now that's a comment about the whole environment, not just the university. But -

WL: Some culture shock, then, for you?

WM: Yeah, yeah. There really was, both in a sense a university culture shock and a social culture shock coming down here into North Carolina. I had never been to North Carolina, ever, before I came down here to respond to an invitation to talk to some people about this assignment. But now, more 00:18:00particularly about the university - first impressions. The university was a part of a much larger system than Michigan's. The SUNY system, of course, was hopeless. I mean, it was so big. There were sixty-five institutions at the time including a great many community colleges. But I had really enjoyed the almost intimate character of the administrative superstructure at Michigan. I mean, we all knew each other from campus to campus very well - worked routinely with the president and with the regents. And the communication problems were very, very limited because I would meet with these people once a month even though I was 00:19:00somewhere else most of the month. I had very easy connections.

WL: Was there a rough similarity of institution, too?

WM: Between what and what?

WL: In the Michigan system, was it, aside from Ann Arbor - ?

WM: No, the other two were quite different - small, urban campuses - quite different. Am I responsive to your question?

WL: Yes, yeah.

WM: Quite different. But the folks who were running them knew each other very well. And there was a kind of a Michigan family feeling at the very highest level there. This system was much larger than that and quite disparate. And I sensed that it would be much more difficult to get to know the other campuses and the leadership on the other campuses and even to some degree the leadership 00:20:00of the system here because it was a much larger board and in many ways much, much more distant from the folks who ran the campuses - who run the campus here, from what was true in Michigan. So that was a first impression too, that this was, this - it was going to take some time here to get to know the key figures, really get to know them, the General Administration [of the University of North Carolina], the board of governors, and so on.

WL: Was there - the arrangement of having local boards of trustees and a governing - a board of governors - was that unusual? Does that compare with what you faced in Michigan?

WM: It's different - it was different in one way. There were local citizens' advisory boards for the urban campuses there, for Dearborn and Flint, but they 00:21:00did not have very much clout. They really were advisory. I welcomed the presence of a board of trustees here for a whole lot of reasons, even though the trustees here do not have all the powers that trustees - that that term implies at some other institutions, because the board of governors have retained a lot of the powers that normally would be associated with a board of trustees. But I was glad to have it and saw it from the beginning as an important asset and resources for this university, and that has proven to be the case.

WL: Did you detect any differences between the UNC [University of North Carolina] campuses? Was this something that you had to deal with? I mean, there's an extraordinary diversity on the sixteen campuses.

WM: Yes, I, I had never seen quite that much diversity. I mean, using almost 00:22:00any measure - size, and racial makeup, and kinds of programs and the geography of the thing. The spread is really enormous. And that introduces some problems in trying to create a university family in the same sense that Michigan had it. I'd never seen anything quite like that. SUNY, of course, has a good deal of variety, but I'd say this is even greater in a way here at North Carolina.

WL: What about inside, internal, the UNCG campus? What sorts of - ?

WM: Okay. One of the first impressions I had, I must say, was that the governance system here looked a little creaky to me. I noticed it right away because it - because governance had been a very difficult problem at Stony Brook 00:23:00where they were trying to put things together, and it was changing very fast. Michigan, in contrast, was and is a beautifully conceived system where all of the principal features of academic governance had been thought through very - well, the role of the board of regents - the powers granted to faculties were quite explicitly delegated. The working relationships of deans and faculties within academic units all had been worked out a long time before and very wisely worked out. And one of my first impressions when I came here was that this was very different from that. That isn't to say that there was nothing here, but 00:24:00that it was just less mature. And that's not surprising since what was here was - in its modern form was put together in the early '70s, I suppose, when the system really - in '72, I think, was where they pulled a whole lot of campuses together. So it wasn't surprising. What was surprising was that things worked as well as they did here. I mean, looking at that system, that is our governance structure, and having had fairly intense experiences in this regard at SUNY and in a sense at Michigan, too, I thought that anything that was as young in a sense as this governance structure was, and maybe even unfinished in some regard, would produce real difficulty. And it hasn't. And the reason for that, I 00:25:00think, is that for - with causes that I cannot explain, there has always been a fairly high level of trust present and a sense of what you might call decency in the working connections of faculty with faculty and faculty with administration and both with students. I had imagined that you only get that when the structure is really, really carefully thought through. And that, in the absence of that, there would be a lot of knocking around and groups bumping into each other. It 00:26:00surprised me that - to learn that that was not the case here, that folks really did work pretty well together in spite of the relative youth of the system, governance system, within which they were working. So that was a key impression. Second impression was that it was really a wonderful faculty, that there were a lot of people here who were not only teaching, but were doing fine work in the way of scholarship and creative work and so on. And that pleased me greatly, and still does. A third thing that impressed me was the fact that the facilities of the campus and the general physical planning was - they were both a long way 00:27:00from what I would have considered even normal. That's the long and short of it. I saw signs of - signs that modern physical planning was badly needed here. And by - be mindful that I knew when I got here a lot about that because I'd seen it done and had been a part of it in two places [coughs], and I was anxious from the beginning to try to do something useful in this regard. The academic side of the university, I thought, needed planning too, but it didn't seem to me to be 00:28:00in tough shape, and the physical university looked to me to be in very tough shape. And I knew what that meant in the way of work that had to be done and the amount of money that was going to be required to do it.

WL: But what, for example, did you - what was striking - what initially made this impression? Was it in terms of landscaping, in terms of building disrepair, or - ?

WM: Landscaping, the handling of automobiles on campus, the - not only the deteriorated character of some of the buildings, not all but some of them - but the signs that - I thought there were signs that maintaining facilities was not 00:29:00a continuous process. It was - and this was true, it was a first impression and it was true - it tends to be convulsive. That is, there is deterioration for a long period of time and then a major correction might be made, perhaps in the life of a particular building, maybe fifteen or twenty years later, rather than holding things. There would be slippage and then brought up. In other words, it looked episodic to me. And it was. So I thought there were a lot of give-away signs that sheer management and clean up of the campus was going to be a big, big job. But, as I said, the academic side looked really very good to me, 00:30:00although because the two are connected, I could only believe that our programs were being hurt by laboratories that were obsolete, by teaching spaces that were in tough shape, and faculty offices that were - that didn't support good work year round because of heat and cold and so on, that sort of thing. And the aesthetic side of the university seemed to me troublesome because it's a beautiful site, but it was not - it wasn't being taken care of. And I soon knew why. I mean, there were resource problems here and other kinds of complications, and I won't try to explain all that. But in any event, I guess the first impressions were that we had a really remarkable faculty that was not very well served by the physical campus. I also sensed early on that there were important 00:31:00budget problems here, and that's another whole story. And I've been working on that ever since, and I know a lot more about it now. But that was a first impression as well. And finally the last, I must say, was the - I guess I implied this before - the sense that with all of these issues which I wanted to address, I would not have the easy access to the governing board that I once had. I was meeting with them monthly, and I used that to good advantage in Michigan. But it was - there was more sort of organizational space there between the campus and the governing board, and there were simply more campuses. So it 00:32:00was going to be a much more complicated scene to get at the people that could help me to solve some of the problems we had here.

WL: You had some sort of regular meetings, I suppose, with the UNC people, or - ?

WM: Right - monthly meetings with the chancellors and the president. And I go to the - normally I go to the meetings of the board of governors so I'm watching it down there, but I am not a participant in those meetings.

WL: And it's - what you're saying is it's not, it wasn't as - it is not as intimate as it, what you, the situation you had at Michigan?

WM: Right, right, which was a practical concern given some of the problems that I wanted to get moving on. But it has worked reasonably well. But those were the differences, and those were first impressions.

WL: Did that present you with certain opportunities? For example, could you go about devising your own solutions on this campus which was oriented toward this 00:33:00campus, those solutions, solutions that were, were oriented towards this campus, maybe more than you might have done at Michigan?

WM: No, I wouldn't say so. The, the access there to the - routine access with the board of governors was paralleled by direct access to the legislature as well. And see, that was blocked here for good reasons, one knows what they were. But both, I'd say on both sides there were some constraints. And these two things worried me a good deal for reasons I've already touched upon. The board of governors has retained a lot of the important powers of governing the university. And so it really is - that is, distance from them does not lend any special advantage, because that's where a lot of the important programmatic and 00:34:00budgetary planning powers are. Now there are ways around the - what I've referred to as organizational distance - and ways around some of the problems that come when a campus does not have direct access to a legislature. But these were first impressions, and to some degree they were accurate.

WL: What about the history of this institution, the fact that this was Woman's College [WC] of [the University of] North Carolina, and it evolved into The University of North Carolina at Greensboro [UNCG]. And, well, I came in 1981, and I've always had the sense that one of the responsibilities of the institution has been - or one of the needs of the institution is - to evolve into an institution that has as a distinctive structure as you had when it was 00:35:00WC. Did that - seems as though the institution went into kind of a period of lacking a definition perhaps.

WM: Between when and when?

WL: Well, let's say between 1963, which is when it ceased to be WC, and certainly into the sixties and seventies.

WM: Yeah, that's a good point, that's a very good point. Yes, I had the impression, having been here for two or three years and to some degree upon arrival, that the place was still in transition - had not really left behind the, its earlier incarnation. It had not left that behind. And that was true, 00:36:00too. Every institution, of course, carries its past with it into the present and into the future. And that's a good thing. And that's what Stony Brook did not have, and why - one of the reasons why - it was having such terrible difficulties in managing itself because that past lends a degree of order and understandability to the way things are done and to what is done. But when I came here, for example, and saw the relatively modest amount of money that was there for teaching assistants and graduate assistants, but we were into doctoral work, I thought, I don't understand that. I don't understand how that is possible. I don't understand why teaching assistants aren't more fundable and in 00:37:00more classrooms. I couldn't reconcile the two. And they're not reconcilable. That is, what I was seeing was a design that had not really yet been implemented. And I think some changes have taken place in the last seven or eight years in particular, in that regard, as the implications of the mission, which we were given in the early sixties, as the implications became clearer and clearer and better understood. So it may be that this place, because of the rich past that it had, probably is true, was a little slower than some other institutions in facing up to the - both the opportunities and the obligations of a campus. James Madison [University], for example, in Virginia went through essentially the same kind of transition. My impression was that they went 00:38:00through it a lot faster. And maybe that's got some disadvantages as well as advantages, but I think we are still really working out the implications of the assignment that we were given in the early sixties. That is still being worked out, although I think it is a lot clearer now as a result of some important basic institutional planning that went on from about '82 to '84, '85.

WL: One of the earlier - well, during the, the early 1980s the mission statement was developed, which I assume started during your first years here.

WM: Yes, I started that planning process in about '81, I would say, and it took us about three years to do it.

WL: Tell me a little bit more about that, how it -

WM: Well, it is - just as a flat rule of thumb, it is a good thing, I think, 00:39:00for every university to, perhaps every ten or fifteen years to try to look at what has happened and to look at its own assignment once again. Now that may not be true for institutions that are pretty fully where they intended to be and ought to be. I mean, major research universities are working with models that have been clear for a long time. But this campus was in transition in 1979-80, and it seemed to me useful to examine both the transition and the objectives at that time in order to try to deal with some of these issues that I spoke about earlier. And for a university that is facing change it is very important that it 00:40:00be clear, in general, about what it is trying to be. It's important because if that isn't clear, then the struggle over what it ought to be and what it is trying to be will take the form of sort of detailed, programmatic, operational conflicts which are really rooted in uncertainty about what the broad direction of the university is. And so sensing that important change was coming and in a sense was already being experienced, it seemed to me useful to get out of the way the basic question of what kind of an institution ought this to be. And that planning work really helped. That's not a question, while we're in transition that will ever be fully answered; maybe fifty years down the road it will be. But I was anxious to do that in order to clear the way for some of the 00:41:00programmatic things that I saw coming, not only academic but physical, and fund raising, and state support and so on. All of those things tie back to the question of the mission of the campus. And I was anxious to get that defined in order, then, to move on to some of the things that follow from the definition of mission.

WL: You're able to work from a more systematic and coherent basis if you have a mission behind you.

WM: That's right. And it is less likely that hurtful conflicts will develop which appear, - which might appear to be simply differences of opinions about a programmatic or a research direction, but which in fact are differences of opinion about what the institution is supposed to be doing. And I've seen that, and I want no part of that. I prefer to deal with the conceptual side of the thing first and get reasonable agreement on that all around, and then to turn to 00:42:00programmatic direction where, if there are conflicts, at least they have to do with that program. It isn't a question of what the whole thing is moving toward or should be moving toward.

WL: Did the physical - in terms of facilities, our master plan that emerged for facilities about this time, a little later, perhaps. Was that a product of this same sort of planning?

WM: Yes, yes, it surely was. The same kind of reason obtains - if one is going to start closing roads or using certain sections of campus for certain purposes - for picking up sites and using them in certain ways - it's a lot easier to do that when a broad conception of the development of the university has been processed and digested by the institution. Any kind of change is tough to 00:43:00handle. But for the same reason that the programmatic changes I spoke of are easier to handle when there's an agreement on mission, the physical changes are a lot easier to handle when the university community has a broad understanding of basically what it is that we are all going to try to do over the next ten or fifteen or twenty years. Yeah, so it was exactly the same reasoning that I wanted a mission statement that had been worked through. I wanted that for our university, and I wanted a master plan that had been worked through, too, because I saw lots of changes coming here. And both of those were finished at about the same time, '84, '85, something like that, '80-'85.

WL: Do you think the - this university's been under funded? I've heard that from a lot, from other, from a number of people. In other words, we have very pressing physical, budgetary needs. Are those needs being met, do you think or - ?

WM: I have some, not only some very clear impressions but some knowledge on 00:44:00that, and I want to do something about that. And in a sense, I've been trying to do things about it but I want to do some other things about that in the future. And I think it wouldn't be appropriate for me to start elaborating on that right now because there is a better way to handle that. But again, there are budget problems here, and they are serious enough for me to give them pretty high priority.

WL: What do you think the future - how would you summarize the future of - say, ten, twenty years should be, will be?

WM: Well, I will say this - that the university is in a fierce competition at the moment, and the competition has many facets. That we are obviously competing for resources and for a useful role or roles with a host of other campuses that make up the university system and not - well, let's say with all of them in some 00:45:00respect. There are also, I think, powerful homogenizing forces at work which nobody admires but that are there, which prompt campuses in the public system to get to look a lot more like each other over time, to remove the special personalities that are present and which normally develop on a healthy campus with time. In order to achieve brilliantly along the lines that were set out for this university in the early sixties, we are going to have to accomplish a lot - 00:46:00perform very well in the next ten years to maintain the position that we have and to make it more distinctive. We have a very good student/faculty ratio. We have a doctoral mission. We've got a very good faculty. And we have a special assignment within the system. We are the only doctoral institution in the system. There are two major research campuses that have doctoral work across the board, but - and we are not that, but we are unique. In order to hold and enhance that unique assignment that we have, we're going to have to do a lot - we're going to have to raise a lot of private money.

WM: So we've got to bring more private resources into the university. We've got to bring more grant contract dollars in to support our programs and faculty. 00:47:00We've got to insist upon very high standards for both our undergraduate and our graduate programs and particularly the doctoral programs. And we've got to be very effective in dealing with the legislature and with General Administration and with the board of governors. And if we don't do all these things - setting aside the general, the need for intelligently-conceived academic program development - if we don't do all those things, then I think it likely that we will fall back into the pack and in twenty or twenty-five years, really not be too distinguishable from a lot of other institutions that make up the University of North Carolina system. So it's a real scramble.

WL: Do you foresee a kind of opening up that might take place right now in terms of [UNC System] President Spangler's, in light of President Spangler's recent reassessment of his, suggestion of - ?

WM: Request for a mission study, yeah. That, depending on what he means by that, could open up the competition for more advanced roles for a variety of campuses. And that fits right in with what I'm saying - that the competition for the special assignment that we have and for the resources that we have and the resources that we don't have and need is going to be very, very fierce. And we will not succeed in that by depending upon the past achievements of the university. That's just not going to work. There is, I think, a great reverence and affection for The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in North Carolina. But the world is tough and practical, and North Carolina is, too. And 00:49:00it will be our performance in teaching, in research, public service in the next ten years that will determine whether this place flourishes or falls back into the pack or is homogenized. And that concern is on my mind all the time.