The University of North Carolina is one of the better public university systems in the country, its in everybody’s top five, I think. This wasn’t just Bill Friday who did that, but he played a major part in that. I think that his real passion — people like to say his only passion — was the university. The university was his monument.
DTH: One of his big passions was maintaining the integrity of college sports. How did he feel in the last few years about the football scandal at UNC?
WL: It was a life-long passion for him to try to keep college athletics under control so it didn’t corrupt the mission of the university. I think he was definitely dismayed the last few years at the things that happened at Chapel Hill because Chapel Hill had always been — at least for 30 or 40 years — had been beyond reproach. The things that happened with the football program especially were very dismaying to him. It was like his own baby, his own child, was (going) wrong here.
I think he felt that it was always fixable, that there was something you could do to restore the integrity.
DTH: What was his relationship like with then-Chancellor Holden Thorp?
WL: My sense is that they were in close contact, they were in regular contact. I think he was honestly probably a little disappointed the way the chancellorship played out. Thorp, in the end, left because of the cloud hanging over the University, that’s the only way to describe it.
He did not publicly criticize Thorp, and he was very careful to never criticize him privately either. We’re sort of surmising here, but I think that a sense of disappointment is probably an honest way to describe what happened.
DTH: How did he feel about the hiring of Butch Davis as UNC’s football coach?
WL: I think he was horrified when Davis was hired. Davis was a big-time football coach, and the football fans were happy. But I think Friday was very concerned that he would bring an array of things that come with big-time football that would bring problems, and he was ultimately right about that.
Friday was old-fashioned about athletics, he felt like it shouldn’t be professionalized, it shouldn’t have lots of money in it, that they were students primarily rather than athletes (first). I think he definitely saw trouble on the horizon with the hiring of Butch Davis, no question.
DTH: The UNC system has increased tuition significantly in the past several years. What did he think of that?
WL: He was always very strongly opposed to that. That was one thing he was very consistent about — the university’s obligation to keep tuition as low as possible.
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DTH: What are some of Friday’s other qualities?
WL: I think he was a very unusual leader. He was able to master bureaucracy, he understood how bureaucracies worked, but at the same time, he wasn’t a product of the bureaucracy.
In the same way … he liked to use power but he wasn’t consumed by power. That kind of personal touch is very unusual nowadays, there’s so much of a corporate model in how leadership in universities occurs. He may be a throwback, but he was also very, very effective in terms of modern organizations. He wasn’t out-of-date, he was a person who knew how to run the processes, but he also had the ability to understand people on a one-on-one basis.
He’s got to be put down as one of the most influential and important people in the 20th century of North Carolina. When it’s all said or done, you can look at governors, you can look at senators, you can look at business leaders, Bill Friday has got to be in the top two or three most important people in the 20th century of North Carolina.
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