Tar Heel of the Year: Erskine Bowles

In 24 days, Erskine Bowles will be effectively unemployed.

After five years of service as president of the UNC system, Bowles will officially step down and his replacement, Thomas Ross, will take over the helm. He has large shoes to fill.

Frankly, no one could have asked for better leadership. The system has spent the last several years weathering budget cuts that have threatened not only finances, but also the quality of education at large.
Through all of this, Bowles’ management has been tested more than ever. And consistently, he has delivered.

But this year especially was an outlier. Bowles spent much of it fulfilling two roles, as head of the system and as the co-chairman of President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

Given his tireless effort spent preserving both the quality of education in North Carolina and righting the nation’s fiscal woes, the choice to make Bowles “Tar Heel of the Year” was abundantly clear. It might be a fitting farewell to an impressive tenure, if it wasn’t so well deserved even outside the context of his other years of service.

Tar Heel born and bred

Bowles is true blue. Hailing from Greensboro, he made his way from the Triad to the Triangle for college here at UNC (class of 1967). After graduation, he could just as easily have left North Carolina for good, especially in light of the successful career that followed.

And yet he returned, founding the successful investment banking company Bowles Hollowell Connor & Co, in addition to other ventures. And while he occasionally found callings outside the state, he always returned home.

The list of roles that he has held over the years runs long: deputy director of the small business administration, deputy White House chief of staff, White House chief of staff, chairman of the Rural Property Task Force, trustee of the Golden Leaf Foundation and, most recently, co-chairman of the president’s debt commission.

A challenged tenure

The editorial board has previously noted that Bowles’ main weakness in coming to the UNC system was a lack of experience in higher education. But you wouldn’t know it now. As it turns out, the system didn’t necessarily need a higher education guru. It needed a capable manager.

Bowles set to work on a number of initiatives to channel the disparate voices of the UNC system into a unified one. The Four-Year Tuition Plan was one of two major steps in this direction. It harmonized the tuition process for campuses into a specific set of guiding principles.

The other achievement, and likely the most impactful and enduring, is UNC Tomorrow. It was hardly necessary, but Bowles spent part of his first year touring the state, hearing from its citizens and synthesizing what problems needed to be addressed.

The UNC Tomorrow initiative seeks to leverage the resources of the UNC system in order to address those problems, in areas including education, economic development and health care.

North Carolina is well-known for its devotion to higher education. The legislature has consistently funded it generously, and a commitment to cheap education is literally enshrined in the Constitution’s oft-cited Article IX, section nine.

But here was a leader seeking to show the men and women who fund the system he presided over that their dollars are coming back to them — that the UNC system is aware of how vital their contribution is. The initiative will certainly live on long past Bowles’ tenure.

The recession sharply changed the focus. Bowles’ business and administrative background may have served the system well during this new era of thrift, but cuts were painful nonetheless. Even more disheartening, crisis management has meant putting aside some of the loftier aspirations of the administration.

Yet Bowles’ job was to be a leader, and his mandate was to lead the system regardless of what it faced. Doing merely that in these tough times would be admirable. That Bowles has gone above and beyond expectations is inspiring.

The capstone year

In February, Bowles took the helm as the co-chairman of President Obama’s debt commission. That post has just recently concluded. Its final report, “The Moment of Truth,” serves as a road map for fiscal reform for the federal government.

Being president of the UNC system, especially in 2010, is hard enough. Performing that duty admirably while co-chairing a national commission in another part of the country is a feat.

And so, while Bowles’ career alone more than justifies the honor, his service to his state and country in 2010 especially stands out as worthy of proclaiming him “Tar Heel of the Year.”

At Bowles’ last BOG meeting in November, he joked — perhaps too humbly — that with the end of his tenure he would be “unemployed and unemployable.” Only one of those is true.

Bowles has said that serving as system president was the peak of his public service career. But depending on how you measure it, Bowles has had many peaks, be it in business, higher education or government.

What can be said for sure is that the leader who may have brought the UNC system closer than any predecessor will leave behind a legacy that reaches far and wide.