He led NCSU out of crisis

RALEIGH -- UNC-system President Erskine Bowles had to pick a new leader for N.C. State University, and quick.

The university was all but rudderless. It had lost its provost and the chairman of its board of trustees over their roles in hiring former first lady Mary Easley in 2005.

Then its chancellor, James Oblinger, also resigned after admitting to Bowles that he hadn't been open about his role in the hiring.

Bowles needed someone to end the chaos at the top of the state's largest university, calm the faculty, staff, students and alumni and handle a complex job until a permanent replacement could be found.

He called retired UNC Charlotte Chancellor James Woodward.

Nine months later, as Woodward prepares to make way for new chancellor Randy Woodson, there is wide agreement at NCSU that Bowles chose well. Woodward is credited with bringing an almost Zen-like calm to a troubled campus and then tackling several potentially controversial tasks that could have saddled Woodson with unpleasant baggage.

Approval at NCSU

"He brought a calm, level-headed approach to a pretty chaotic and rapidly evolving situation," says David Genereux, a professor in the department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and member of the faculty senate's executive committee. "He wasn't afraid to take an honest appraisal of things and do what needed to be done."

Student Body President Jim Ceresnak, who sits on the board of trustees and has worked closely with the interim chancellor, agreed.

"As soon as Woodward walked in, instantly his credibility and personality settled everyone down," Ceresnak says. "He was that calming figure that allowed everyone to step back and say OK, we can do this now, and here's what we're going to have to do."

Woodward had good cause to think Bowles might call when he heard about the problems at NCSU.

He had a reputation as one of the UNC system's steadiest leaders and had been chancellor of UNC Charlotte for 16 years. That's double the national average for chancellors and an eternity by NCSU's standards. He had held fundraisers for the governor and lieutenant governor and worked with legislative leaders, key allies at a time of state budget cuts.

But Woodward wasn't looking for a job. He had retired in 2005 and was enjoying time at home with Martha, his wife of 50 years; his work on several boards; and taking his grown children and grandchildren on trips. He'd also just bought a puppy that he had promised his wife he would train.

But Woodward says he knew how badly NCSU needed a leader who could bring stability and how important NCSU is to the state. More importantly, Martha Woodward knew, too.

She had supported his career for decades, following him as he bounced around the country, then playing the often thankless role of a chancellor's wife at UNC Charlotte. He felt it only fair to leave the decision to her.

Her answer was simple: "She told me I could not not do it," Woodward says. "We both knew the importance of this institution, its importance to the state and the nation."

Choosing his path

Education has been the core of Jim Woodward's life. He was born in central Florida. His father was a flooring contractor and his mother a homemaker. He was the first member of his family to go to college, where he earned four degrees and literally became a rocket scientist - his speciality was structural engineering for aircraft and missiles.

After graduate school, he taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy for several years, then moved to Raleigh for his first civilian teaching job. He was here a year before getting an unusual offer from the University of Alabama at Birmingham that included not only a post at the university but one in private industry.

For a long time Woodward believed he would wind up in industry. But after several years moving back and forth between industry and academia, just after he resigned from UAB to take an attractive private-sector job in Finland, he was offered the academic vice president's job at UAB. From that point, his path was clear: academia it would be.

In 1989, he went to Charlotte, where he grew the university from about 12,000 students to more than 19,000, led a construction boom and added several doctoral programs.

In retirement, he has spent much of his time in volunteer roles with various groups that support education, particularly for underprivileged children. He says now he is eager to get back to those groups.

"If you lose kids in first grade," he says, "you lose them forever."

Woodward started work at NCSU two days after Bowles' phone call, slowed only when Martha stopped him on the way out the door to make him swap a yellow tie for NCSU red.

Woodward had told Bowles he would take the job if he had the full authority of a chancellor and the backing to make big and hard decisions. Bowles had said he wanted the same thing.

"I didn't think the institution could simply float for a year, and frankly I had no intention of coming out of retirement and placehold for a year," says Woodward, who is 70 years old. "For me to give up a year of my life, at my age and my wife's age, that didn't make sense. I didn't need a job, I didn't need an income, and I didn't need any ego strokes."

Tough decisions

Meeting with deans that first morning and with other groups throughout the day, Woodward stressed that the university's problems were confined to the handful of top jobs and pledged to act transparently so there would be no question about any decisions he made.

He soon identified three tasks that he believed were not only important, but also doable in the months he would be on the job: laying the groundwork for an eight-year fundraising campaign to boost NCSU's undersized endowment, jump-starting stalled efforts to build a new chancellor's house and greatly expanding the student center.

NCSU's Talley Student Center opened in 1972, when there were about 14,000 students. Even then, it was too small, campus officials have said. Now, there are more than twice as many students. A revamped student center is crucial if NCSU is going to attract the best students, Woodward said.

He asked the staff to retool the design to make it less expensive and develop a schedule for increasing student fees beginning this year, but with the largest burden placed on students who would use the center after it is finished in the 2013-2014 school year.

But current NCSU students weren't thrilled.

In a nonbinding referendum, 57 percent said the expansion was needed, but only 38 percent approved the financing scheme.

The student government approved the fee increases, triggering a storm of complaints from students who felt they had been ignored.

Ceresnak was among those who took the brunt of criticism, but he says Woodward was right about the importance of the student center.

"His resolve and vision allowed us to move forward," he says.

The harshest criticism Woodward faced came in October when he fired Associate Vice Chancellor Lennie Barton, the popular head of the alumni association. Barton had unusually long ties to the university, having played on the varsity golf team as an undergraduate and worked for NCSU in various capacities for more than 30 years.

Woodward says Barton was fired because of his performance.

Among other things, he says, the alumni group's membership growth had stagnated, and Barton had done a poor job handling its finances.

Some alumni are still bitter about the way Barton was treated. Woodward says that it was the most difficult personnel decision he had ever made but that the problems were serious, and he had no choice.

Woodward is particularly proud of how well the university has continued to do extraordinary work, despite the leadership crisis. It's on track, he says, to set a record this academic year for the number of research proposals and grants and contracts received.

As Woodward prepares to return to his busy retirement, Bowles pronounced himself pleased with the results of the phone call he made in June.

"He did his homework, he listened, he got a good sense of where the university was, then he used his experience and his enormous personal skills and leadership ability and moved the University forward," Bowles wrote viae-mail. "He hasn't deferred a single tough decision. He has clearly left N.C. State better than he found it."