If you were looking for something bad to say about the next president of the University of North Carolina, detractors might point to his inability to keep a steady job. Everyone wants him to fix something.
Tom Ross, the Davidson College president who was chosen Thursday to succeed UNC President Erskine Bowles beginning New Year's Day 2011, has held a series of increasingly important jobs and scores of volunteer posts over a 35-year career that uniquely qualify him for what is arguably the most important job in the state.
Ross' personal story is one of accepting increased responsibility at each step along the way, growing in experience and building a record of accomplishment that in a few months propelled him to the top of the list for the Board of Governors' search committee. It wasn't any one thing that made him the right person for the job, said BOG Chair Hannah Gage of Wilmington: It was the total package.
That sounds about right. Like most folks, Thomas W. Ross is the sum of all his experiences. But I'd like to argue that his work in the early 1990s as chairman of the N.C. Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission put him not only in the spotlight but on the short list of thinkers and doers who could take an extremely tough problem, figure out how to break it down into digestible pieces and fashion a series of solutions that work.
It's worth remembering that until 20 years ago, Ross was still relatively unknown outside the courtroom and the political arena. He had gotten a law degree in 1975 at UNC-Chapel Hill, taught a couple of years in what is now the UNC School of Government, practiced law, was chief of staff to former U.S. Rep. Robin Britt and, at age 33, became the state's youngest Superior Court judge when Gov. Jim Hunt named him to the bench.
But in 1990, then-N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Jim Exum gave Ross some extra work: chair a commission to figure out how to fix one of the biggest messes in modern state history. The criminal justice system was broken. Criminals were getting out of prison after serving a ridiculously low percentage of their sentences. The state couldn't build prison cells fast enough to keep them in.
Ross, known for his plain-spoken ways, was telling sheriffs that prison crowding had "essentially legalized misdemeanors in North Carolina" and shocked them with the news that a two-year sentence could be served in about 12 days. Prison sentences didn't mean anything, he said.
Not everyone liked to hear that kind of thing, but Ross and his commission - which included law enforcement officials, victims' advocates and a diverse collection of thinkers on justice issues - hammered away at the theme. They also made the point that what prison space we have should be reserved for the worst crimes, and that alternatives to incarceration could better handle some nonviolent offenses.
The commission came up with a truth-in-sentencing policy that required inmates to serve the sentences they were given, focused prison resources on the most violent crimes, and perhaps most important, came up with a way to accurately forecast future prison needs. If the legislature changed a penalty, that system could tell policymakers how many new cells would be needed, and when.
It took some convincing, but when the General Assembly voted, the new structured sentencing law won the support of the overwhelming majority of both the House and Senate. In time the state would have a surplus of prison beds, for at least a while. Governing Magazine proclaimed Ross one of its 10 National Public Officials of the Year and other organizations hailed the law as an outstanding government innovation.
Now Ross has a job far larger than anything he's tackled before. He'll deal with 17 campuses at once, his own Board of Governors plus 170 members of the General Assembly, and a million details to be tackled routinely. It will test his abilities to juggle scores of balls at once, handle growing concerns over the proper role of athletics in the academy and find ways to keep higher education accessible in a time of grave financial difficulties.
In higher ed, something always needs fixing. I'm thinking Tom Ross is up to the task.
Jack Betts is a Raleigh-based columnist and associate editor for The Charlotte Observer.
