The retirement of Marc Basnight from the N.C. Senate is truly the end of an era, as your Jan.5 article rightly pointed out.

Basnight was an incredible champion of higher education. Certainly, the University of North Carolina has never had a better, more loyal or effective friend than Marc Basnight in its whole history spanning three centuries. His effect on UNC-Chapel Hill was nothing short of stunning.

From the passage of the bond bill at the beginning of the decade, the battle to retain our overhead receipts, which led to the great run-up in research funding at Carolina, through the approval of the Cancer Hospital, the N.C. Cancer Research Fund and, most recently, the imaging building, his fingerprints are indelibly etched in the history and the future of UNC.

As I look at construction still under way on the Carolina campus, I am reminded of the inscription to Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul's Cathedral: If you seek a monument, gaze around.

James Moeser

Chancellor emeritus, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill