After eight years, Moeser takes stock

CHAPEL HILL -- For a couple months now, James Moeser has been on a victory lap. The soon-to-be former chancellor at UNC Chapel Hill has been feted in grand style by various boards and organizations, given laudatory resolutions and gracious ovations. He was even surprised with a new Toyota Camry, courtesy of the university’s board of trustees.

Moeser’s tenure was not always so smooth. A Texan who worked his way through the administrative ranks with stops at public universities in Kansas, South Carolina and Nebraska, Moeser arrived in Chapel HIll in 2000 largely unknown.

The big stuff started before he even got to campus, when he approved the hiring of Matt Doherty as the Tar Heels' basketball coach. That could have worked out better.

When he got to campus, he dove right into his role as an unabashed pitchman for the university system’s $2.1 billion higher education bonds campaign, which was approved by voters that November and brought about $500 million in construction and renovation to his campus.

Through the years, Moeser had some stumbles. He issued a series of public apologies after giving what many thought was an overly generous severance to departing university attorney Susan Ehringhaus. In 2002, UNC-CH’s summer reading program used a book about the Quran, a distasteful choice to some who bristled that the assignment wasn’t voluntary.

And several years into Moeser’s tenure, UNC-CH boosters rankled some legislators and university system bigwigs with their desire that the campus have the freedom to set its own tuition rates. The UNC system’s governing board makes tuition decisions.

But the successes have been many. A capital campaign topped $2.4 billion, allowing deans and department heads across the campus to bolster faculty ranks using endowed professorships. Carolina North, a new research-intensive campus planned north of the main campus, is slowly taking shape. And the Carolina Covenant, devised by scholarships chief Shirley Ort with Moeser’s backing, brought the campus an avalanche of good publicity when it guaranteed a free education to academically qualified low-income students. Since the covenant was unveiled, about 80 other universities across the country created their own versions.

Moeser, a classically trained organist, steps down as chancellor June 30 and will later return to join the faculty. He sat down recently to chat with the News & Observer. The following are excerpts.

News & Observer: You’re facing a serious lifestyle change.

James Moeser: “I think there will be big adjustments. We’ve very spoiled. For the last eight years, and four before that, other than the times I would block out on my calendar for private time, basically my calendar is not mine. I get a calendar every week and people tell me what I’m doing. Now I look at my calendar starting July 1 and I get to fill it in. In one sense there’s a sense of liberation from almost literally being tied to a treadmill. But there’s also the feeling of being out of the stream; there’s freedom, but there’s also the lack of structure and the lack of doing things that are important. I don’t really know how I’ll relate to it until I do it. On the other hand, I’m looking at the other hand as an interim, not as a rest of my life. I’m not ready to stop doing, to stop being active.”

N&O:: You’re coming back to teach?

JM:: I’m going to affiliate with {UNC-CH’s] Institute for the Arts and Humanities over on McCorkle Place. That’s where my office will be. Being an artist and a humanist, that’s a natural home to me. [Moeser is an organist].They have a leadership program there, and a number of sitting deans, here and elsewhere, are alums of that program... So I’ll align myself with that. Secondly - I’ll do some teaching of undergraduates with a close association with the Carolina Performing Arts program, helping students outside the arts program appreciate the arts.