Thorp ready for crash course leading UNC
Published: Mon, Jun. 30, 2008 12:30AM
Modified Mon, Jun. 30, 2008 07:37AM
E-Mail
Print
tool name
closeDURHAM -- Holden Thorp's new office will have a significant family presence. Thorp, who becomes UNC-Chapel Hill's new chancellor Tuesday, expects to decorate his new South Building office with the scribblings and amateur art of his two young children, John, 13, and Emma, 9. And over the fireplace, Thorp will hang an aged print depicting the Chapel Hill campus as it was in simpler times. Versions of the print hang on walls across town; few are the century-old version. Thorp's is a hand-me-down, from grandfather to father and now to him.
Thorp's ascension to the top job at Chapel Hill caps a meteoric rise for the 43-year-old Fayetteville native, a 1986 graduate of the university who has taught chemistry, directed the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center and, most recently, led the College of Arts and Sciences.
He expects his first month to be a frenzied crash course: UNC-Chapel Hill 101. He will meet with the deans of each of the university's 14 schools to learn about the issues facing each. Until then, he isn't prepared to discuss any new universitywide priorities, he said.
THORP'S AGENDA
Holden Thorp detailed three things he must accomplish as chancellor.
1 Raise funds for research, teaching and the hiring of new faculty members, particularly in light of continuing enrollment growth and the retirement of many longtime professors.
2 Work with students to define higher education's future. So much has been made about preparing students for a global economy; the key, Thorp said, is what to do now?
"What skills are going to differentiate America and North Carolina in this next phase?" he said.
3 Work with the town of Chapel Hill to revitalize Franklin Street, the downtown strip whose looks are sagging because of scores of empty storefronts. The university just made a big move in this regard with the purchase of the University Square/Granville Towers complex, which it may eventually redevelop.
"The perception certainly is that ... [Franklin Street] is as bad now as it has been," he said. "We really haven't had a way to work at this until now. If we want to maintain one of the defining facets of the university, we have to be serious about this."
Will he be a visible leader? "Everybody thinks they will do a lot of that. In practice, there's so much on the calendar, it's brutal. I probably won't be able to do as much as I'd like to."
Related Content
More Local & State
After his hiring, Thorp received hundreds of notes of congratulation. He answered each handwritten note with a handwritten response. He knows he faces high expectations.
"Some of ... [the notes] are from people I don't know," he recalled. "Whatever people say about the Thorp era, they can say it started off with some good vibes."
Get it all with convenient home delivery of The News & Observer.
The News & Observer is pleased to be able to offer its users the opportunity to make comments and hold conversations online. However, the interactive nature of the internet makes it impracticable for our staff to monitor each and every posting.
Since The News & Observer does not control user submitted statements, we cannot promise that readers will not occasionally find offensive or inaccurate comments posted on our website. In addition, we remind anyone interested in making an online comment that responsibility for statements posted lies with the person submitting the comment, not The News and Observer.
If you find a comment offensive, clicking on the exclamation icon will flag the comment for review by the administrators, we are counting on the good judgment of all our readers to help us.
