'Dad used to say that politics was like bad whiskey," Erskine Bowles once told me sitting in a Down East barbecue joint. "It's really tough to drink. Once it's in your system, it's impossible to get out."

Apparently, the same is true of Carolina.

After a career as a high-rolling investment banker in Charlotte and on Wall Street and a political career that included running Bill Clinton's White House and running twice for the U.S. Senate, Bowles is returning to Chapel Hill to become president of the University of North Carolina system.

It has been 38 years since Bowles graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in the class of 1967. Lyndon Johnson was president, the counterculture had not yet kicked in and the campus was dominated by guys wearing alpaca sweaters, alligator belts and Weejuns without socks.

Students still dressed up for football games. Coeds, as female students were then called, were protected with intricate rules, including the hour they had to be back in their dorm at night. And because there were not enough women on campus, Carolina men trawled at UNC-Greensboro and St. Mary's and Peace colleges.

Bowles was a legacy. His dad, Hargrove "Skipper" Bowles, was a Greensboro businessman, future Democratic nominee for governor and a civic force. The Bowles name is etched on buildings and streets around the UNC-CH campus. When Skipper died in 1986, the bell in South Building tolled for one minute.

Erskine Bowles' undergraduate days got off to an "Animal House" start. As a freshman, he fell from a fraternity house's second-floor window during a party and broke his back. The injury forced him to wear a brace for a year and ride to class in a golf cart.

"There is not a soul in the class of '67 that would believe that I would be standing here in front of this class, rather than in the back," he told a gathering of UNC students in 2002 while he was campaigning against Elizabeth Dole for the U.S. Senate. "There is no one who had more fun than I did or did as many silly things."

The Old Well network rallied to his Senate candidacy, including legendary basketball coach Dean Smith. The Duke crowd, including coach Mike Krzyzewski, got behind Dole, a Duke graduate.

On the campaign, Bowles would deride Dole's math in supporting partially privatizing Social Security. "I go back to arithmetic -- maybe because I went to Chapel Hill and she went to Duke," Bowles said.

Bowles kept his Chapel Hill links -- not the least of which are seven front-row seats in the Dean Dome, the Carolina basketball arena built by a private fund-raising campaign led by his father.

When Bowles was Clinton's chief of staff, he was approached about becoming UNC president. But Bowles said the timing was bad, and the post went to current President Molly Broad.

With his political career thwarted after two unsuccessful Senate runs and his U.N. stint of overseeing tsunami relief ending, Bowles was more open to overtures about the UNC presidency this time.

Few who know him doubted that he could resist a second time the siren call of "Hark The Sound [of Tar Heel Voices]."