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Editorial: New leaders
Monday, August 29, 2005
Every student attending this year's East Carolina University freshman convocation is a leader, Chancellor Steve Ballard has told the group. "That is why you are here."
It's a substantial weight for such young shoulders, but a goal that is achievable. That we know, because the ambitious students have come to an institution which was built to develop leadership.
East Carolina University might not have been here except for area leaders who worked tirelessly to attract a tiny teachers training institution. In the early years of the 20th century, the effort was under way with strong competition from other communities of eastern North Carolina. There was also considerable opposition from areas not in the running who maintained the state couldn't afford yet another higher learning institution. Too expensive, they said even though the expanding public school system had a critical need for more trained teachers.
Greenville, however, had a major figure to help bring it about. It was former Gov. Thomas J. Jarvis who also served as United States minister to Brazil and U.S. senator. The nationally respected local citizen had returned to Greenville and the practice of law. He was called upon to be the rallying point for area citizens who would quickly learn to become true leaders. It fell to them to sell a bond election to local voters which would result in the location here of East Carolina Teachers Training School. "Training School" was selected because of objections from other state colleges to designating this one a college. That was changed, however, and the institution was known for decades as ECTC.
Only a decade or two before, these leaders might not have imagined helping spearhead such a project, but they were challenged.
The institution required a president and it found an able one in Robert H. Wright who steered it to college status and provided remarkable organizational skills.
All of that prepared the community for the Leo Jenkins era which culminated in university status, major expansion and rallying local leaders and supporters everywhere. They provided their leadership abilities in the fight for a School of Medicine. Jenkins was president and chancellor from 1960 to 1978.
The opposition to the changes was prompt in coming, but that inspired supporters to greater efforts in meeting North Carolina's critical needs for well trained family physicians. What had been envisioned as a two-year School of Medicine became a plan for a full four-year School of Medicine. That goal was eventually met including a unique agreement between the county and the medical school to develop the under-construction Pitt County Memorial Hospital as the clinical facility.
East Carolina University, its Brody School of Medicine, a remarkable teaching hospital and much of what is present-day Greenville were all products of stirring the leadership qualities that lie within us.
In this era, Chancellor Ballard is championing developing leaders. He is instructing the university's newest students to hone their leadership skills and further advance the causes of mankind. If there are any doubts about what can be achieved, one only has to look around. It has been done in the past. We can be confident it will be done again – and with new goals these emerging leaders will set. |
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