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Bowles Plans to Help ECU Meet Goals
By John Durham
Erskine
Bowles, the incoming president of the University of North Carolina
system, came to the East Carolina University campus this month looking
for ways he could help.
I want
to be your champion to help you get the resources to meet your goals,
Bowles told the Executive Council during one of a series of meetings on
Nov. 8.
Bowles,
who will take office on Jan. 1, will visit all 16 UNC campuses by the
end of the year. During his day-long stop in Greenville, he met with
senior administrators and deans, representatives of the Faculty Senate
and Staff Senate, students, trustees and community leaders.
I see my job as to be helpful. What can we do to help? Bowles said.
Everybody
likes me now because I havent made any decisions, he cautioned. I
will make decisions you dont like, but they will be transparent.
ECU had
suffered inequities in the UNC system in the past, Bowles said. Youre
not going to have to worry about that in the future, he told the Board
of Trustees.
Bowles said he is a big fan of distance education. With the exception
of ECU, he said, the UNC system has ceded the market in distance
education to the private sector.
He also praised ECUs partnerships with community colleges and its
efforts to bring diversity to the student body. He noted however, that
the university still has work to do in faculty diversity.
Bowles, an investment banker from Charlotte, is part of a family that
has long been at the forefront of public service in North Carolina. His
father, the late Hargrove Skipper Bowles, was a distinguished state
legislator and a gubernatorial candidate in 1972.
During
the Clinton administration, Bowles served as director of the Small
Business Administration and then as deputy chief of staff and chief of
staff of the White House. He lost campaigns for a U.S. Senate seat from
North Carolina in 2002 and 2004.
His
life-long commitment to public service is well known. Bowles helped
found Dogwood Equity, chaired the Rural Prosperity Task Force, and
served as a trustee of the Golden LEAF Foundationthree entities
designed to bring economic development to rural North Carolina.
Earlier
this year, he was appointed United Nations deputy special envoy to 13
tsunami-affected countries in Southeast Asia. He has served as vice
chair of the Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte and as a trustee of
the Duke Endowment.
At the UNC system, he will succeed Molly Corbett Broad, who announced in March that she will retire this year.
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