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Spotlight: William O. McCoy

Days earlier, Broad had coaxed McCoy into taking the job for a few months while Michael Hooker underwent experimental cancer treatments in Maryland.

But 20 students, concerned about working conditions in overseas plants that manufacture Carolina-licensed apparel, had a silent greeting for McCoy. They filed past his table and deposited under his nose the printed flyers listing what they expected him to do about their concerns.

Days later, many of these same students crowded into the South Building rotunda to stage a sit-in. They wanted action, and they wanted it now, they reminded McCoy.

They would get an answer, McCoy told the circle of students -- when he was ready to give it.

For McCoy, that early episode was a crash course on the stark differences between campus and corporate culture.

For the University, the way McCoy handled the confrontation offered a glimpse at the kind of leader he would prove to be.

What the campus discovered was that McCoy doesn't attack problems, he subjects them to unrelenting analysis.

Growing a future

Ancel Mewborn met Bill McCoy and his family in Free Will Baptist Church, which was where everybody met everybody in the tiny crossroads town of Arba in eastern North Carolina. The church was at the center of town and served as the heart of community life. It was also the only church in town.

They became friends when they started playing basketball together at Snow Hill High School in rural Greene County.

They became family when Mewborn married Sylvia, McCoy's sister, who graduated a year ahead of Bill along with her husband-to-be.

McCoy became his boss in the spring of 1999 just as Mewborn was nearing the end of a long and distinguished career as a math professor at Carolina.

"As far back as I can remember he was very self confident and very popular, not only with people his own age but with adults," Mewborn said. "It was clear from the beginning that he had a bright future ahead of him."

Look at a picture of McCoy in his white Navy cadet uniform and there is a hint of a young Gary Cooper: the long, narrow face; the square jaw; the hint of seriousness lurking behind the tight-lipped smile.

Look at him now, at the age of 65, and there is the hint of Woodrow Wilson: still rail-thin in his dark, neatly pressed suits; his gray hair meticulously combed back above his ears; his manner as polished as the lens of the gold-rim glasses perched on his long nose.

His sister Sylvia sees the same surface look of formality and reserve that others see, but she can see through it, too. "He's a very human person -- and there's a lot of humor right underneath," said Sylvia, herself a retired secretary with the Carolina School of Education.

Sylvia was the only girl born amidst four boys. As a child, she was closest to Bill because he was the closest to her in age.

Sylvia said her little brother didn't have much of a chance against her and their first cousin, another girl one year older then he was.

"We just loved to tell Bill what to do," Sylvia said. "But he had a good disposition even then, and he would just go along with us."

It was a childhood of tree-climbing and hide-and-seek and the 100 other things kids can figure out to do in the country, Sylvia said.

Arba, besides its one church, consisted of a single intersection, smattered with a few general stores, a post office and a three-room schoolhouse McCoy attended through the sixth grade.

The people in the surrounding countryside subsisted on one thing: tobacco.

McCoy's father was a tobacco farmer but a farmer who took more pride in his ability to figure long rows of numbers in his head than to cultivate rows of tobacco on his 80-acre farm.

Most of McCoy's friends and neighbors knew almost from the time they were born that they would stay on their family farms and grow old growing tobacco.

McCoy said his parents made sure he and his brothers knew almost as early that they never would.

"It was understood that we would all go to college, and we would all do other things," said McCoy, who next month will turn over the chancellor's reigns to James Moeser. "Without saying any words about it, they conveyed you do the best you could and so I always had an achievement orientation based on that environment."

His father's skills at counting and measuring were well enough known that the county would seek him out if there was surveying to do. And each fall, his father would manage one of the tobacco warehouses in Goldsboro or Wilson.

McCoy knows he picked up his interest in business -- and figuring -- from his father.

His two older brothers paid their way through N.C. State University on the G.I. Bill. McCoy got to Carolina by virtue of high school grades good enough to get free tuition -- $75 a quarter, he thinks. He earned spending money at the rate of 50 cents an hour by working mornings in Wilson Library.

McCoy's father had offered him an acre of tobacco to help finance his way through college, but McCoy turned him down. "I just felt like I wanted to do it myself as much as I could," he said.

He worked behind a circular desk that stood at the top of a ring of steps not far from the room where students had made their point to him during his first week as acting chancellor.

During his junior and senior years, he worked as a dormitory manager in exchange for a free room. He augmented that job by drumming up business for a local dry cleaning company. He remembers how he would tell his fellow Navy ROTC cadets that he hoped it would rain on drill days so he could cash in on all those wrinkled, wet uniforms.

A college roommate would later describe McCoy as a practical joker, but McCoy scoffs at the notion. "I took things pretty lightly and enjoyed life, but I was a serious student," McCoy said. "I could laugh at situations, but I didn't light matches in people's shoes."

Besides, he didn't have much time for mischief. College, as much as anything else, taught him how to make the most out of every day by treating every minute like a coin in his pocket he could not afford to squander.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1955, then went off to fly helicopters for the Marines. He landed in places around the world where potential trouble was brewing, from Cuba to Lebanon to Venezuela.

When his four-year hitch ended in 1959, he hooked up with AT&T and took off on a different kind of flight path.

It was up the ladder, or out the door. McCoy knew that going in. And he climbed.

It was a another time, another generation, and a time when loyalty to a company was both expected and rewarded in return.

"Back then most people did try to stay with the same organization, and it paid off in a lot of ways," McCoy said. "You built up your own family of friends and developed loyalty as a result of that. You knew the institution and how it should work and you could make a better contribution as a result of that."

The tight regiment of work and study McCoy followed in college engrained in him a habit of discipline he never lost. After he married Sara, and his two daughters were born, he would go home from work and spend time with his family. After the girls went to bed, he would stay up for two or three hours of work.

"In terms of my counsel to people: Try to do the best you can and try to be the best. Why not? But at the same time, I think you can enjoy life, and you don't have to take everything real seriously. At the heart of it all, I think, is effort."

Answering the call

Retirement would give him the one thing the telephone company had never been able to offer: the freedom to choose where to call home.

Over five decades, he had picked up and moved his family more times than even his father might have been able to count. Boston, Birmingham, Charlotte and Nashville were among the stops he made on his way up the corporate ladder. While in Boston, he earned a master's degree in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But it was in Atlanta that McCoy was named chief financial officer of BellSouth following the court-ordered breakup up AT&T in 1982.

It was in Atlanta that he was elected vice chairman of BellSouth Corp. in 1983 and president of BellSouth Enterprises Inc. in 1986.

And it was in Atlanta where his career would end.

By the fall of 1994, McCoy was a millionaire businessman with nothing left to prove, no need to add to his reputation or his wealth. He bought a summer house in the mountains of North Carolina, a couple hours' drive from Atlanta, as he and Sara prepared to settle in the city that had been their home the past 13 years.

Then the call came from Don Sundquist, an old friend from his days in Nashville.

Sunquist, who had just been elected governor of Tennessee, asked him how he would like to come work for him as the state director of budget and administration.

McCoy sought the counsel of Cliff Cameron, a member of the UNC Board of Governors who had worked for former N.C. Gov. Jim Martin as his budget director.

Cameron mentioned what McCoy was considering to C.D. Spangler, who as president of the UNC system was looking to fill the position of vice president for finance.

Spangler caught up with McCoy with a call to McCoy's hotel room in Nashville. McCoy remembers these four words out of Spangler's mouth: "Don't take that job."

Because Spangler had his own job for McCoy: vice president for finance with UNC General Administration.

Final exams

McCoy stayed with General Administration for three years, then in January of 1997 retreated into retirement.

The job with General Administration had allowed him to weave together the same kind of network of friends and acquaintances that he had given up when he left Atlanta -- and a stronger network maybe than he had bargained for.

In the spring of 1999, the call came from Broad, Spangler's successor, asking McCoy to fill in for Chancellor Michael Hooker. Hooker returned to work as expected in June after treatment for cancer but died at month's end. And the fill-in job that McCoy had accepted was handed back to him once again, this time for a year as interim chancellor.

Broad will not say how much she had to twist McCoy's arm to get him to stick around for so long. What she will say is this: "I will ever be in his debt."

McCoy stepped into South Building with a pile of problems waiting on the desk.

Two weeks before Hooker's death, James Ramsey, the University's chief financial administrator, announced that he was leaving Carolina to take the same job in Kentucky that McCoy had turned down in Tennessee.

Nearly three weeks before Ramsey's announcement, legislators summoned Ramsey and other University administrators to Raleigh to explain what was then projected to be a $9.8 million budget shortfall.

State support had been weak in recent years.

The University had implemented new initiatives for academic improvements, sometimes without the dedicated revenue sources to sustain them.

A calendar quirk had led to an extra 27th payroll that hadn't been planned for.

The answer to the deficit, they told legislators, could be found in all of the above.

When McCoy walked into the job of chancellor, he inherited the budget shortfall and the suspicion of many students and faculty members questioned how some millionaire businessman could be suited to run the country's oldest public university.

His work in General Administration had equipped him with a working knowledge of the Carolina campus, but at the same time, that association led to some guardedness about him among some faculty members, said Pete Andrews, faculty chair during most of McCoy's tenure.

"He came to the University with a tremendous history of commitment to this institution, but into a situation that was also challenging in the sense he knew the University better than it knew him," Andrews said.

He erased those doubts soon enough, Andrews said, with his trustworthiness and a willingness to listen -- qualities he would display time and time again.

"With Michael (Hooker) you could always argue and debate, but Michael was quicker to announce initiatives and debate about them later," Andrews said. "Bill is much better about bringing people along."

"He came in knowing he needed the help of all of us to do the job the University needed done in a tough transition," Andrews said. "His style was not stereotypically corporate. He listened to everybody, then took time to think everything through.

"I would hope one of the things Bill would feel most gratified about is the depth and breadth of the appreciation and trust toward him that has built up over his year here. He has led us well."

Even McCoy's sister, Sylvia Mewborn, was amazed at how the little brother she had bossed around ended up coming back to be Carolina as the biggest man on campus. It was a surprise -- and a delight -- for them both, she said.

"He loves Chapel Hill, and he loves this school," she said.

As senior captain of his high school basketball team, McCoy played one of two centers in a "double pivot" offense. He played with his back to the basket and eye on the ball, the hub around which the rest of the team revolved.

As chancellor, McCoy found himself the captain of the team once more, again at the center of decision-making, once again watching the ball only this time to make sure nobody dropped it.

In basketball, winning comes through passing and teamwork. Success in business works much the same way, even if the textbooks describe it as "delegating responsibility" and "participatory management."

The other big man in South Building was Provost Dick Richardson. Observers said the two were able to run the University as effectively as they did because each had the presence of the other, with McCoy handling budgetary matters and passing off the academic issues to Richardson.

Richardson summed up his feelings about McCoy at a campus reception held for the provost before he retired last month. "If we'd been able to tailor-make a chancellor, we could not have done any better," Richardson said.

The key to being an effective leader, whatever you are doing, is getting everybody behaving the same way, believing in the same things and shooting for the same goals, McCoy said.

As chancellor, his job was to call the shots -- and make the tough calls.

Andrews said McCoy's decision not to fire football coach Carl Torbush -- after everyone assumed it was a foregone conclusion -- may have been one of his toughest -- and best calls.

"It was indicative of the care with which he makes decisions," Andrews said. "He consults very widely, he thinks and sleeps on things before he makes up his mind."

For Broad, the sure, calm way McCoy responded to the student protests was her first inkling that she picked the right man to lead Carolina at such a pivotal time in its history.

"The issues and concerns around the sweatshop matter held great potential for divisiveness and disagreement that could have been destructive to the campus community," Broad said. "Bill quickly became a student of the issues, listened carefully to the varying perspectives and points of view and asked a lot of questions."

McCoy demonstrated that same steady hand of leadership time and time again, and never more so than in the past few months as the University worked to change the way it calculates its budget needs.

"In short, Bill does his homework," Broad said. "He involves the key constituencies in understanding the issues. He knows how to listen and to ask tough questions. He has the skill to find the points of common interest and to reconcile the different points of view of the University's larger mission."

In the end, people knew that McCoy was going to do what was best for the University, Broad said. "And that is what it takes to be a leader."

Jack Evans, interim vice chancellor of finance and administration who worked with McCoy on the budget, said McCoy demonstrated an ability to represent the University to all of its various constituencies both on and off campus.

McCoy played an aggressive role to promote Carolina's fund-raising efforts and reached out to donors whose interests ranged all across the various missions of the University, Evans said.

At the same time, Evans suspects the challenge of serving as chancellor proved to be a profoundly personal experience for McCoy.

"In the time I've been here I've been struck by the very special feeling that people who are connected to the University have for what it has done for them both professionally and as individuals," Evans said. "I have met an incredible number of people who have their own personal interpretation of that, and I think Bill McCoy is one of those people. He did not necessarily see serving as chancellor as a duty, but as an opportunity to give something back that was really unique."

Memories, lost and found

In an early message to faculty and staff, McCoy vowed he would not be a "caretaker" chancellor, but in a way he turned out to be exactly that: He took great care with every decision he faced. And with every person he met.

Joanne Kucharski, assistant University registrar, remembers how McCoy took time to introduce her after she was named chair of the Employee Forum. And she remembers how he made time to talk with her no matter what the issue.

"I do not believe he ever treated his status as chancellor as interim," Kucharski said. "He's given more than 100 percent and expected us to do the same.

"I believe he guided us with a special strength and grace through some very difficult times. The Carolina family has been fortunate to have known and worked with Chancellor McCoy."

For his part, McCoy says that the chance to get to know the people of the University is one of the things that made the experience worthwhile.

"All of us were sad about Michael Hooker's untimely death, but given that it happened, I was glad I was able to be of help and glad that I've had this experience," McCoy said. "It has been a privilege. It's been enriching, and it's been a great joy to work with the people of this campus. They are so committed to doing a good job and making sure our students get just the very best education."

The work he will leave, but the memories he will take.

In April, he gave a speech at an induction ceremony for Phi Beta Kappa. Years ago, McCoy had been inducted in the same ceremony and received the same key as these students were to receive. His had been lost years before, and he had even forgotten how it had been lost.

And then he thought of it: He had given the key to Sara as a charm bracelet -- and she had lost the bracelet. Without telling him, Sara contacted the president of Phi Beta Kappa to get a replacement. McCoy ended up getting the key during the April induction ceremony.

Then there was the fall afternoon last September when McCoy stepped out of South Building. It was one of those postcard pretty days. The sun glinted through leaves just starting to change color. Students sprawled on blankets studying. He walked along, thinking of his old days as a student, the new job in front of him and getting used to being greeted as chancellor wherever he went.

Then, "I heard this voice calling, `Grandpa, Grandpa.'"

It was his granddaughter, Jessica Foster, who was starting her freshman year as he had nearly half a century before. "She ran over and we chatted and hugged," McCoy said. "It really doesn't get any better than that."

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