Ferrel Guillory is head of the Program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life at the University, which first received funding in 1996.

The University’s long-held commitment to service to the state has become a center of attention.

Chancellor James Moeser first put that dimension of the University’s mission into focus last fall when he announced the creation of a Chancellor’s Task Force on Engagement.

Interest on service further intensified when incoming UNC President Erskine Bowles visited campus Nov. 21.

It was no accident that Bowles spent a full hour of his visit with members of the engagement task force to hear their ideas and have them hear his commitment to making them real.

Perhaps no one on campus is as happy to see these recent developments as Ferrel Guillory.

Guillory, who is both the creator and director of the Program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life — began thinking about how Carolina could be better employed to address the state’s needs long before he was even employed here.

He began thinking about it way back in 1991 when he was still a southern correspondent for The News & Observer in Raleigh — a job that gave him the license to travel all over the South and talk to people about the issues they faced.

Invariably, the people he was interviewing would turn the conversation around to pepper him with questions. They wanted to know what was going on in Raleigh — what the governor might be doing with education reform, for instance — and they also wanted to know more about the happenings in Chapel Hill.

Guillory wasn’t a graduate of Carolina himself. His boyhood home was Louisiana.

He graduated from Loyola University in New Orleans, then left for New York City to earn his master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University before he sank roots in North Carolina during a career at The News & Observer that spanned more than 20 years.

But even before Guillory started writing about North Carolina, he knew of the state’s reputation for leadership and innovation throughout the South — and knew that reputation was earned, and spurred in part, by the presence of three great research universities in the Triangle.

During his years as a journalist, he learned even more about how deeply felt that connection between the University and the state was — a connection made even more vital throughout the 20th century by such renowned leaders as Albert Coates, Frank Porter Graham and Bill Friday.

It was with this awareness that Guillory in 1991 first approached former Chancellor Paul Hardin with the proposal that would end up becoming the Program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life.

One term Guillory used in his original proposal was “research brokerage,” and behind it is the notion of connecting the work of scholars to the civic and community leaders, elected officials and opinion leaders whose decisions affect people’s daily lives.

It was Guillory’s intention not to tip over the ivory tower, but to tap more of the rich knowledge trapped inside.

“It’s been clear to me that there is, beyond the walls of the academia, a desire, a thirst even, for greater access to the research, the learning of the university, particularly from people at the state level,” Guillory said.

Overcoming barriers
But the stone walls of academia proved thicker — and harder to crack — than Guillory imagined.

Hardin expressed interest in Guillory’s proposal, as did Michael Hooker when he took over as chancellor in 1995.

But it was not until a meeting Guillory had with Hooker, former Provost Dick Richardson and Richard Cole, the longtime dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, that Guillory felt confident his idea would become a reality. The meeting ended with Hooker saying: Let’s get around the obstacles.

Some of those obstacles were financial, some institutional, but the biggest challenge Guillory faced was winning support from the faculty. If enough of them did not buy into the concept, if they did not see the value of contributing their time and expertise, no amount of money was going to make it work.

And Guillory understood that from the start.

 “The biggest barrier was the culture of the University,” Guillory said. “It wasn’t oriented to operate or think this way. Certainly the School of Medicine and the School of Government were oriented toward connecting with the broader society in their own way and in their own traditions. But in general, few professors on campus considered making these real-world connections as being the reason they were here.”

Guillory received the first seed money for the program in 1996 — five years after he first pitched the idea to Hardin. It came in the form of a $50,000 grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation that followed up that support with another $150,000 grant in 1998 that sustained the program in its early years. The first state appropriation of $250,000 did not come until 2000 — only to be rescinded because of budget shortfalls. Only recently has that funding been restored.

Guillory did not begin his appointment as director of the program until March 1997, some two years after he had begun a leave of absence from The News & Observer — a leave that would prove to be permanent — to work as a senior fellow at MDC Inc., a non-profit research firm in Chapel Hill that explored economic development and workforce issues.

Guillory has remained a senior fellow at MDC and sees his research work as complementing and informing his work at the program. Through MDC, he has co-authored “The State of the South,” a series of biennial reports to the region beginning in 1996.

A record of progress
When the program first began, it was loosely connected to the Center for the American South — a tie that has grown stronger over the intervening years. The only connection Guillory has with the journalism school is the office space it provides to the program on the third floor of Carroll Hall and the course he teaches to students each semester titled “Southern Politics: Critical Writing and Thinking.”

Guillory sees the past eight years as a kind of incubation period for the program — a period of forging relationships with faculty members and earning their trust.

 “Faculty, particularly those who are on the tenure track, need to do research and need to publish,” Guillory said. “I don’t want to divert them from that because they are doing an honorable and important thing not only for their careers but for society at large.

“But my view is maybe they can learn some things through this engagement with public leaders and journalists and they will get an idea or two that we can turn into or contribute to a policy paper but also take into a peer-reviewed piece.”

Recently, the program published a progress report highlighting accomplishments.

More than 100 legislators from 10 states have participated in one of the six Executive Seminars for Southern Legislators that the program, in coordination with the UNC Program on the Humanities and Human Values, has offered since 1999.

In them, lawmakers heard lectures from such people as former North Carolina governor James Holhouser to pre-eminent scholars such as William Leuchtenburg, John Shelton Reed and Doris Betts.

The program, with the School of Government, convened seminars for first-term North Carolina legislators before and after the 2003 session of the General Assembly.

Since 1998, the program has hosted the Southern Journalists Roundtable twice a year, a once-a-semester gathering in which editorial writers, columnists and government reporters meet with faculty and graduate student as well as invited speakers.

The program, in coordination with Jesse L. White Jr., director of the Office of Economic and Business Development, sponsored a series of “After the Factories” seminars that explored a new economic model for the state in response to declining number of jobs in the textile, tobacco and furniture industries.

The program has also been behind several roundtable discussions on education reform. Discussion from the first such roundtable, hosted in January 2003 with the Public School Forum and the Office of the Governor, contributed to the enactment of the “high school innovations fund.”

This past December, the program, in coordination with School of Education Dean Thomas James, sponsored another seminar on high school reform that joined members of Gov. Michael Easley’s education team with faculty members. Participants included State Board of Education Chairman Howard Lee and Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue. Panelists heard presentations from Carolina education professor Greg Cizek and Georgia State University professor Gary T. Henry, who both spoke on the value and limitations of state testing and accountability measures to bolster student performance.  

Challenges ahead
The program has received numerous other grants over the same years to make all those activities possible, Guillory said.

Recently, the program received a $45,000 two-year grant from Progress Energy to fund “SouthNow,” a newsletter and web site designed to examine trends data, elections and issues, and NC DataNet, a newsletter of government and political data edited by Thad Beyle, the Pearsall Professor of Political Science who has also served as the program’s associate director.

The program also has received funding for two fulltime assistant directors, with one focused on research and the other on program development.

The arrival of Hodding Carter III to campus is a milestone for the program as well. Carter, an award-winning journalist and State Department spokesman in the Carter administration, joined the faculty of the Department of Public Policy and will be help the program strengthen its efforts to enrich public leadership, Guillory said.

The South has led the nation in job growth and population growth over the past 20 years and census data released in 2005 projects that North Carolina — with a population that has inched past eight million — is going to grow by 4.5 million people in the next 25 years.

Confronted with these new challenges, it is Guillory’s hope that state lawmakers will turn more and more to universities for help in framing policies with research and context — all the things that people in a university do.

Guillory remembers strolling across campus with an old friend from college. In the middle of describing what he was doing here, his friend blurted out, “Oh, you’re not working on journalism are you? You are working on democracy.”

The line stuck in his memory, Guillory said, because it helped him to understand what he was trying to do here.

“Shouldn’t a great public university be committed to that charge? We shouldn’t say, ‘Oh, that’s just politics and we’ll get our hands dirty if we get involved.’ Our state and country and region need us.”