Tom Ross

Brilliant. Firm. Fair. Hard-working. A visionary with wide experience who also has an eye for details. Those are the words supporters use to describe Thomas W. "Tom" Ross, the Greensboro native and former head of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation who was tapped Thursday to become the next president of the University of North Carolina system. Ross will need all those qualities and more to enhance the strong 17-school system in a time of budget cuts.

We believe that Ross, the president of Davidson College for the past three years and a leader respected throughout North Carolina, is up to the job of guiding this major statewide organization. The UNC system educates the professionals who help us with every facet of our lives. And it has produced many of our national, state and local leaders.

Ross, 60, will take office in January and succeed another highly-qualified Greensboro native, Erskine Bowles. Bowles, a former Clinton chief of staff and investment banker, announced in February that he would retire by year's end. In five years on the job, Bowles has pushed to keep tuition rates at reasonable levels and advocated for reform after revelations about excesses in payments to administrators in the system.

Ross, like Bowles, is a progressive who is committed to public service. The decision to leave Davidson College wasn't easy, he told the UNC Board of Governors Thursday, "But I do so feeling called to this position and to this university."

Also like Bowles, Ross has a strong network of powerful friends throughout the state. Ross, who was educated at Davidson College and UNC Chapel Hill, has been the chief of staff for former Congressman Robin Britt, served as a Superior Court judge, the director of the state Administrative Office of the Courts and the head of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. He's also taught at the UNC Chapel Hill School of Government.

Throughout his career, Ross has often focused on broad policy. As a judge, he was a leader in crafting the Structured Sentencing Program. At the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation in Winston-Salem, one of the state's largest and most influential, Ross rebuilt the organization's small staff and focused on concerns such as the growing disconnect between government and citizens. We found him to be innovative and accessible.

Ross also earned high marks at Davidson, a highly respected liberal-arts college with about 1,800 students. It's a far cry from the UNC system, which has more than 220,000 students across its campuses, each of which has its own issues and politics. In a firm but fair way, Bowles has asserted the importance of the president's office among those campuses.

Ross has the political skills to continue that work. As one example of that, soon after he took the reins at Z. Smith Reynolds, he hired his predecessor as a part-time fellow. One board member cautioned Ross that he might have a hard time getting control of the foundation with that arrangement. Ross said that his predecessor would never interfere with his leadership. And if he couldn't get control of the organization and lead it, he said, they'd hired the wrong person and they might as well know it sooner rather than later. Characteristically, he was kind but firm, and his judgment was correct.

Ross' main concern will be securing sufficient money to run the UNC system. He'll do fine as a fundraiser among alumni, but raising money from the state legislature will be more difficult. Budget cuts in the last two years have hit hard, The Associated Press noted, even as the number of students in the system is expected to grow by 50,000 in the next seven years.

Campuses have passed along supplemental tuition increases of up to $750 per student to help offset an extra $70 million in spending cuts legislators directed them to make. Ross' experience as the head of the Administrative Office of the Courts should serve him well. In that position, he had to work with legislators to get more money for the judicial system.

All in all, the Board of Governors made a good choice in unanimously electing Thomas W. Ross. He's got wide experience in academics, administration, fundraising and politics. He'll bring to the job judgment skills honed on the bench and in his other work, skills that include listening and gathering all the facts before making decisions.

But most of all, Ross is a visionary who cares deeply about educating the students who are the future of this state.