College president, fix-it man

The Charlotte Observer
August 29, 2010
By Jack Betts
Associate Editor

If you were looking for something bad to say about the next president of the University of North Carolina, detractors might point to his inability to keep a steady job. Everyone wants him to fix something.

Tom Ross, the Davidson College president who was chosen Thursday to succeed UNC President Erskine Bowles beginning New Year's Day 2011, has held a series of increasingly important jobs and scores of volunteer posts over a 35-year career that uniquely qualify him for what is arguably the most important job in the state.... But I'd like to argue that his work in the early 1990s as chairman of the N.C. Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission put him not only in the spotlight but on the short list of thinkers and doers who could take an extremely tough problem, figure out how to break it down into digestible pieces and fashion a series of solutions that work.  Click here to read more.