EDITOR’S NOTE: Buck Goldstein, a Professor of the Practice in the School of Education, University Entrepreneur in Residence at UNC Chapel Hill and contributor to Higher Ed Works, retired from the faculty June 30. These are his parting words – but we don’t believe it’s really a farewell.

CHAPEL HILL (July 13, 2023) – To everything there is a season, and this is the right time for me to step down from the job of a lifetime. June 30 was my last day as a full-time professor at UNC-Chapel Hill after 19 years as a member of the faculty. Little did I know when I was admitted in 1966 as a first-year student, that I was beginning a defining, life-long relationship. Having been a student, a volunteer, a donor and a faculty member, I’ll become a volunteer again, helping out where I can.

I’m not good at looking back, but it is satisfying to know that UNC will be alive and thriving long after we are all gone. Great universities endure because the very idea of a university is so powerful. They are institutions in perpetual war with themselves but out of that ferment, which often looks like chaos, comes magic in the form of great teaching and new knowledge. Year after year, great universities change lives.

I learned long ago, no matter how much you might love an institution, you can’t expect it to love you back. Universities don’t love; they are built to endure. Love comes from people and my odyssey with UNC has given me more love than I could ever expect. Rather than a long list, I’ll describe three examples.

I was an activist in the late sixties when fellow students were dying in Vietnam and at Kent State University. Students led waves of anti-war protest with faculty and administrators eventually following along. Anne Queen, the director of the Campus Y, provided the adult supervision we needed even if we didn’t know it. Anne was from Canton, North Carolina, and worked in a paper mill for over a decade before attending Berea College and Yale Divinity School. Her small house on Mallette Street was a salon where students met with leaders in the state and the nation. Anne helped me understand the world and how it works, and she quietly worked to make the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, which I led — the largest mass protest in the history of UNC. She also introduced me to a group of people who became life-long advisors, and she encouraged the most important relationship of my life — my marriage to Kay.

Ruel Tyson was a religion professor at UNC with big ideas. He was also from rural North Carolina, and his father was the sheriff of his hometown. Although he chaired the Department of Religious Studies at one point in his career, he never completed his doctorate. Ruel hatched what became the Institute for the Arts and Humanities over a series of brown bag lunches and then recruited a rag-tag team to make it happen. I had the good fortune to be part of that team largely because, as a student, I was one of his many acolytes. Improbably, he asked me to serve as Chair of his Advisory Board for over a decade when I had neither money nor influence. But he brought me along and taught me about what he called precinct work. He also reinforced lessons I learned as a student that a big idea can sometimes succeed against all odds. Over the years, Ruel turned a monthly luncheon group into one of the most influential institutions on campus housed in a magnificent building called Hyde Hall.

When I returned to Chapel Hill in 2004, after a career as a lawyer and venture capitalist, I met Holden Thorp, who subsequently became chancellor. I was looking for support for the newly funded campus entrepreneurship initiative. Little did I know that I would find a genius, a collaborator and a life-long friend. My 25 years in the private sector turned out to be an advantage as we attempted to introduce entrepreneurship into the culture of a research university. Our partnership resulted in two books, a class in entrepreneurship attended by hundreds of students each fall semester, and an online course that reached thousands of people around the world. It involved hundreds of hours of collaboration, countless hours of heartache and pain and an equal amount of fun. You can’t expect an institution to love you back but, in this case, love came from the chancellor.

These three relationships are emblematic of countless others. UNC System President William Friday taught me that picking up the telephone achieves much more than press releases or official statements. Dean Smith taught me that most college basketball games are won in living rooms, talking to the recruits and their families. Colleagues in the Department of Economics, the School of Education and The Graduate School taught me that universities are not corporations and can’t be run like one. I learned the secret sauce that makes universities different is remarkable people united around preserving and growing the idea of a university as the crown jewel of our society.

As I return to life as a “civilian,” I have a deep sense of gratitude to the hundreds of colleagues, students and supporters that filled my time at UNC with challenge, opportunity and ultimately love. I’ll keep helping wherever I can as a board member at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities and the Ackland Art Museum, and as a volunteer for the Shuford Program in Entrepreneurship, The Graduate School and the Carolina seminars on higher education. In addition to gratitude, I have a deep appreciation for those of you who continue to care deeply about our alma mater. There will be twists and turns, but we can take solace in the fact that UNC will evolve and endure and the work we put in to make it great is time well spent.