The philosopher king.

• Author: Perkins, David
• Position: Wake Forest University president Thomas Hearn - Includes related article

A Baptist college president leads the choir as Winston-Salem strives to become a born-again business center.

John W. Davis III is rarely at a loss for words. But the Winston-Salem stockbroker had to speak to the Presidential Debates Commission, and he didn't know what to say. Until the memo came.

Wake Forest University was trying to grab one of the 1988 campaign debates, and Davis and other civic leaders had been recruited by President Thomas K. Hearn Jr. to make the case.

The idea came from three students with a yen for politics. But it had not escaped Hearn that a broadcast to 75 million viewers would be the kind of PR boost that money couldn't buy. It would also be the most publicity for the beleaguered city since RJR Nabisco moved its headquarters to Atlanta.

Hearn left little to chance. He sent a list of points to Davis, as well as to Gov. Jim Martin and John Medlin Jr., CEO of Wachovia Corp., whom Hearn had also recruited.

"Tom orchestrated the whole thing," says Davis, who heads the Winston-Salem office of Alex. Brown & Sons and was then chamber of commerce president. "This guy is a great marketing man. He's a strategic planner. He's a salesman in a lot of ways."

You know the rest of the story: Wake Forest was chosen. Davis raised $500,000 to pay for the debate. And next spring, applications to Wake Forest were up 5% -- a testimony to a kind of town-gown teamwork that didn't exist before Hearn became Wake Forest's 12th president in 1983.

But although Wake Forest has become bigger, richer, better known and possibly better run under Hearn, he's had a harder time selling his program to some faculty members and students, who complain that image building has taken priority over academic spadework.

A busy press office has all the right figures: a 60% increase in applications; an increase in average SAT scores from 1,120 in 1982-83 to 1,183 in '90-91; four Rhodes scholars in the past six years, more than any other Southeastern university; rising enrollment, from 4,818 in '83-84 to 5,360 in '89-90.

Despite such triumphs, Tom Hearn is something of an enigma on his own campus. He is a private, driven man who loosens up on the university tennis courts with CEOs but is stiff at faculty parties.

"He's done an excellent job in strengthening the administrative structure and reaching out to the world of commerce and the community at large," says Carlton Mitchell, chairman of the religion department. "What that means is he has not been able to spend as much time on personal internal relationships, which have long been part of the Wake Forest tradition."

But he has certainly united Wake Forest and its hometown, with benefits for both.

Ever since it moved from Wake County onto a piece of R.J. Reynolds' estate in 1956, Wake Forest had looked askance at Winston-Salem and vice versa. Hearn's predecessors were scholars leading a small Baptist school with ambitions of becoming a university -- an ambition realized in 1967. A little distance from the city was fine. But Hearn saw that the city's business community could help the university make a bid for national standing.

Soon after taking office, Hearn jumped into the leadership vacuum left by the loss of the city's old-guard corporate headquarters such as RJR Nabisco and Piedmont Airlines. He has also invited businessmen onto Wake Forest's fund-raising and trustee boards, turning some into its most raucous and open-handed cheerleaders.

By 1988, a Greensboro News & Record poll of...