When worlds collide.

• Author: Donsky, Martin
• Position: Dick Spangler, president University of North Carolina

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

Dick Spangler sits down to a quick lunch at a Chinese restaurant a few blocks from his office in Chapel Hill. "Ni-hou-ma?" he greets the waitress, asking how she is.

A few minutes later, she is back with the menu and tea. "Hsueh-hsueh," he says, thanking her.

Just a few phrases he picked up on a trip to mainland China in 1979. Just a few words to make the waitress feel comfortable. After all, isn't communication the key, whether ordering a $2.99 plate of shrimp chow mein, building a family fortune that has made him one of the richest men in the state (if not the richest) or running the 16-campus University of North Carolina, a $1 billion operation responsible for educating 140,000 students each year?

But it was Spangler's failure to communicate last summer and fall that put his job on the line. On the same Sunday in October, two of the state's major newspapers published highly critical front-page stories in which two members of the board that oversees the UNC system - Spangler's bosses - called for his resignation.

Never before had the top executive of the UNC system been subjected to such a public whipping. The words were harsh and blunt. "He doesn't have the kind of leadership the university needs to take it into the next decade or the next century," said William Johnson, a Lillington lawyer and former chairman of the UNC Board of Governors.

And this from Walter Davis, the Tar Heel-born businessman who made it big in Texas oil and is a major contributor to political and educational causes in his home state: "I feel that he handled the N.C. State matter as badly as it could have been possibly handled." Spangler, Davis contended, had let allegations of corruption in Coach Jim Valvano's basketball program fester too long.

Adding insult to injury, the Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper on the Chapel Hill campus, called him an "invisible leader" who had "made a mess" of the Valvano affair. The editorial suggested he "return to his business interests" and leave UNC to "someone who cares about this system and the future of education as much as students and faculty do."

Four months later, C.D. "Dick" Spangler Jr. - described by a friend as a "man who has never done anything that he's failed at" - is still president. The turmoil subsided after he promised to do a better job of communicating with his board. "The criticism was justifiable, completely justified," he says. The board gave him a unanimous vote of confidence - his critics backing down, content to take him at his word.

But the issue is far from settled. The debate over how one man communicates was only one manifestation of a deeply rooted conflict. On that day in January 1986 when Spangler was chosen to fill what many consider to be the most important public post in North Carolina, two distinct, dissimilar - and at times adverserial - cultures were set on a collision course.

Spangler and the man he succeeded, William Friday, represent these two cultures. Friday, the career public servant, is at his best - and is most comfortable - in the political and academic hustle and bustle of Raleigh and Chapel Hill. He is the ultimate public man. Spangler, the rich Charlotte investor, is at his best, and most comfortable, in the corporate suite - the ultimate private businessman.

"Dick Spangler's modus operandi is completely different than Bill Friday's," says UNC board member Betty McCain, a longtime Democratic activist from Wilson.

Friday and Spangler share certain common bonds. They are intelligent, articulate and, one-on-one, two of the most engaging, stimulating men in the state.

Spangler, 57, has been called a Renaissance man. Well-read and interested in the arts, he is committed, one associate says, "to the intellectual life of the university."

He uses, for example, Polonius in Hamlet and Iago in Othello to explain himself and his philosophy. "We all have some weaknesses," he says, talking about the past few months. "We all have some strengths. I am a big believer in what I perceive to be Shakespeare's greatness: that every one of his heroes had some weaknesses and every one of his villains had some strengths that you would admire."

Spangler, whose grandfather could neither read nor write, early on made public education his passion. He and the late W.T. Harris, a Charlotte businessman and founder of the Harris-Teeter supermarket chain, are widely credited with building the public support needed to begin statewide kindergartens in the early 1970s.

In Charlotte, Spangler was one of the few business leaders to support the public schools during the earliest, most difficult days of integration. Although he attended Woodbury Forest, a prep school in Virginia, he sent his two daughters to public school and in 1972 won a seat on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education.

Charlotteans still remember the night in 1976 when Spangler, then the board's vice chairman, surprised the audience - during a televised meeting - and convinced his colleagues to fire Superintendent Roland Jones (who had lost the board's confidence). Spangler was just as outspoken when he became chairman of the state Board of Education in 1982, bluntly assessing the public schools as failing - then scolding Sen. Jesse Helms for trying to make political hay from his comments.

Though he retired nearly four years ago, Bill Friday never really left. Instead of his first-floor office in the General Administration building on Raleigh Road, his perch these days is on the fifth floor of the Kenan Center, overlooking the Chapel Hill campus. Friday, 69, is president of the William R. Kenan Jr. Fund, chairs a statewide group to promote rural growth and serves on a national commission assessing college athletics.

He still hosts a public-television show sponsored by UNC that celebrates the state's history and...