Campus Characters: The Jogging Mathematics Professor

Robert Ramsay had a toothache, and running into Lou Holtz on that particular October afternoon in 1975 didn’t make it any better.

All the longtime NC State mathematics professor wanted to do was get in his daily four laps around the Paul H. Derr Track, which was delayed by a morning visit to the dentist. He was in pain, angry and in no mood to deal with a control-freak football coach.

Ramsay was taking his daily lunchtime jog around the Derr Track a little later than usual, but he was determined to stick to his fitness routine. So, even when he was told to stop jogging and leave the track premises behind Reynolds Coliseum by members of Holtz’s staff, Ramsay kept on chugging.

Holtz and his team were preparing for an important Atlantic Coast Conference game at Maryland, and the coach was convinced the wiry runner was a spy for Terrapins coach Jerry Claiborne.

“I was kind of pissed off, and I didn’t want to leave,” the late Ramsay said in a 1999 interview.

Ramsay — a native of Aberdeen, Washington, who had been a member of the NC State faculty since 1967 — told Holtz he would only leave if he was arrested. So Holtz called campus security, which put the professor in handcuffs and charged him with “resisting, delaying and obstructing a public officer while the officer was attempting to discharge his duty.”

In retrospect it’s kind of funny, but at the time, it was nerve-wracking.

The incident was shared by The Associated Press and created headlines around the country, though it wasn’t a big deal to the Wolfpack players on the practice field that day.

“We all stood there and watched the whole thing with wide eyes as the campus security cops came down and tried to get the guy to leave,” said Johnny Evans, the Wolfpack Radio Network color commentator who was a sophomore quarterback at the time. “It didn’t completely surprise us. He completely believed that the guy could be a spy, and he wanted to get him removed.

“It’s just an example of how intense Coach Holtz was.”

While NC State interim chancellor Jackson A. Rigney pardoned the professor the day before the game against Maryland, the Wake County district attorney’s office said Rigney had no authority to do so. That kept the conflagration burning for another month. The charges were eventually dismissed by Wake County District Attorney Burley Mitchell, Ramsay was censured by the NC State faculty senate and the professor was forced to write a letter of apology to the officer involved.

“It wasn’t much fun,” Ramsay said in ‘99. “In retrospect it’s kind of funny, but at the time, it was nerve-wracking.”

Regardless of whether Maryland received inside information from the accused, the Terps earned a resounding victory in College Park, 37-22.

Many Wolfpack fans believed back then the Ramsay incident was part of the reason Holtz left Raleigh after the 1975 season to become the head coach of the NFL’s New York Jets. In retrospect, Holtz admitted that he overreacted, quite an admission from college football’s most tightly wound Napoleon.

Ramsay was forced to quit running by bad hips in 1994, though he continued to ride his bicycle all over the state of North Carolina and in various road races. He thought about coming out of jogging retirement in 1999, when Holtz returned to NC State’s campus in his inaugural game as head coach at South Carolina.

“I probably won’t go jog up and down the sidelines in front of him during the game,” Ramsay said. “I have thought about it, though.”

Ramsay, a topologist who earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees from Washington and his Ph.D. from Miami, spent another 30 years in NC State’s mathematics department, serving as the director of undergraduate programs from 1989 to 1999. He had a long career interacting with students, particularly through the M6 (Magnificent, Monthly, Mesmerizing, Money-Making, Minatory, Mathematical) Problem-Solving Contest from 1989 to 2001 and his annual football pools.

Though he gave up running, he was an avid cyclist, participating in the first Murphy-to-Manteo bicycle ride in 1999 as part of a group of educators called “The Road Scholars.”

The incident with Holtz was largely forgotten.

“Every once in a while someone will bring it up, but very few of my students know anything about it,” Ramsay said 25 years after the fact. “I don’t jog anymore, so I don’t go down to the track. But I do go to the gym every once in a while, and sometimes people will remind me of it down there.

“Mostly, it’s forgotten, thankfully.”

The professor saved some of the hate mail he received in his office until he retired from the department in 2004 and the scrapbook of newspaper clippings his mother collected for him. He died on March 29, 2016, at the age of 75.

Holtz eventually learned to laugh about the incident, though he never formally apologized to Ramsay.

When the professor left on a two-year teaching sabbatical at Stanford, Holtz sent him an autographed picture that said, “If I knew you were going to leave, I would have stayed.”

In Campus Characters, we explore some of the people who, through the years, have given NC State’s campus a different spice and flair. If you’d like to suggest someone to profile, email Tim Peeler at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.