A Pirate (Captain) Looks at 40

He’s like many typical NC State alums two decades after graduation — a suburban dad, with a wife and two kids. The expanding family goes hiking in the summer and snowboarding in the winter. They are hardly in the limelight.

Now 40, this former student body president with both an undergraduate and master’s degree in mechanical engineering works from home every day as a staff engineer for Red Canary, a cybersecurity company in Denver, Colorado.

It’s the last part that makes those who remember just how much “The Pirate Captain” wanted to keep his identity secret from his NC State constituency that gives the last 20 years of Whil Piavis’ life a bit of an ironic twist.

Ah, the spring of 2005, when the captain and his five-member “Scurvy Crew” raided campus and pillaged student government with their creative low-budget campaign to anonymously steal a position few students knew they were interested in until the election and runoff started getting local, national and international attention.

Taking advantage of a student government constitutional loophole, Piavis registered to run for NC State’s top elected official that spring without letting anyone know who he was. He went all in on a made-up pirate persona, from his wide-collared-and-cuffed, Seinfeld-inspired puffy shirt to his tri-cornered hat with a mop-like wig of ringlets.

When he parroted campaign slogans, he did it with a stuffed bird on his shoulder. He’s the only candidate in the history of student government to have an actual plank to walk in his campaign platform. He vowed to keep an eye on corruption, which was hard to do with one covered by a patch.

“It gives you headaches,” he said.

It was the worst case of piracy on a college campus since music-sharing company Napster went bankrupt three years earlier.

It was, however, a ton of fun, with an origin that was never fully explained.

“What happened was, I was training in taekwondo for Olympic-style sparring, and I hurt my ankle incredibly bad,” Piavis says. “All of a sudden, I had two or three extra hours per day with nothing to do.”

In other words, he had a lot of time on his hook.

He was taking a class called Graphic Communications for Non-Design Majors and he needed something to do as a class project. What he came up with was not unlike subsequent fake candidates like Mad Cap’n Tom, Count Binface/Lord Buckethead or 2024 U.S. president candidate Vermin Supreme.

“It was all about using Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to make fun stuff like T-shirts, posters, buttons,” Piavis says. “I had all this time, so I thought it would be fun to run a real campaign for a fake character.”

He met up with some of his high school friends who were also enrolled at NC State and UNC Charlotte at a local pizza joint to bandy about some ideas. They painted the Free Expression Tunnel black, highlighted by a Jolly Roger flag, using free paint given to them by a Cary hardware store. They made signs using broken pallets from the same store. Piavis made 1,000 well-designed campaign flyers and 1,000 buttons to hand out to classmates.

He and his friends made a YouTube campaign video that ended with, “I be The Pirate Captain, and I approved this message.” They launched a website and shared their platform and planks on a new social media platform called Facebook, which kept deactivating the page because of its anonymous email. They recreated it dozens of times, and one version still exists.

Not until he won a runoff election — with 58% of the vote — did his fellow students know Piavis was a junior mechanical engineering major from Cary with no previous student government experience nor any idea of how it worked.

Some classmates were furious. Some were bemused. Everyone — especially Piavis and his supporters — was shocked.

It was intended to be a lark, of course, poking fun at the student politicians who sometimes took themselves a little too seriously. Winning forced him to come up with some ideas to share with the student population, to develop a strategy for dealing with NC State and UNC System administrators and to decide if he was going to continue with the buccaneer brogue he insisted on using for campaign speeches, student government meetings and spring commencement.

“We just wanted to see how many people we could engage,” Piavis says. “We were all kind of disillusioned about the whole idea of student government. It seemed like it had the opportunity to do a lot of cool things. They had a budget. They had a seat on the Board of Trustees and the Board of Governors.

“To us, the people who had those seats seemed very pompous. So we decided to be exactly opposite of that.”

His original goals were simple: To appear a time or two in Technician, NC State’s student newspaper. To get at least 10 emails on his NCSUPirateCaptain email address. Maybe get some off-campus media attention.

Boy, did he. Stories began appearing in the News & Observer, his hometown Cary News and papers statewide. Local television station WRAL-TV actually covered the campaign — rare attention for any college SBP election. The Associated Press shared some of those stories nationally and internationally. Piavis became a hero to student newspapers across the country. Both Inside Higher Ed and the John Locke Foundation weighed in.

The economic impact of his supporters going to local Long John Silver’s restaurants to get free paper pirate hats was never studied, but it was a definite blip in Raleigh and Wake County.

In the April 8, 2005, edition of the N&O, a long-form feature on the Pirate Captain shared side-by-side coverage about the passing of Pope John Paul II.

“That was just incredible,” Piavis says.

Not all of Piavis’ Statey mateys liked the schtick. The student senate, of course, tried to impeach him, which has happened more often to duly-elected officials in the 103-year history of NC State Student Government than remakes of “Treasure Island” (16 and counting).

I still like playing the fool. It’s all in good fun. I don’t do it to be malicious or harmful.

University administration stepped in, saying it was reviewing the impeachment proceeding for violation of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution for due process considerations. Piavis had quietly gained administrative acceptance, and the impeachment proceedings were dropped.

“Whil Piavis turned out to be one of my favorite student body presidents, of the 30-some that I worked with during my years at NC State,” says Tom Stafford, vice chancellor for student affairs emeritus.  “It was not because of all the things that went on while he was president, but because of the person he was and is today.

“He was a bright young man with a zany personality.”

During the campaign, Piavis had to introduce himself to members of university administration, like Chancellor Jim Oblinger, Secretary of the University P.J. Teal and Director of Student Conduct Paul Cousins. Once they discovered he was a strong student without malicious intent, they gave him a tentative thumbs-up.

Piavis continued to receive attention throughout his year as student body president and was given the second-annual “Flying Dutchman Award for Outstanding Pirattitude” by the same organization that sponsors International Talk Like a Pirate Day (which this year is Thursday, Sept. 19, by the way).

Piavis served as SBP his junior year in his pirate garb, then returned to being relatively anonymous. After his 2007 graduation, he left Raleigh for graduate school in Hawaii, which has had low interaction with pirates and privateers during its isolated past.

He spent three years after grad school doing alternative energy research on and around the islands.

“We never stole any ships,” Piavis says, “but we did find some.”

Even on the most remote collection of islands on the planet, people recognized him for his student president persona.

“That was kind of mind-blowing,” he says. “It doesn’t happen as much here in Denver, but that was 20 years ago.”

He met his Chicago-born wife while in Hawaii. Their son is 2 1/2 and their daughter is 6 months old.

He started a software development company and sold it. He worked as a data engineer. He wrote a novel about a lovesick computer programmer and the gamer friends who shun him. His YouTube channel, IAmWhil, has 776 subscribers and 147 videos, including three seasons of a tongue-in-cheek travel series called “The Great Not Indoors.”

He never tried to lose his subversive style of humor, nor does he have a desire to do so. He calls himself “compulsively not serious.”

“Some things never change,” Piavis says. “I still like playing the fool. It’s all in good fun. I don’t do it to be malicious or harmful.”

Piavis says he learned some valuable lessons about how not to judge people and how to handle being judged.

“If someone met me solely as the Pirate Captain, and didn’t take time to get to know me, they would be surprised,” he says. “At the same time, I learned a lot about the motivation of people who are in student government and administration and why they did what they did.

“Most of the time, it was out of a genuine love for what they were doing and who they were doing it for. I learned to respect that.”

Piavis does return to the East Coast to visit his mother in Cary and his father in Union Grove, as well as his younger brother in Maryland. Paul Piavis, an original member of the Scurvy Crew, received an appointment to and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, making him perhaps the only commissioned officer pirate in Navy history.

Whil Piavis has recently attended the student government reunions at football games and met up with old friends — and maybe a few of his old political foes.

The once-young captain is now a 40-year-old scalawag, one with solemn duties and responsibilities of family and cybersecurity that don’t always reflect his past persona.

The last line of his LinkedIn resume has the only professional mention of his secret identity: “International recognition for ‘The Pirate Captain’ campaign.”

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.