Hunt’s Passionate Legacy Will Never Be Extinguished

A team of folks from NC State’s main campus went to visit former North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt (’59) a few years ago at his family farm in the Wilson County community of Rock Ridge.

Hunt showed off the barn he and his dad built when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked people across the United States to redouble their agricultural production efforts at the start of World War II.

He had his grandson, who was still in middle school at the time, model a blue corduroy jacket the governor wore in high school, back when he thought the highest elected office he would ever hold was the statewide presidency of the Future Farmers of America.

He talked about how he fried his okra, and then he helped Carolyn, his wife of 67 years, feed watermelon rinds to their chickens; simple, everyday chores they enjoyed after a lifetime of public service.

For one of the nation’s most visionary thought leaders and one of NC State’s most beloved and accomplished graduates, one of the final times he reflected on his life as a public servant occurred that day when a visitor thanked him for doing as much as any leader in the state’s and the university’s history to advance education, technology and economic development.

Hunt smiled, grabbed the visitor’s elbow and said with a slight smile, “How about more than anyone else?”

That was Hunt’s way. He had a habit of walking right up to the edge of humility without ever jumping over. It served him well in the field of politics, where he needed to stand firm in his beliefs while also trying to compromise with both sides of the aisle to get things done.

Just one of seven people to serve two terms as NC State’s student body president — and the only person to serve four terms as North Carolina’s governor — Hunt died last Thursday at his family farm near the tiny town of Lucama, North Carolina. He was 88.

James Baxter Hunt Jr. (born May 16, 1937) has a list of accomplishments inside and outside the borders of his home state too long to put on one page. As governor, he was responsible for giving NC State the first parcel of land to create Centennial Campus.

When NC State Chancellor Bruce Poulton asked Hunt to create the Institute for Emerging Issues, a think tank located on Centennial Campus, he took the idea and ran with it, thumbing through his Rolodex of national and international leaders and asking them to come to Raleigh to identify the world’s most pressing problems. (The only one who didn’t immediately call him back was astronomer Carl Sagan, so Hunt called one of Sagan’s best friends, asked him to bring a private plane to Raleigh and make sure Sagan was in the seat beside him. He was.)

Of the many places that bear his name — a highway in Wilson County, a horse complex at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds, a high school in his home town, residence halls at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM), a ferry in Currituck Sound and the Hunt Institute for Educational Leadership & Policy Foundation, just to name a few—the most prominent is NC State’s nationally recognized, award-winning James B. Hunt Jr. Library, which was dedicated in 2013.

Hunt was never shy about saying he was a product of North Carolina’s diverse landscape: conceived in Shelby, born in Greensboro, raised on the family farm in Wilson County and eventually died there too. He was the full embodiment of NC State’s land-grant mission, a native of the state’s most rural area who came to Raleigh for a life-changing education at an institution devoted to agriculture, technology and military science.

In the end, the state’s capital was where Hunt made a lasting impact, directing policy as a state legislator, the youngest lieutenant governor in state history at the age of 35, its longest-serving governor (1977-85, 1993-2001) and an advisor to national leaders like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, pushing and pulling his home state into a new millennium of unfathomable progress for a kid whose only dream was to get a degree in agricultural sustainability and return to the farm.

He went so much further than that.

During his two administrations, the state created both NCSSM and the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, among his many efforts to promote education, technology and technology-based economic development around the world.

He never forgot the original mission he learned on campus in Raleigh, however. His alma mater was not designed for a classical liberal arts education but was meant to create solutions. At the dedication of the world-class library that bears his name and in support of the Institute for Emerging Issues, Hunt said: “The world doesn’t need another think tank. We need a think-and-do tank.”

Think and Do has been the university’s trademarked brand mantra ever since.

The world doesn’t need another think tank. We need a think-and-do tank.

Hunt’s methods of persuasion were kind but firm, especially when he asked for what some might have considered favors but the governor intended as direct orders.

“He had this way of grabbing your hand, pulling you in very close and asking, ‘You know what the right thing to do for the state of North Carolina is, right?’” said retired chancellor Randy Woodson. “He made you feel like you were the most important person to solve the most critical problem in the history of the state of North Carolina.”

Known as the state’s ambassador for education throughout his political life, Hunt also had a huge impact on the state’s growth and economic development. There’s no better example of that impact than the land he gave to NC State on Dec. 19, 1984, to create NC State’s public-private research park known as Centennial Campus, the school’s second land grant after its founding in 1887.

Hunt left that original gift of 355 acres on his way out of his second administration, leaving the door open for successor Jim Martin to grant another 741 acres — perhaps the greatest bipartisan gift in the university’s history.

Chancellor Kevin Howell, who became NC State’s newest chief executive in May 2025, worked for Hunt as a legislative liaison in the final years of Hunt’s last term. He maintained a close connection with Hunt throughout the years.

“At his heart Governor Jim Hunt was a public servant,” said Howell. “From his days serving as NC State’s student body president to becoming a four-term governor he wanted to make things better for people. He learned what a gift an education was … and set forth on a mission to improve education in our state.

“At the same time, he recognized the impact of economic development. That resulted in his gift of funding the first parcel of land for what is now the thriving Centennial Campus. It was an honor to work for and learn from this person of such integrity and passion for our great state and university. And now to lead the university that he loved so much makes me tremendously proud.”

It was an honor to work for and learn from this person of such integrity and passion for our great state and university.

Hunt admitted in a 2010 interview that when he arrived in Raleigh in the fall of 1955, he had good sense but a myopic worldview. All he wanted was a degree in agricultural conservation, a lofty goal tripped up by a course in organic chemistry. It was a critical point in the school’s history, right after it opened its doors to Black undergraduate students for the first time. Hunt carried the lessons he learned by being classmates with Irwin Holmes, Walter Holmes, Manuel Crockett and Ed Carson while pursuing his bachelor’s degree in agricultural education and a master’s degree in agricultural economics. He later earned his law degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“I grew up in the rural south,” Hunt said in a 2021 interview. “It was still segregated and that’s all I knew. When I got to NC State, I started to see that wasn’t right. It just wasn’t right.

“Later on, I had the chance to do something about it.”

In 1983, Gov. Hunt appointed Henry Frye to be the first Black associate justice on the North Carolina Supreme Court. Frye later became the first African American chief justice on the court. More than half of Hunt’s cabinet during his 16 years as governor were women, he recalled. His middle daughter, Rachel, was elected to the same lieutenant governor position he once held.

His fellow students elected Jimmy Hunt as their president twice, a rare honor that has happened only seven times in the school’s 138-year history. He took his position within student government seriously and learned politics from legendary professor Abraham Holtzman, who was well-known for decades at NC State for rewarding students who could defend their beliefs and for penalizing those whose arguments were weak.

“You better believe he provoked us,” Hunt said. “He got us thinking and kept us thinking. He opened the world to us.”

Hunt burst through those doors on graduation day to pursue a career unlike any other alum. He is one of four graduates elected North Carolina’s governor, joining O. Max Gardner and the father-and-son duo of Kerr and Robert Scott. The four terms he served gave him more time in office to get things done, though, and he translated his lessons from student government to a statewide and national stage.

What college does is get students to think … You start learning that we can do better. What should we do? How can we get things done? How can we better express ourselves?

“The important thing was that in addition to your studying, you started thinking about the world and what is going on around you and what life is like for other people,” Hunt said. “You start learning that we can do better. What should we do? How can we get things done? How can we better express ourselves?

“What college does is get students to think.”

Hunt unabashedly loved college athletics. Sitting at Raleigh-Durham International Airport one morning while waiting on a commercial flight, he separated the sports section from the front page and local news.

“Why do you read sports first?” another traveler asked him.

“Because it chronicles achievement more than failure,” he said. “The news is full of the bad things people do. Sports tell the good things.”

College basketball was his passion and his first introduction to NC State. As a junior-high student, he sat in the top row to watch the first game ever played at Reynolds Coliseum on Dec. 2, 1949.

“Daddy took me to that game and I’ve been an NC State fan ever since,” he once said.

Back home on the family farm, the Hunts listened to every Wolfpack game broadcast on the family’s radio, marveling at the accomplishments of Dick Dickey, Sammy Ranzino and Lou Pucillo, who later became Hunt’s top campaigner for student body president.

He never forgave himself for missing NC State’s victory over Marquette to win the 1974 NCAA men’s basketball championship, because as lieutenant governor he had to stay in Raleigh to preside over the state senate, which met every Monday night. Afterward, he made superstar player David Thompson a page in the state senate.

When the Wolfpack played Houston for the 1983 championship in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he wasn’t about to miss another title game. By then, he was governor and had control of an old state-owned six-seater plane. He watched Jim Valvano’s team beat Houston 54-52 that night, and afterward he headed straight to the airport.

He and his security detail were back in Raleigh the next morning for an important breakfast meeting.

“NC State basketball has been the love of my life,” said Hunt, who hosted two of his inauguration balls on the floor of Reynolds Coliseum. “There is nothing that I enjoy more. There has never been a more rabid Wolfpack fan than me.

“And, for 16 years as governor, I had some pretty good seats.”

For Hunt, the passion he developed for academics and athletics spilled over into his time in the national political arena. And he never saw anything wrong with that.

“We all need to be passionate about something,” he said. “If you’re going to sell people on doing something big, they need to sense from its leaders that it really makes sense, but that it can also be exciting. It can be fun that you are passionate about it because you believe in it so strongly.

“We get passionate at ball games, but darn it, we ought to get passionate about improving schools, passionate about having the kind of industries here and job opportunities for all of our people, passionate about protecting the environment that God created and passionate about equal opportunities.

“That’s how you get people excited to get things done.”

Hunt never lost his passion for anything he believed in throughout his life as a public servant, and the glowing embers that first sparked as a young NC State fan, a student and a devoted alumnus will likely never be extinguished.