Feature

A PROBLEM-SOLVING MINDSET

Story and photos by Eddie Huffman

Guilford may have only established the Center for Principled Problem Solving during the past academic year, but for decades grads-turned-politicians have put lessons learned on campus into practice, from local town halls to Washington, D.C.

“I don’t know that Guilford caused me to go into politics, but I think they gave me the skills and the understanding and the means to work with people and try to understand people,” says Maggie Jeffus ’65, a state representative serving Guilford County in the General Assembly.

Keith Holliday ’75 recently concluded an eight-year run as mayor of Greensboro, a period of economic growth and dramatic downtown revitalization. The skills he learned for a successful political career weren’t just handed down in lectures.

“The great thing about Guilford was you learned more out of class than you learned in class,” Holliday says. “The overall philosophies, the traditions, the interaction with students, contributed much more to my learning than just what I got from professors. Without a doubt, a consensus-building institution carried over to a problem-solving mindset on my part.”

Alumni who graduated up to half a century ago continue to pull political duty. Howard Coble ’53 ranks as the senior member in North Carolina’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing parts of Guilford and surrounding counties in the 6th District. Paul Gibson ’78 continues his work on the Guilford County Board of Commissioners after a full term as chairman. Billy Ragsdale ’66 recently stepped down as mayor of Jamestown after a decade, preceded by five years on the town council.

Howard Coble

Fifty years after graduating, Coble – described in a 2005 Associated Press article as a “close ally of President Bush” – has little in common with Guilford’s image as a Quaker school where “liberal arts” signifies more than just a well-rounded education. But he says the school has changed a lot more than he has.

“When I was there, Guilford was more in line ideologically with what I am now,” he says, relaxed in a chair in his spacious Capitol Hill office, his feet resting on an oversize image of the state seal woven into the carpet. “Ideologically, Guilford would be classified as a far more liberal school than it was when I was there. But I guess you could say that about a lot of schools.”

Coble earned a history degree at Guilford in fits and starts. He spent a year at Appalachian State with an eye toward becoming a high school baseball coach, but transferred to Guilford when his family preacher convinced him to enter the ministry: “I thought, ‘Well, if I’m gonna go into the ministry, I could probably get a liberal [arts] education at Guilford that would be more in line with seminary, as opposed to a physical education major.’” In the long run, however, “I never did feel the call,” he says.

Politics lured Coble after he earned a law degree from UNC Chapel Hill, and he spent time in the General Assembly and as secretary of the state Department of Revenue before riding into Congress on the conservative wave in 1984 that reelected President Ronald Reagan and Sen. Jesse Helms.

Although he serves on the Board of Visitors, Coble’s politics – and controversial statements he made five years ago – keep him a little at odds with his alma mater. In early 2003, speaking to a caller on a local radio show, Coble defended President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to send Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II. A national controversy ensued, and several dozen Guilford students signed a letter asking Coble to cancel his plans to deliver the commencement address. He decided not to come to avoid disrupting graduation. “Back when I was a student there, you wouldn’t have thought about not inviting a guy to speak because he defended President Roosevelt,” he says today.

Coble has broken ranks with President Bush on the Iraq War, however. No one would ever mistake the congressman for a pacifist with his voting record on defense spending and military action, but in 2005 he told the News & Record he was “fed up with picking up the newspaper and reading that we’ve lost another five or 10 of our young men and women in Iraq.” The Korean War was a parallel for his generation: “Back in those days there were several students at Guilford who were conscientious objectors. ... The Quaker influence, I think, was more pronounced then than it is now.”

Paul Gibson

The objectors got less conscientious and more outspoken by the time of the Vietnam War. For Gibson, it was a long, strange trip to Guilford from spying on protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention, where a “police riot” (so labeled by a federal commission) led to the infamous trial of the Chicago Seven, in which the judge ordered Black Panther Bobby Seale gagged and bound to a chair.

“I was in Washington weekend before last – a lot of good memories,” Gibson says, seated at a table in the Greensboro label company he has worked with for decades. “You know in ‘Forrest Gump,’ that scene where he’s by the reflecting pool? I was right in the middle of that. I handled those peace moratoriums.” After graduating from Greensboro Senior High School in 1964, Gibson attended Guilford for two years before he realized he was “wasting my daddy’s money and my time.” He got drafted into the U.S. Army, which assigned him undercover work: “I worked in G-3 operations at Fort Bragg, and our job was to – of course, we denied it, it was against the law – we kept tabs on civilians.” For Gibson, it was nothing personal: “They were just a bunch of kids who didn’t want to go to Vietnam, and I didn’t wanna go, either.”

When Gibson returned to Guilford in 1971 to pursue a political science degree, he had plenty of other adults for company – many of them Vietnam veterans – on Guilford’s main campus and its now-defunct satellite campus in downtown Greensboro. “I really did enjoy it, I really got a great education, and a lot of those values that were part of Guilford have stuck with me,” he says.

Politics runs in the Gibson family. His father served as Guilford County sheriff from 1966 to ’84, and Gibson first got elected county commissioner in 1986, but left after a single term. “I had small children at the time, and I was spending more time at the courthouse than I was at home,” he says. Gibson returned to a commissioner’s seat in 2004, spent 2007 as chairman and remains on the board today. (He was succeeded as chair by Kirk Perkins ’76.) He describes himself as a fiscal conservative who’s “more liberal on social issues,” and credits Guilford with shaping his approach to politics.

“There were a lot of liberal-thinking folks out there, but I felt like I could voice my opinions, and I felt no push back,” Gibson says. Guilford exposed him to an array of people representing different genders, races and nationalities, a real stretch from the segregated culture of his childhood: “It really was probably the closest I’ve ever come to a life-changing experience. It was a very, very interesting time and made a real impact on me.”

Keith Holliday

photo by Jerry Wofford

Where Gibson got drafted to do surreptitious surveillance work for the Army, Holliday always wanted to do investigative work for the FBI. The longtime Greensboro mayor earned a degree in sociology, minoring in psychology and criminal justice. “My original intention was to join the FBI out of college,” Holliday says, sitting in a glass-walled conference room on the ground floor of First Citizens Bank downtown. “That’s what got me to Guilford – that criminal justice program.”

In college Holliday seized every opportunity to pursue his interest in law enforcement work. One way he “learned more out of class than in class” was by helping to start a student-operated campus security service. “We actually fired the rent-a-cops,” he says. “They came to the criminal justice department and said the criminal justice majors would be a natural group to self-govern or self-secure yourselves ... The last two years I was the actual student director of that.”

Holliday believes in institutions, from the security service he helped start to the office of president of the United States. In the early ’70s, he says, “I was the last person at Guilford to believe Richard Nixon was guilty.” “Back then everybody was anti this or anti that,” Holliday says. “I just wasn’t anti. You had to prove it to me before I would become anti.”

He also believed in the power of redemption. An internship with the Greensboro Police Department his senior year convinced Holliday that his future was in helping offenders, not arresting them: “Takin’ ’em off the street and lockin’ ’em up wasn’t good enough,” he says. “I need to fix ’em – fix their issues. So correction was a natural fit.” Holliday worked 13 years for the N.C. Department of Corrections, primarily as a probation officer, earning a state award as Young Correctional Officer of the Year in 1984.

Three years later he made the transition to banking, eventually working his way up to a vice presidency with First Citizens. Experience with the Greensboro Jaycees groomed him for politics, and Holliday took a seat on the city council in 1995, then became mayor in 1999. Since he stepped down as mayor, he became president and CEO of the Carolina Theatre. His experience at Guilford, he says, taught him to recognize “the value of consensus-building, which was one of my ways of governing.”

Maggie Jeffus

The same holds true for the soft-spoken Jeffus, who began her first term in the General Assembly in 1991 and has served continuously since ’97: “I’m not of the Quaker faith, but I agree with a lot of their philosophy. I’d much rather sit around the table and talk with someone and try to come to consensus than argue and fuss.” The retired teacher earned an education degree at Guilford, and won major teaching awards over the course of her career, including Greensboro Teacher of the Year for the 1972-73 school year and Phi Delta Kappa Outstanding Teacher of the Year for 1997-98 at the end of her career in the Greensboro public schools. Her list of honors and community-service work tests the limits of the average inkjet printer.

Like Coble, she started at a former state teaching college before transferring to Guilford. In Jeffus’ case it was Woman’s College, now UNCG. “I was not real happy at WC,” says Jeffus, sitting behind the desk in her compact office upstairs at the General Assembly in Raleigh. “I was a town student – I think that was part of it. I didn’t live on campus, and I didn’t feel a part of the school. And I sort of felt like a number, not a name.”

Jeffus got married around the time she transferred to Guilford, and took night classes for several years at the downtown campus. Eventually she took day classes on the main campus to pick up courses not available in night school. “I loved it when I got out to the main campus,” she says. Jeffus got much more personal attention at Guilford. The professors understood the needs of adult students with families, she says, and occasionally her science professor, William E. Fulcher, would give her gifts to take home to her children.

Billy Ragsdale

The kind of family atmosphere and personal attention Jeffus experienced at Guilford extended to Ragsdale’s extended family. “All of my daddy’s family were Quakers, so we’ve been associated with Guilford since day one,” says Ragsdale sitting behind his desk among work samples and golf and duck-hunting decorations at Oakdale Cotton Mills in Jamestown.

The family business has operated continuously since 1865, weathering storms that have shuttered many area textile mills in recent decades. During the interview, Ragsdale pauses to take a phone call from someone who has heard the mill is closing and wants to buy its dyeing equipment. “Business is not as good as it was, but we’re not anywhere near closing,” he says into the phone.

Ragsdale is a familiar name around Jamestown, showing up on the local high school and YMCA, and routinely over the years in the mayor’s office. Ragsdale earned a degree in economics at Guilford. “My daddy’s family, all of ’em went to Guilford,” Ragsdale says. “My grandmother and all her family went to Guilford. We jokingly call it Quaker Tech.” But he needed a little persuading: “I wanted to go to Carolina, but my daddy told me I ought to go to Guilford.”

Family connections didn’t make much difference on his transcript, unfortunately. “My main thing was just get in and get out,” Ragsdale says. “I didn’t like school much. I mean, I liked to socialize and all that, but I wasn’t much of a student.” The campus was also much quieter in those days than the one Ragsdale sees these days as a member of the Board of Trustees: “Kids back in those days were so much more controlled than they are now, and that was right before the hippie movement. Some of that was beginning to emerge, but it was just a different culture back then. Kids were taught respect.”

While the campus had yet to become the hotbed of political activism and protest it would turn into later, Ragsdale says the lessons he learned about diversity and respect carried over into his political career: “Guilford was very diverse then. We had kids from Kenya there, we had a lot of different nationalities. We were always taught in Quaker families that everybody had the light of God within ‘em, so you respected other people. You respected where they came from and what their plight was in life.”

 

Huffman is a journalist and freelance writer living in Burlington, N.C.

 

GENERATION NEXT:

JEFF THIGPEN

photo by Julie Knight

“When you’re young, you want to change the world,” says Jeff Thigpen ’93. “And you feel like, ‘Bring it on, I can do it.’... You have this desire to be out front and to be known and to be relevant, to make a big difference quickly. Guilford does that to you, you know.”

He would know. When Thigpen successfully ran for the Guilford County Board of Commissioners in 1998, he was the youngest commissioner in the county’s history, and one of the youngest elected officials in the state. This year, Thigpen’s running unopposed for his second term as register of deeds.

Thigpen may have seemed like a political newcomer, but his activism dated back to his college days. While a Guilford student, Thigpen organized a protest against a proposed hazardous waste incinerator near his hometown of Burgaw, N.C., and won. He worked with community organizations providing services to the poor. And, he says, he learned the value of asking what he calls “the right questions” and truly listening to the answers.

It was listening that got Thigpen into his first tight spot politically, when he was arrested on Martin Luther King Day, 1996, at a boycott of a Greensboro K-Mart that had been fined by federal agencies over labor abuses. “I figured at that moment that I had chucked my young political career to the curb, that I was pretty much through,” he says. But, the affected workers reminded him of his parents and other friends back in his Eastern North Carolina hometown – “working class people who just want a job and make a decent living … I felt like I would be stepping all over them if I didn’t make a stand.”

The K-Mart protests taught Thigpen the value of building a coalition across communities, an ability that came in handy in his campaign to unseat a longtime incumbent. The Business-Pulpit Forum Work Group, of which he was a part, brought together church and business leaders to cooperate in defining economic disparity as a community issue. “It was really the first time that I know of that major big business folks were in the same room having a discussion about
our economy with welfare mothers,” he says of one town hall meeting.

Thigpen believes passionately in the power of dialog to effect change. “Our community will be defined by how we engage conflict in a way that we can both understand it and move through it … in a way that makes our community grow,” he says. “In the world we live in, sometimes things are not what they seem. A lot of us have preconceived assumptions ... We stereotype people in ways we want to see them, based on how we want them to be, rather than who they are and what their experiences are.” -S.B.