LEXINGTON, Mass. (July 16, 2025) – Durham native David Gergen died last week after serving a vast array of roles as a political insider: Communication advisor to four presidents, editor of U.S. News & World Report, CNN commentator, Duke and Harvard instructor.
Gergen is remembered for his civility – a calm yet somehow forceful delivery. He worked for Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton – yes, both Rs and Ds. He is credited with feeding Ronald Reagan the critical line in a 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”1
IN AN INTERVIEW with Public Ed Works from Cambridge, Massachusetts nine years ago, Gergen emphasized the importance of supporting higher education in North Carolina.
His comments at the time were prompted by the adoption of HB2, the “bathroom bill” that required North Carolinians to use the restroom of the sex they were assigned at birth.
But his observations were more broadly prophetic about the state of higher education in North Carolina – and for that matter, the nation – today.
IN THE 1960s, “North Carolina was in the forefront of moving to become what they call the New South, moving from the Old South to the New South,” Gergen says in the accompanying video from that interview.
“I see the progress now being threatened by a growing sense that North Carolina wants to go backward, not forward, into the 21st century.”
In response to the new law, both students and would-be faculty voiced growing doubts about coming to North Carolina, Gergen said.
“And faculty members – whom we’ve attracted in great numbers – you want the engineering faculty coming in, you want the science faculty coming in, we want the liberal arts faculty coming in. And if they decide, you know, ‘This is a state that has a certain amount of intolerance, I’m not so sure I want to there’ – when North Carolina, as it has been recently, shows up in headlines, ‘North Carolina and Mississippi do the same thing together,’ that is going backwards for us in terms of our reputation.
“This is a time when we need to be pulling together and finding a solution, a creative solution. And I do think there are creative solutions.”
“North Carolina is right on the edge where we’ve had such a good reputation. Let’s not go back, let’s not go backward,” he said.
“These anecdotes are piling up now. People that we’d love to recruit into North Carolina, and for whatever reason, they’re saying they’re not quite so sure. We’re going to unfortunately hear more of that…. This is a time to rally behind the institutions of higher education, whether they’re public or private.
“I cannot stress enough that in an innovative economy, when so much emphasis is placed on knowledge and breakthroughs in the life sciences and digital economy and energy and so many different areas, where our engineering schools are all important, where our science labs are so important, where our medical facilities are so important, the medical research.
“We have to have the very best public and private universities in the country in order to attract the very best people.”
Again, prophetic.
David Gergen, we could use your soothing yet insistent voice again right now.
Rest in peace, friend.
1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2025/07/11/david-gergen-dead/; https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/11/politics/david-gergen-dead.
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