CHAPEL HILL – Shortly after Tom Ross was named President of the University of North Carolina System in 2011, he got a call from former NC Senate Majority Leader Tony Rand.

He expected congratulations. That’s not what he got.

“Remember, nothing is more important to this State than our University,” Rand said. “Don’t mess it up.”

That bluntness was typical of Rand, a proud Tar Heel who served 11 terms in the Senate and died last week of thyroid and skin cancer at age 80.

In tandem with then-Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight, Rand pushed from the mid-1990s through 2009 for major university funding, including the $180 million NC Cancer Hospital at UNC-Chapel Hill and $50 million a year for the University Cancer Research Fund.

“Tony Rand was one of my very best friends and a true giant of a person,” Basnight said last week. “He had a deep appreciation for his family, his friends, his UNC Tar Heels, the Senate, and the state he truly loved to call his home….

“We will truly miss his sense of humor, his brilliance, and his compassion for his fellow human beings.”

“Nobody – nobody – has ever done as much for the University as Tony Rand,” said Bob Eubanks, a close friend and former Chair of the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees. “And a lot of it was done quietly.”

WHETHER IT WAS the University or the Senate itself, Rand believed in institutions and their traditions.

“He’d make sure the University – not just Chapel Hill, but the System – got taken care of,” said Richard Stevens, who served in the Senate with Rand and is now Chair of the Carolina Board of Trustees.

Rand could be a fierce partisan. Yet he also built relationships across the aisle.

When Basnight and Rand proposed to make Stevens, a Republican, co-chair of the Education Appropriations Subcommittee that oversaw roughly half the state budget, they received pushback from other Democrats.

But Rand told the Democratic Caucus: “Richard’s not really a member of the Republican Party. He’s a member of the University Party.”

Similarly, when Republican Sen. Ham Horton of Winston-Salem was out after a bout of chemotherapy during an overnight session in August 2005 that gave Democrats an opportunity to push through a state lottery, “Tony was like, ‘Nope – that’s not how we’re gonna play this,’” Stevens said.

His mastery of the legislative process was unsurpassed.

As they listened to debate in the Senate over the eventual passage of the lottery, Stevens nodded toward Rand and told then-Rep. Margaret Dickson, “We’re here playing checkers, and that man’s playing chess in 3-D.”

His floor speeches were legendary – one hand holding the mike, the other often twirling in a circular motion, as if to keep rhythm.

His occasional outbursts of “My Gawd!!!” could easily stretch to three syllables. It was a cruel irony that thyroid cancer later robbed him of a rich baritone that sounded uncannily similar to Foghorn Leghorn.

BUT HE ALSO made it fun.

“The First Rule of Holes is when you’re in one, quit diggin’!” he would occasionally declare, especially during budget shortfalls.

His glorious obituary noted that “one of Tony’s most enjoyed roles was awarding (and sometimes being awarded) the Oxmeter, which was frequently bestowed upon the Senator who had become ‘intoxicated with the exuberance of their own verbosity’ during a speech on the Senate floor.”

The Oxmeter is an awkward assemblage of random plumbing fixtures, complete with a temperature/pressure gauge, that’s presented to a senator a day after a grandiloquent delivery on the Senate floor to remind the loquacious orator that he or she is full of bovine effluvium.

Rand was passionate about Carolina athletics. So much so, his obituary noted, that when Gov. Mike Easley issued an official proclamation in 2001 to honor Duke’s NCAA basketball championship, it read:

“The Duke University Blue Devils have one of the most prestigious programs in all of college athletics, and the accomplishments of this year’s team have the respect and pride of all North Carolinians (except for Tony Rand).”

Rand kept his sense of humor to the end. He texted Stevens a couple months ago that he wanted to get some barbecue into one of the pouches that were squeezed into his feeding tube.

Stevens texted back to tell Rand – who once killed a bill to name Lexington-style barbecue the official State Barbecue –  to make sure it wasn’t Lexington barbecue.

“I shall be ever watchful,” Rand replied.

He also kept his sense of compassion.

Last week Rand texted former Senate Rules Chair Tom Apodaca – another Republican with whom Rand spoke several times a week – a letter of recommendation for a young lady to be admitted to the UNC School of Law. 

Apodaca contacted the student’s mother, who said she had no idea Rand had written such a letter.

“He was taking care of things as only he can,” Apodaca said.

Anthony Eden Rand’s university experience informed his own life, and he knew it could inform the lives of countless others. You can read here – or better yet, listen – as he describes his Carolina experience in that rich, sonorous voice.

“To me, Carolina was about learning to live, and to do so with some degree of passion, interacting with all types and kinds of people,” he said.

“I was a product of a small agricultural town in the Old South…. My Carolina experience was about the larger world and about what you could do in it. And this isn’t about politics — this is about the rule of law, the administration of justice and the quality of one’s existence, about the guaranteeing of equal rights, about accepting people far different from anything I had ever seen before for just who they were … and, by the way, I learned a little something.”