News Release

Note: For photos of the award recipients, see end of release.

Board of Trustees honors four alumni with Davie Award

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees on Wednesday presented four alumni with the William Richardson Davie Award, the board’s highest honor.

Chancellor James Moeser and the trustees honored the following recipients at a Carolina Inn dinner: Rep. Joe Hackney of Chapel Hill; Mike Overlock of Greenwich, Conn.; Ken Thompson of Charlotte; and Patricia Timmons-Goodson of Fayetteville.

Established by UNC’s Board of Trustees in 1984, the Davie Award is named for the Revolutionary War hero who is considered the father of the university. It recognizes extraordinary service to the university or society.

A Chatham County native, Hackney is serving his 14th term in the N.C. House of Representatives. He has served as speaker pro tem, house majority leader and house democratic leader and was elected speaker of the house in January 2007. He is consistently rated by his peers as one of the 10 most effective legislators, according to the N.C. Center for Public Policy Research. He is president-elect of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Hackney attended N.C. State University before transferring to UNC to earn a degree in political science, graduating with honors in 1967. He then earned his law degree at UNC in 1970. He served as an assistant district attorney in Orange and Chatham counties and later he and his UNC ’67 and UNC School of Law ’70 classmate Robert Epting founded their own firm, Epting & Hackney, in Chapel Hill. He has practiced law there for 33 years.

Mike Overlock earned his bachelor’s degree in economics at UNC in 1968. After serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, he earned a master’s degree in business administration at Columbia University in 1973. That year, he joined Goldman, Sachs and Co., where he spent his entire career. He headed the firm’s mergers and acquisitions department from 1985 to 1996; served on the management committee and was co-chairman of the investment banking division from 1990 to 1996. He became a limited partner in 1996 and a senior director in 1999.

Overlock has brought that wealth and breadth of experience to serve his alma mater as co-chairman of the Carolina First Campaign, UNC’s fundraising drive set to end Dec. 31. The campaign has received $2.27 billion in commitments, including $333.3 million to support students, $394.8 million to support faculty, $572.2 million for research, $598.5 million for strategic initiatives and $179.6 million for building needs. Carolina First supports UNC’s vision to be the nation’s leading public university.

Ken Thompson is chairman, president and CEO of Wachovia Corp., the fourth largest bank in the United States. He grew up in Rocky Mount and entered UNC in 1969 as a Morehead Scholar and later received master’s degree in business administration from Wake Forest University. He has held his current position with Wachovia since 2000.

Thompson has served UNC in many roles. He was on the class of 1973’s 20-year reunion committee, the Board of Visitors and the Arts and Sciences Foundation board of directors. Currently he is a trustee of the Morehead-Cain Foundation and is a member of Carolina First’s Morehead Alumni Campaign Committee and Regional Steering Committee.

Patricia Timmons-Goodson is the first African-American woman to serve as an associate justice on the N.C. Supreme Court. In 1984, she was the first African-American woman to serve as a judge in Cumberland County. In 1998, she was the first African-American woman elected to any state appellate court. In 2002, she served on the first three-judge panel of the N.C. Court of Appeals to be made up of all African-American women.

Born in Florence, S.C., Timmons-Goodson earned her undergraduate and law degrees at UNC, in 1976 and 1979, respectively. She began her legal career as a prosecutor and then was a legal aid lawyer at Lumbee Legal Services. In 1984, Gov. Jim Hunt appointed her to the District Court bench in Cumberland County, where she spent more than 12 years. In 1997, Timmons-Goodson was appointed to the court of appeals and was elected to the seat the next year. She resigned in the fall of 2005, with the plan of entering private practice, but Gov. Mike Easley called just a few months later to say she was his choice for a vacant seat on the N.C. Supreme Court. In 2006, she was elected to the same seat.

Photo URLs:
Hackney: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/releases/hackney_joe_2.JPG
Overlock: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/releases/overlock_mike.jpg
Thompson: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/releases/thompson_ken2.JPG
Timmons-Goodson: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/releases/timmons_goodson_patricia.jpg

UNC Development Communications contact: Scott Ragland, (919) 962-0027 or scott_ragland@unc.edu
News Services contact: Lisa Katz, (919) 962-2093, lisa_katz@unc.edu