Ron Bergquist

Currently an Adjunct Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ron Bergquist is the son of a couple who met and married in Australia during the Second World War. Born in Idaho in 1946, Mr. Bergquist attended elementary school in Hawaii and Delaware, and high school and university in Texas. Upon his graduation with a BA in Geography from the University of Texas at Austin in 1968, he was commissioned through Air Force ROTC as a Second Lieutenant. He began his Air Force career with two tours in Vietnam, was assigned to stateside duties in Texas, Virginia, Alabama, and at the Pentagon, and spent eight years in three different assignments in Germany. It was during his assignment to a Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron in Texas that he met his wife, Drucilla, a Virginia native.

In 1976, he was selected for advanced study to become a Middle East Area Specialist and in 1978 he graduated with distinction from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California with an MA in National Security Affairs. He also was an honor graduate of the Basic Arabic Course at the Defense Language Institute in the same year. His years of Area Specialist duty coincided with the Iranian Revolution, the Tehran Embassy hostage crisis, and the Iran-Iraq War. In 1981, he was selected as a Research Associate for the Air Staff; the result of this assignment was the book The Role of Airpower in the Iran-Iraq War, published by Air University Press in 1988. During the first Gulf War in 1991, he was the J-2 (Director of Intelligence) for Joint Task Force Proven Force which operated over Northern Iraq from Incirlik Air Base, Turkey. His final assignment in the Air Force was as the Assistant Commandant of the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center at the Presidio of Monterey, California.

After over 26 years in the Air Force, Mr. Bergquist retired on 1 January 1995 at the rank of Colonel and moved to Pinebluff, North Carolina. In November 1995, he was elected to the Town Board of Commissioners and served a two-year term as the Mayor pro tem and as the Commissioner for Parks and Recreation.

He began his second stint as a graduate student in January 1997 and was accepted into the SILS Master's Program in March of the same year. He graduated with a Master of Science in Library Science degree in May 1999 and began his doctoral studies in August of the same year. During the last year of his MSLS work and the first year of his doctoral studies, Mr. Bergquist was a Graduate Research Assistant. From the summer of 2000 to the spring of 2006, he was a Teaching Fellow, teaching courses to both undergraduate and graduate students in the School of Information and Library Science. After earning his Doctor of Philosophy in Library and Information Science in May 2006, in the summer of 2006

he became an adjunct professor.