Parker proudly defends accessibility and inclusivity

As a boy, David Parker dreamed of being a crusading reporter, digging up facts and writing stories that would change the world.

A year away from 60, and a few months from retirement as Carolina’s interim general counsel, Parker looks back on his youthful “black and white” thinking with the wistfulness of a man who has spent the past 30 years navigating a world colored in shades of gray.

The grandiose notion of becoming a muckraker, Parker said, was planted in his imagination by his father, a small-town newspaperman in Clinton who came to Carolina in the late 1940s on the G.I. Bill. It was here at Carolina his father met the history graduate student he would marry.

“He was the only one of eight siblings able to go to college, and that was only because the government took what was then an extraordinary step and made education possible for returning vets,” Parker said. “My mother was recently liberated from four years at an all-female college and had come to a place where there were so many men and so few women that she had dates just about every night.

“They both worked several jobs at a time and didn’t have a dime to spare, but they found real happiness and opportunity at Carolina and they have passed that love for Chapel Hill to all of their kids.”

And it is here that, at one time or another, all five of their children would spend time finding their own paths. Finding his, Parker said, took longer than he expected.

He arrived as a freshman in 1976, but dropped out at the end of his sophomore year “because I just didn’t know what I was doing with myself.”

He went to work as a reporter in a small newspaper in LaFayette, Georgia, where he stumbled upon his true vocation. But to his surprise, it wasn’t journalism.

“Every story that I worked on that I was really fascinated by had a lawyer in the middle of it who knew a lot of things I didn’t,” Parker said. “I thought: ‘These are the people who really know what is going on.’ So I think it was my natural snoopiness that led me to be a lawyer.”

He returned to Carolina and finished his degree in English in 1980; he returned the following year for law school and earned his law degree in 1984. While learning to be a lawyer, he also figured out – or finally accepted – that he was gay. “When I was an undergraduate, I didn’t tell anybody,” Parker said. “I couldn’t even tell myself.”

He spent the next 10 years in Raleigh – the first two at a small private practice, the next eight as a lawyer for the state Attorney General’s Office, where he represented the North Carolina Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services, the UNC system and the Department of Public Instruction.

Through this work, Parker discovered how law, exerted from the inside, could serve as a lever to effect social change. It was through his work representing state universities that Parker met Susan Ehringhaus, the general counsel at Carolina, who offered him a job in 1994. “She was, at that point, probably the smartest person I ever met,” Parker said. “I think she thought of me as trainable – and she took a chance on me.”

He spent nearly a decade specializing in law involving technology transfer and research contracting, including doing legal work to help launch Carolina’s first start-up, Inspire Pharmaceuticals.

“One of the wonderful things about coming back here was that I got a chance to learn about the science and research that I didn’t know much about when I was a student,” Parker said. “It was just an amazing revelation to me to find out how exciting it was and what people were doing and how interesting they were.”

When Ehringhaus left the University in 2002, Parker stepped in to perform the legal work she had been doing with the School of Medicine and the UNC Health Care System. In addition, he handled faculty personnel issues and ongoing work with the University’s research enterprise.

With his wide-ranging knowledge, Parker has been called on again and again to guide various offices through periods of transition – first as interim director of the Office of Technology Development, then as interim general counsel of the UNC Health Care System and, since January 2015, as interim general counsel for the University.

This last period, arguably, has been one of the most legally contentious in the University’s history, with a number of lawsuits tied to irregularities associated with athletics and the former Department of African and Afro-American Studies.

“Responding to them has been very trying and uncomfortable for people who love and understand the University and what we are about and who we are,” Parker said.

The values Carolina represents, Parker believes, are embodied in its commitment to accessibility – a commitment put under threat by a lawsuit the Students for Fair Admissions filed against Carolina and Harvard in November 2014. The lawsuit asserts Carolina engages in racially discriminatory undergraduate admissions practices in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Parker sees it differently.

Race, he said, is just one of an array of characteristics that the Admissions Office takes into account with each applicant. Is he or she from a rural county? From a poor family? A first-generation student?

“Considering this range of characteristics allows Admissions to create a student body that is truly reflective of the diverse society in which our students will live their lives,” Parker said. “That is not just the right thing to do legally. It is the right thing to do. I believe in it because it expresses what Carolina is and aspires to be.”

As a gay man, Parker added, he understands the concept of exclusion firsthand. And that understanding has given him the insight to be a better lawyer.

“Early in my life, I had to deal with being somebody who did not have the civil rights to be who I am,” Parker said. “That experience, I think, helped me to develop an attenuated grasp of how complex things can be.”

He and his husband, Robert Huls, have been together since 1991 but were not able to marry until three years ago. They adopted their daughter, Hallie, 14 years ago, when she was two days old.

The thought of retiring – to have more time to spend with his family – was something that Parker began contemplating about the time he and his husband wed.

He postponed retirement, though, when Chancellor Carol L. Folt asked him to serve as interim general counsel following the departure of Leslie Strohm in 2014. Parker will stay on until Mark W. Merritt takes over as general counsel in September. Going will not be easy, Parker knows.

“I’ve served under two brilliant general counsels who were great friends and mentors, and I’ve been able to work with amazing colleagues inside and outside of the Office of University Counsel,” Parker said.

Carolina will always mean a great deal to him and his entire family.

“The reason why I am here and am able to do what I do is because my parents got educations here that totally changed their lives and that made it possible for them to open all kinds of doors for us,” Parker said.

“The University just has this personal connection for me and I think I am an example of how it succeeds in lifting people up. I feel enormously grateful for that and for the opportunity that the Chancellor has given me over the last year and a half to serve the University as general counsel. It has been a great way to cap off my career.”