Elizabeth Amigh remembers her father, former North Carolina four-term governor Jim Hunt ’59, ’62 MS, as someone who never did anything halfway.

There were sports. She recalls how her dad took her to NC State games in Reynolds Coliseum as a child and how he insisted everyone listen to the postgame show on the radio during the car ride home afterward. And there was food. “When he was lucky, my mom would cook seafood for breakfast,” Amigh remembers. “That’s how much he loved seafood.

“He was just really super passionate about all the things in his life that meant a lot to him.”

Hunt died Dec. 18, 2025. He was 88 years old.

“He was just really super passionate about all the things in his life that meant a lot to him.”
– Elizabeth Amigh, daughter

The man of full measure left a legacy of improving the multitude of things for which he held passion. Hunt’s leadership as governor stressed science and technology as economic drivers and focused on changing education, something he stayed committed to after his four terms (1977 – 1985 and 1993 –2001) by starting the Hunt Institute in 2001.

NC State was one of those things, too — a place where Hunt twice served as student body president. He often credited the university with opening the world to him, allowing him to learn about the injustices of segregation and apartheid and understand the needs of the state’s K–12 education system. It also opened him up to the global world. A professor encouraged Hunt and his wife, Carolyn, to join a Ford Foundation program, taking them to Nepal to live for two years. Amigh casts the stay as sharpening Hunt’s worldview. “It shapes you as a person to be a force for good, even in a small way, in a small country that is part of a huge world we all care about,” she says.

Hunt later founded the university’s Institute for Emerging Issues in 1986 as a forum where ideas of the day could be explored. The James B. Hunt Jr. Library on Centennial Campus bears his name. That campus is a direct legacy of Hunt. He allotted the 355 acres in 1984 on which technology, entrepreneurship and partnerships now deliver the university — and the state — into the 21st century.

Of those legacies, Amigh says, “Centennial Campus would be the standout … he probably would have been most incredibly proud of.”

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