Forty years ago this month, at a low point in his political career, Jim Hunt had his best idea.

It became the Centennial Campus at North Carolina State University.

You can argue with “best.” He had plenty of good ideas and initiatives.

Like: Smart Start, raising teachers’ pay to the national average, the Primary Reading Program, National Board certification for teachers, gubernatorial veto and succession, the N.C. Biotechnology Center, the N.C. Microelectronics Center and the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics.

But it’s hard to beat the birth of a research and innovation campus that has produced thousands of new jobs, 200-plus new ventures, more than 1,500 patents and 600 new products – in fields including engineering, quantum computing, national security and plant science.

NCSU has produced this 40^th-anniversary video on the campus, which is home today to 70-some companies, government agencies and nonprofit organizations – and an equal number of academic units.

It was born in December 1984, the final weeks of Hunt’s second term as governor. He had just suffered a shattering loss to Jesse Helms in a Senate race that set national records for cost, bitterness and negativity.

Hunt, characteristically, went back to work. A farm boy, he believed in “plowing out to the end of the row.”

One day, a delegation of Raleigh developers and city officials led by then-Mayor Avery Upchurch came to see him in the Capitol. They had an idea: the State should sell the City the thousands of acres of land left vacant by the closing of Dix Hospital, so it could be developed for houses, shopping centers and the like.

When I interviewed him in 2007 for my book, Jim Hunt: A Biography, he talked about the meeting:

“I listened to them politely, but the whole time I was thinking this is not what we need. But they gave me the idea that something ought to be done; we ought not let that land just sit there.”

He knew N.C. State needed more land to handle its growth.

“I had my head into this whole idea of new technologies, knowing what was happening to our traditional industries. Where are the jobs of the future going to be? … I knew we had to put our emphasis on research and development and science and technology….

“The minute those people walked out of the office, I thought, I know what we ought to do with that land. We ought to use this for a big research campus for North Carolina State University. (It was) one of those lightbulb moments….

“You just don’t get a piece of land like that at a great research university very often. You needed to have a place where we could expand into the research areas and science, a place high-tech industries could literally come and build next door to the campus. I wanted the scientists in the companies to park in the parking next to the scientists from N.C. State. I wanted them to have lunch together and have that cross-fertilization of ideas.”

Hunt spent much of December making it happen. He made an initial gift of 335 acres. He teed up the Council of State and incoming Governor Jim Martin to add thousands more acres.

I was still reeling from the Helms race, so I didn’t do a good job of presenting and explaining the idea to the press. The News & Observer wrote editorials raising questions and cautions about such a giant step.

Time and events resolved those concerns.

Today, I drive by Centennial Campus and remember Hunt’s bright idea cutting through those gloomy December days 40 years ago.

It’s only right that the most spectacular building on the campus is the James B. Hunt, Jr. Library, which Time called “the library of the future” in 2020.

Centennial Campus is a testament to how an active, forward-looking leader can shape the future.

It’s a lesson for anyone in – or interested in – politics and public life: You can make the world a better place, even in the worst of times.