Simply put, his strengths are insight and vision.

The new chief academic officer and dean of Catawba College gets that terse but glowing assessment from one of his colleagues at Wingate University, where he served as provost before joining Catawba.

Dr. William Christie, a serious-minded scholar who has already challenged the Catawba faculty to identify their dreams and then, just as Thoreau advised, build the structure to support them, tends to raise the bar wherever he goes. He is willing to work hard, to prepare well, to approach each task with a thoroughness that leaves no point unexamined. And he expects everyone else to work just as hard and prepare just as thoroughly.

When he arrived at Wingate in 1993, President Jerry McGee told the faculty that when people looked back on Wingate’s progress from some point in the future, they would date the significant turning point to the coming of Christie.

“He came with real high expectations,” says Dr. Edwin Bagley, chair of the department of religion and philosophy, “and I would say he fulfilled those expectations.”

A scholar himself, Christie respects the life of scholarship, Bagley says. “He supported us when we made attempts to engage our disciplines at significant levels. He put the weight of his personal activity and his office behind it.”

Bagley describes Christie as a loyal friend who stands by people; a person with a good sense of humor; and an extremely hopeful person. “He sees possibilities where some others don’t,” Bagley says, “and he pursues those possibilities until he brings them about.”

At the University of Arizona, where Christie began his administrative career, he saw one such possibility. A Mexican American student who was on the verge of suspension fell under his purview. “He was the first in his family who had even come near the door of a college,” Christie says, “but there was something there that showed potential.”

With Christie’s help, the student improved his grades. “The day he graduated, he opened a whole new world of possibilities not just for himself but for his entire family,” Christie says. “I was very, very proud of him.”

Greatest accomplishment

Dr. Martha Asti, assistant academic dean at Wingate, says Christie helped the Wingate faculty find an academic direction. Reflecting on the personal change he experienced under Christie’s leadership, one faculty member wrote Christie a note after he accepted the position at Catawba. “I think I was on the threshold of becoming another small-college hack teacher until you came along and helped me revive my research interests,” he said. “I’m not out of danger yet, but there is hope, and I owe much to you.”

“That,” Christie says, “epitomizes my greatest accomplishment as an administrator.” He is also proud of the fact that he established a system at Wingate that now operates well without him. “I put my stamp on a lot of things there,” he says, “but when I stepped down, the place didn’t miss a beat. I had made myself totally dispensable. I was very proud of that because the school is always bigger than the individual.”

Christie describes his leadership style as “maximum freedom, maximum accountability.”

“I want people to know what their jobs are, to know the expectations,” he says, “to know how their jobs relate to other people’s jobs, to know their mission and the collective mission of the institution. And then I want them to do their jobs. I don’t want to tell them how to do their jobs. I want them to do things the way they think is best and produce the necessary results.”

Christie is the quintessential professional, and that professionalism clearly gets the job done. But it also keeps the inner Bill Christie at arm’s length. This only child of a telephone worker and a high school English teacher chooses, for the most part, to keep his own counsel.

He grew up near Frederick, Md., where his only associates during the early years were adults; where he spent hours reading anything he could get his hands on; where he sat evening after evening on the bank of the railroad tracks near his home and watched the National Limited steam toward Washington; where he loathed school and loved baseball.

School may not have captured Christie’s attention, but his mother planted the seed of scholarship in her son. “I have gotten my scholarly interests, my love of literature, my love of music, and, in some ways, my idealism from my mother,” he says.

Those loves propelled him to Washington and Lee University for his undergraduate degree and to Yale University, where he earned two master’s degrees and a doctorate.

Window to the soul

Christie’s surroundings hint at what feeds his soul. His desk bears pictures: a photo of his father, a warm, open, understanding man who remained Christie’s hero until the day he died 16 years ago; his sons — William III “Will,” who is pursuing a master’s degree in economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Sam, a sophomore pre-med major at UNC-Chapel Hill. “I’m extremely proud of both of them,” Christie says, “and it is important to me to know they are important to each other.”

The music on the CD player and the art on the wall also provide a window into Christie’s soul. Walk into his office on the second floor of Hedrick Hall and you’ll likely hear Haydn’s “Te Deum in C Major” offering a vigorous choral backdrop to his preparation for a strategic planning session.

A print of John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral hangs directly behind his desk, along with a cast of Angel with Horn from Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, and a reproduction of a seventh-century Irish crucifix — all sure signs that an unabashed anglophile inhabits this office.

And then there’s the tea on the credenza. Loose tea only, of course.

His understated comment, “I’m a tea drinker,” doesn’t do his passion justice. This is a man who travels to London for his tea. He is particularly fond of a Badamtam variety of Darjeeling from Whittards of Chelsea; a Fukien Province black tea from Harrod’s; several Szechwan varieties from Fortnum and Mason. But he’ll also send off to Foojoy’s in San Francisco and Stash in Oregon for oolong and Ceylon teas.

“I go scouring for good tea varieties all over the place,” he says.

While tea was not the driving force, Christie has traveled to England three times this year. Admittedly, that’s a bit much, even for him. But the isles draw him again and again. One of England’s allures is the rich offering of cathedrals — true salve for this Anglican at heart. “There is something about cathedral worship in England that you just can’t find anywhere else,” Christie says. “I’ve never been to England without taking in at least two or three services at St. Paul’s.” This comes from a man who once considered entering a Baptist seminary, a man who — without hesitation — lists God first when he talks about the things that are important to him. Then he backtracks a little. “To say that spirituality is important to me almost makes it sound as if I’m holding myself up as some especially religious creature, which I’m not,” he says. “I don’t like creating that impression.”

Integrity of life

He explains. “What is important to me is the integrity of life, by which I mean I do not like a life lived in compartments. I want my spiritual life to inform my work; I want my scholarly interests to inform my spiritual life. I want all the various parts of my life to feed one another. In a way, it would be difficult to understand me and my thoughts about my religious faith, for example, without understanding my views on scientific method and chaos and complexity theory. It’s all of a piece.”

Religious beliefs also inform his approach to individuals. “People are children of God,” he says, “so I am very much concerned to see that they have every opportunity to develop as children of God in whatever way they and God find correct and appropriate.”

Growth is important to Christie — personal, professional, emotional and spiritual growth.

So are relationships. “There’s an old Quaker saying: ‘Look for God in people and speak to that,’ ”he says.

He hardly pauses before the disclaimer rears its head again. “I feel almost embarrassed saying this,” he says. “It could come across as making me sound especially virtuous, and I am not especially virtuous.”

Christie seems naturally drawn to the Anglican Church, but those Anglican leanings emerged later in life. Calling himself “a self-contained ecumenical movement,” he has more than a nodding acquaintance with a number of denominations. “I was baptized a Presbyterian by a Methodist minister,” he begins. “Until I was 7, I attended an Episcopal Church with my father. Then my Episcopal father and Presbyterian mother compromised by becoming Baptist.”

He has also attended Evangelical Lutheran and Disciples of Christ churches and placed his sons in Catholic schools. Now, however, he is a regular communicant in an Episcopal Church — the American equivalent of Anglicanism.

Christie has high hopes for Catawba. In the coming year alone, he plans to increase the opportunities for foreign study for students; strengthen strategic planning and assessment; encourage more professional development activities among the faculty; and strengthen peer evaluation among the faculty.

Mostly, though, he wants the faculty to dream. “I want the faculty to build their castles in the air and then to plan their foundations and lay them out solidly,” he says. “I want them to plan and share their dreams and work together to create a shared vision of what the college can become.