Biography | Chuck Robbins — The Mathematics Degree He Took Beside This Old Well

People treat Chuck Robbins as a sales chief who arrived at Cisco already formed.

The dated record starts on this quad.

He entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1983 and left in 1987 with a bachelor of science in mathematical sciences, with a concentration in computer science.

Cisco's own executive page and his later alumni citation both print that degree, not a business-school diploma.

A content-farm biography sometimes swaps the college of arts and sciences for Kenan-Flagler. The university's own commencement program for Sunday, 10 May 1987, does not.

That program names Kenan Memorial Stadium as the gathering ground and Peter Ueberroth as the speaker.

The work that earned the diploma sat a few hundred yards southwest, in Phillips Hall at 120 East Cameron Avenue, then the home of mathematics and physics.

The Old Well in front of South Building is the image every Tar Heel postcard still uses.

It is also the public pin a visitor can stand on without walking into a classroom.

He had come from Rocky Mount Senior High School on South Tillery Street, a campus that opened in 1953 and later gave way to Rocky Mount Middle School when the high school moved to Bethlehem Road in 2012.

After Chapel Hill he did not go west.

He went to Charlotte and wrote bank software for five years.

The math degree is the piece the later CEO story keeps skipping.

Photo: Jack a lanier, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons