Willis Jackson Phillips Jr., a senior at West Carteret High School, son of Willis and Diane Phillips of 120 Edwards Drive, Morehead City. He is captain of the varsity soccer team, vice presdient of the National Honor Society and a service flagman and speaker for the Boy Scouts. He is a first tenor sax player in the jazz band, a summertime inner-city youth tutor and a member of the varsity swim and water polo teams. The announcement was made April 16 by the John Motley Morehead Foundation trustees. Among the largest and most competitive scholarships at U.S. colleges and universities, the Morehead Award was the first non-athletic merit scholarship in the country and was patterned after the Rhodes Scholarship awarded for graduate work at England's Oxford University.
Criteria are academic achievement, leadership, moral force of character and physical vigor.
Recipients are chosen by merit and achievement, not financial need. During the same period, six Morehead Scholars were selected as Rhodes Scholars and seven as Luce Scholars. Eight have won Truman Scholarships and six have received National Science Foundation Fellowships. They now live in 47 states and on every continent. The Morehead program was begun in 1951 by the late John Motley Morehead III, an 1891 UNC-CH graduate who also gave the Morehead Planetarium to the university.