72

REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

To the Board of Trustees,

The University of North Carolina:

I have the honor herewith to submit my report for the current
year.

In this period of recovery and reëxamination the colleges and
universities should lead, not lag, in the intellectual and spiritual quest
for a less haphazard economic order and a fairer way of life for all
people. As a part of the plan of reconstruction, let us make fresh
adaptations of the opportunities of our consolidated university to
meet great human needs in this most hopeful adventure of our genera-
tion. While in the mood to look forward on new social frontiers, let
us as a resource of recovery look back and remember the rocks out
of which our three institutions were hewn, the people of the state
who have sustained and given them hope through all the years of
their foundation, struggle, and growth, and the unlisted men and
women whose lives and spirit will always be deeply interfused in the
University of North Carolina.

As eminently representative of that unbroken line, Dr. Julius I.
Foust, for more than a score of years President of the Woman's
College, is with us this morning bringing to this present hour an
indomitable will in his work of high devotion and faithful public
service. We also rejoice to say that Dr. Eugene C. Brooks, for a
decade President of the State College of Agriculture and Engineer-
ing, is happily restored to the College and the University after a
gallant fight to carry on his devoted life and distinguished leadership
in our state. From that day in the late eighteenth century when the
youthful Revolutionary soldier and co-framer of the Federal Consti-
tution, William R. Davie, stood under the poplar in the woods on a
hill in Orange and envisaged the first state university to open its
doors in America, on through the days of the foundational masonry
of Pullen, Polk, Leazer, Primrose, Winslow, Alexander, Bailey,
Tucker, Upchurch, Fries, Winston, Williams, Charles W. Dabney,
Walter H. Page, and the other pioneer Wataugans, legislators, and
citizens west of Raleigh and of Charles D. McIver and his colleagues
west of Greensboro, down to this hour of the twentieth century, we