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THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA

very nature of the University and as one of the purposes of con-
solidation, is at Chapel Hill. The Institute for Research in Social
Science is a center of social research and, with the University
Press, is vital to a whole region and distinguished over the world.
With the allocation at the master's level of graduate work and
research in home economics and secretarial science to the Woman's
College, this work on the graduate level there constitutes for its
brief period in the number of graduate students a total above the
totals of its previous history. With the natural and functional
allocation of graduate work and research at the master's level in
agriculture, forestry, agricultural economics, engineering, textiles,
and vocational education to State College, and with the new con-
centration in these fields, State College has readjusted its gradu-
ate and research program and is on the advance upward in these
fields, basic to the life and income of our people.

AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH

We are calling attention now to the crisis in agricultural re-
search. North Carolina has long lagged in its direct support of
agricultural research with, it is fair to assume, a resulting annual
loss of many millions of dollars to the farmers and people of
North Carolina. With the loss of the able director and eminent
plant breeder, Dr. R. Y. Winters, we now need to call as his suc-
cessor an agricultural scientist and statesman of the first rank.
We need larger annual support of the present work. We lack mod-
ern scientific laboratories. We need a larger staff for basic re-
search in the soils, plants, animals, resources, and the rural-social
situations and potentialities of this state and region. Unless we
can make decisive commitment of purpose about these things we
will fail to get the combination of agricultural scientist and rural
statesmen needed by the farm men and women of North Caro-
lina, who meantime pay the price in lower income and welfare as
a toll out of the life and income of a whole state. This University
has come face to face with no greater scientific opportunity.
A million dollars, as a beginning endowment for agricultural
research at State College and as a basis of larger state and federal
support, would, at this critical turn in the Southern economic
tides, be a scientific investment capable of producing as large
economic and social returns for North Carolina as any investment
ever made in our history.