Pages That Need Review
Volume 01: July 11, 1932–July 8, 1938
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our institutions, a week before a game upon which depended a conference title, broke his training pledge. His teammates, as members of the Monogram Club, voted to report him and the coach dropped him from the team. This key player dropped out of college before his case came before the student council. His teammates, though deeply hurt for their lost leader but reënforced from an inner resource of honor and determination, won the Southern Conference championship. The student leaders genuinely feel that the honor principle must prevail in athletics as an educational part of college life.
THE HONOR PRINCIPLE IN ATHLETICS
Without the illusions of the holier than thou attitude, we hold that the athletes must stand on the same basis as other students in all matters of honor, scholastic work, scholarships, fees, rooms, loans, jobs, and any other financial aid. This simple principle of openness and equality of opportunity for all students in the matter of financial aid will basically decide the issue as to whether intercollegiate football is to be a spectacular racket or a college sport. Those responsible for policies of educational institutions should consider the effect on the athletes themselves of being favored with advance promises of special preferment with regard to scholarships, fees, loans, jobs, rooms, board, and other financial aid. The sincerity of our intercollegiate conference agreements is tested in the award by representative and responsible faculty committees of all scholarships, loans, jobs, and any other direct and indirect financial aid of the institution on a basis open equally to all students. The genuineness of the athletic ideals of the college can be more and more communicated to the alumni and the students. We should consider the effect on the students in general of being in institutions which sanction or connive at such so-called legitimate violations of the letter of conference agreements and the amateur spirit of college sports, not to mention the effect on educational institutions themselves in the very days of their surface prestige and outer glory. Is student life to revolve mainly around a circus subsidized and brought into the institutions or is it to center mainly in the teachers, library, classrooms, laboratories, historic buildings, shrines, trees, and flowers which are a part of the soil, the air, and the spirit of the place?
In this matter of athletics the colleges and universities are all
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brothers together in aspirations and frustrations. The ground we have gained we will not surrender. We are not yet what we would become, and we need the help of all. With the coöperation of trustees, alumni, faculty, and students, the colleges can preserve and advance themselves as educational centers in which intercollegiate sport will become a more representative by-product of the youthful zest for games and athletic skill, the spirit of sportsmanship, and a community-wide participation in athletic play. The colleges have no greater means of teaching than through their departments of physical education, gymnasiums, intramural and varsity fields, the lessons of the physical basis of intellectual vigor and the spiritually radiant personality, the satisfaction and values of clean living, the sportsmen's code of fair play, courage, self-sacrifice for the team and the college, mayhap to be translated into a social code of the higher loyalties of justice and coöperation among men.
PARTICIPATION OF THE FACULTIES
Closely related to this reexamination of athletics, the honor principle, student life, and self-government on the campus, is the reëxamination of the curriculum now under way in many of the best American colleges and universities. The faculties of our three institutions, upon your approval of my recommendation, have undertaken a reconsideration not only of the curriculum but also of student life and welfare, faculty community life and welfare, the college budgets, the quarter and semester systems, the comprehensive examinations, the administrative and clerical organization, and any other matters of vital concern to the three institutions and the one university. It was considered hazardous to turn the budget over to a faculty committee for their independent consideration, but so far there have been constructive suggestions and adjustments rather than violent explosions. These committees will report both to the respective faculties and to the university administrative council, from which summary reports will be brought by the president to the Board of Trustees. Paralleling these local studies, a survey is being made by a member of the faculty of the University, under the auspices of the General Education Board, of the curricular experiments under way in American colleges. Thus we shall have both a local and a national approach to the reconsideration of the curriculum. The promise of the several approaches and the ability and enthusiasm of many of the com-
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mittees already hard at work indicate the possibilities of vital contributions to the intellectual and spiritual consolidation of three distinctive institutions in one manifold university, to far-visioned plans for making a better state, and to higher educational thought and practice in the United States. I pray for the understanding to interpret these studies in a way worthy of the men and women out of whose lives they come.
INTER-INSTITUTIONAL AND STATE COMMITTEES
The work of these intra-institutional committees is to be followed by the studies of both inter-institutional and state-wide committees, which will make recommendations with regard to libraries, extension work, the departments of education, the summer school, graduate work, engineering, education, the textile school, agriculture, forestry, general resources and industries, home economics, fine arts, public health education, scientific and social research, and the larger educational, economic, social, aesthetic and spiritual building of our state and way of life.
The best thought and most coöperative spirit of all these committees; the long-run and the state-wide view of governors, legislators, trustees, alumni, faculties, students, and citizens; and many approaches, both experimental and arbitrary, will be required to work out the wisest and most useful consolidation. We must look within the institutions and within the state, out in the nation upon other institutions, back into the past, and forward with the direction of the times for the understanding that should guide the reconstruction of our university and our civilization.
CONTEMPORARY EXPERIENCES IN OTHER STATES
In the several American states in which consolidation of the state institutions of higher learning is now in process different procedures are being followed. We can all learn from each other. In one state the executive orders of a self-willed governor were decisive. In another state, action on the part of the board of trustees was peremptory to the point of informing whole faculties without notice previous to the letters of notification that their contracts ended with the college year. Though the contracts were renewed for the most part, the summary action was a shock to the dignity of a great profession and the morale
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of loyal and faithful groups of public servants. In one state a sharp differentiation was attempted, with sciences on the upper college level concentrated on one campus and liberal arts on the other, against the whole tendency and spirit of learning. Consolidation in one state looked to a submergence of institutions and an emergence and dominance of a system with a possible loss of precious treasures of locality and spirit. Destructive antagonisms, warring institutions, lowered morale, and state-rending factions followed in the wake of some of these consolidations. They will doubtless all come through with values for themselves and for universities in other American states.
North Carolina has come to consolidation by many approaches common to other states, and is working it out in ways common to them and distinctive of its own life and needs. North Carolina had in common with other states the drastic economies of the depression; the movement for the reorganization of state government and institutions; the initiative of the Governor, unique perhaps for his vision above the budgetary destructions of the hour and his impetuous enthusiasm for consolidation communicated to public leaders and the legislature; a state commission on consolidation; a notable survey for the commission by a staff of disinterested and distinguished experts from outside the state; the adaptation of the report of the experts by the commission, and further adaptations and actions by the consolidated board in whom rests the final authority. The Board of Trustees, with high regard for the many values of the experts' report, have acted upon their recommendations not as a fixed blueprint for arbitrary acceptance but as a chart for guidance, adaptation, modification, and further study in the development of consolidation.
North Carolina has drawn upon the experiences of several states and shares many of these procedures with other states, but its distinctive contribution to the process is the enlistment of especially equipped men and women in the three faculties for further study of the inner life and needs of the three institutions as they unite to serve the state. Consolidation thus becomes not merely an instrument for economy but fundamentally a process in education. We appreciate deeply the support of the Board of Trustees in its stand for an educational development as against any political manipulation of consolidation. Consolidation becomes more significant in the participation of committees of the faculties in the shaping of the slower processes
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looking to the consolidation and coördination of the inner resources of mind and spirit, standards and quality of work, libraries and laboratories, departments, courses, and research, and the intellectual and spiritual exchange between trustees, alumni, faculties, students, and citizens in a cooperative state plan for University education.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW TYPE OF STATE UNIVERSITY
In addition to this view of the studies within our three institutions and to this regard for the contemporary experiences in consolidation in other states, we should consider consolidation against its historic background of a threefold development.
In many of the oldest American states and in some of the youngest the traditional university, the college of agriculture and engineering, and the woman's college, were founded separately, grew to maturity independently and sometimes with antagonisms and cross purposes. In many of the younger states and in a few of the older ones the three types of institutions were from the beginning joined in one all-embracing state university on one campus. It is not our purpose to judge between these two different developments but to search for the values of both so that we can play our part more understandingly in a third development now under way in some of the oldest and some of the youngest American states. While based on a recognition of separate and independent foundations, their functional values, and their large capital investments in separate localities, this third movement in state higher education would consolidate their support, control, and direction in an intelligent plan for the differentiation and coordination of functions and consolidation of values in one greater state university. We have now emerging this third and new type of a state university to make its coordinated and consolidated contribution to the variety of higher education and to the vigor of American democracy.
THREE IN ONE AND ONE IN THREE
Our work is not a theoretical problem to be worked out on a clean sheet of paper unmarked by lines of investments, functions, history, traditions, loyalties, and spirit. We start with the fact that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the State College of Agriculture and Engineering at Raleigh, and the Woman's College at
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Greensboro are on separate campuses, twenty-nine, fifty-one, and eighty miles apart, representing investments of $9,702,356, $5,322,247, and $6,772,669; traditions reaching back a century and a half, fortynine, and forty-one years; living alumni numbering 17,332, 10,500, and 14,332; and student bodies of 2,413, 1,488, and 1,241. We do not stop there, however. We start there. The three institutions, with all their differences, represent present functions of one university of the whole people. They have a common basis of democratic support—a common background of state history. They came from the womb of the same mother commonwealth. They have a common purpose in the training of youth and the building of a better state and a nobler society. They should not weaken each other in undue duplication or destructive antagonisms, but should reënforce and magnify each other by differentiation, coordination, and consolidation.
The University at Chapel Hill, the first state university to open its doors, with its college and schools crowned by a graduate school, is today a member of the Association of American Universities composed of the twenty-nine English-speaking North American universities most distinguished for scholarship, research, and graduate work in many fields. The State College of Agriculture and Engineering, with its treasure house of history and opportunity, represents and meets in a vital way three of the most basic needs of our people in their agricultural, textile, and engineering life and enterprises. With wide-open opportunities and capacities for restoring and advancing the dignity and greatness of agriculture, and for the intelligent development of manifold industries; with scientific, technological, socialscientific, and cultural resources for a wiser social usefulness to the people in a region built on farms and factories, what magnificent vistas open up before the State College of Agriculture and Engineering!
The Woman's College, the lengthened shadow of one of the state's greatest sons, is North Carolina's proud answer to the need of a distinctly woman's college in the state plan of higher education. In America, according to the genius of our people, there is a clearly developed need for both the co-educational institution and the distinctly woman's college. In response to the two needs, North Carolina has made provision for both. The Woman's College, on the basis of past achievements and present hopes, and through the loyalty, dreams, and plans of the leaders, faculty, and alumnae of the College and the
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people of the state, is to be in the threefold university a liberal arts college distinctly for women, with a dignity and eminence of its own second to none—the rising sun of a greater day, we devoutly trust, for women in North Carolina. As expressive of that day, the members of the faculty of the Woman's College recently held a meeting in which the several chairmen of the faculty committees made preliminary reports of their studies of the College. This meeting, and the meetings of the faculty at State College, and the many discussions at Chapel Hill on the nature, needs, and opportunities of education, have been an inspiring source of faith and courage to many of us as we stumble on our way toward the light for the reconstruction of our education and our civilization.
SUMMARY OF ACTIONS IN CONSOLIDATION TO DATE
Though the inner processes are and will continue to be the subject of much faculty study and thought inside the institutions, we shall give illustrations of coördination and consolidation in a summary of results already in force by the original action of the legislature and the continuing actions of the Board of Trustees. The Board, in the first phase, based their action on some of the recommendations of the experts and the consolidation commission; in the second phase, on studies of their own together with consultations with members of the faculty; and more lately on the recommendations of the president, who has set up the policy of studies by faculty committees. This is the summary to date:
1. One board of trustees. 2. One president. 3. One administrative council. 4. One comptroller and one uniform system of cost accounting. 5. Transformations of the school of education into departments. 6. No new registrations for the School of Science and Business at State College after the year 1932-33, with provisions for basic scientific, social-scientific, and cultural courses in the service department for agriculture, engineering, textiles, and vocational education. 7. No new registrations for elementary education in the college of the University at Chapel Hill. 8. The discontinuance of the Library School at the Woman's College in 1933, with provision for two library courses for teachers in the Department of Education at the Woman's College.
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9. A joint directorate of university extension work preliminary to the appointment of a single director and the development of the great held of adult education. 10. No men students at the Woman's College, in accordance with its purpose and the need in the state plan of higher education for this distinctly and preëminently woman's college of liberal arts and sciences. 11. One director of the coördinated and consolidated summer schools. 12. The beginning of the coördination of departments and the mobility of staffs. 13. The appointment of intra-institutional, inter-institutional, and state-wide committees on basic and moot questions for study and recommendations to the faculties, the administrative council, and the trustees. 14. The plans for the correlation of the research projects of the Central Agricultural Experiment Station at State College and the Institute for Research in Social Sciences at Chapel Hill with the extension work of all three institutions, the Department of Home Economics at the Woman's College, the several state departments, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. 15. The beginning of the coördination and consolidation of graduate work in one graduate school under one dean.
EXAMPLE OF THE BOTANY DEPARTMENTS IN COÖRDINATION OF WORK AND CONSOLIDATION OF VALUES
The possibilities of combinations in graduate work in one graduate school are now being illustrated in the coöperation of the botany departments of State College and the University at Chapel Hill. Each department is separately a strong department, with special excellence at State College in plant physiology, pathology, and ecology, and at Chapel Hill in plant classification, morphology, and mycology. An M.A. graduate student from another state found in North Carolina the botanical combination suited to his needs. Guided by the heads of the two departments and the dean of the Graduate School, he registered at Chapel Hill, paid his fees at State College, and entered upon graduate work there for the fall and winter quarters. In the spring quarter he will enter upon his graduate work at Chapel Hill. He will write his thesis under the professor of his choice
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and will next year take his oral examination for his doctorate before the combined departments of botany and the division of science. The botanical library, built up through the periodical exchanges and library collections of many decades and the unique Ashe Herbarium on the George Watts Hill Foundation recently added to the Coker botanical collection, the greenhouse and experimental station at State College, together with the laboratory and statf resources of the departments, give added value and distinction to both departments and a wider opportunity for botanical and basic agricultural research in North Carolina and the South. The recognized excellence of departments and schools, differentiated in functions but consolidated in the values of one graduate school, will focus and reënforce the vigor and variety of the intellectual life of each institution and deepen the content and value of the whole university.
THROUGH COÖPERATION NORTH CAROLINA CAN BECOME ONE OF THE DISTINGUISHED INTELLECTUAL AND SPIRITUAL CENTERS OF THE WORLD
The coördination and consolidation of our three state institutions of higher learning; the coöperation of the State College and the Woman's College with the colleges in their neighborhoods, and the coöperation of the University at Chapel Hill with its next door neighbor, Duke University; and, in general, the coöperation of the consolidated university with all the schools, colleges, institutions, departments, agencies, and enterprise of the people, will make possible the development in North Carolina of one of the great intellectual and spiritual centers of the world.
Coöperation, not abdication, is the advancing position of the consolidated University of North Carolina. To this we give our hands and summon the people to her side for a great American adventure in creative coöperation. We take our stand with youth as, in the midst of a shattered world, they look beyond the confusions of the hour and dream the commonwealth that is to come.
THE UNIVERSITY TODAY
The Inaugural Address Delivered November 11, 1931
By FRANK P. GRAHAM
Eleventh President of the University of North Carolina.
The local occasion which brings us together is submerged in the international occasion which focuses today the thought of the world upon the coming of peace. A university is so dynamic in its life that no occasion, however local or however international, is outside the range of its radiation. The campus and the world interact upon each other with generative and regenerative power. A university is more than intellectually dynamic, it is vitally organic with the life streams of the culture of the ages and the present hopes of the people. With a rootage as deep as the race and as wide as the worlds the university grows in local soil for the finding of truth for all and the development of youth in whom are gathered both the local and international hopes of mankind.
A modern university is such a vital and manifold institution, has been so integrated into the structure of western civilization, unbroken in their interconnection since the twelfth century, is so intimately a part of the context of every real problem of the modern world, that any life strand found at hand anywhere running through the life of the world enters into the texture of the modern university. We may work out from that strand into the complex life of the university and back again into the tangled life of the world.
ARMISTICE DAY AND THE UNIVERSITY
This is the forenoon of November 11, 1931, the fourteenth Armistice day. As we, in Chapel Hill, go back to the armistice hour of that first day we find as the minute hand moved close to the hour, a young man, not long from the classrooms and playing fields of this University, was struck down at the head of his men and lay dying as the armistice hour struck the peace for a war-wrecked world. He was one of the tens of thousands of college men killed where danger stretched its farthest front, one of the ten millions of the fittest men on earth killed in four years of war. Greater than the gigantic figures of death, disease, and physical destruction is the uncountable loss of