News and Perspectives from University Archives and Records Management Services
Thank you everyone for your submissions to our latest caption contest! We had a ball reading all of the captions! Now it’s time for you to vote for your favorite. We’ll announce the winner next week!
Click on the captioned photographs to view larger images.
It’s not what you think. We are not discussing the Affordable Care Act or even paying for health care. This is a historical look at just one health care issue at Carolina. In the 1980s, the question for some students was not what they would pay for health care but whether or not they would receive it with equity.
In November of 1983, Brian Richmond wrote to the Daily Tar Heel to reprimand the School of Medicine for turning down the opportunity to offer a scholarship to medical students who had come out as gay or lesbian. Richmond, the acting director of the Sexuality Education & Counseling Service, condemned the decision because as a sex counselor on a college campus, he had come to realize how difficult it was for lesbians and gay men to find good doctors for a variety reasons including prejudice, misconceptions, malpractice, anti-gay laws, and fear of AIDS. Richmond believed that supporting gay men and lesbians in their pursuits to become health care providers would be a step in the right direction. In his letter, he called on the Dean of the School of Medicine, Dr. Stuart Bondurant, to work with the gay and lesbian community on his campus.
Dr. Bondurant stood by the decision not to offer a scholarship exclusively to gay and lesbian medical students, but he did acknowledge that the School of Medicine could better respond to the health care needs of gay and lesbian students. So, the idea for a Committee for Gay/Lesbian Health Concerns was born. The Committee would be composed of students, School of Medicine faculty, and Student Health Services staff. Due to scheduling conflicts in the Spring semester of 1984, however, the committee failed to meet and was put off until the following semester.
The next interaction we found between the School of Medicine and the gay and lesbian community occurred in 1985 when North Carolina’s Lesbian and Gay Health Project called upon the school to update their curriculum. The Project asked for health care issues unique to gay men and lesbians to be incorporated into study. The idea was to improve doctors’ understanding of health concerns particular to the homosexual community while dispelling common misconceptions.
From the records of the Institute of Latin American Studies (#40089) comes this week’s funny photo and another opportunity for a Caption This! caption contest.
Leave us a note in the comments with your caption suggestion. You can caption as many or as few of the gentlemen in the picture as you like, but be sure to give your man’s number so we know who you’re captioning! Like last time, we’ll hold a vote for the best captions!
Now let’s see what you’ve got!
For a while, we had a tie between two excellent comments, but we now have a winner!
Thanks, Austin, for the great caption! Thank you to all of our other contributors and everyone who voted! With all of the hilarious options, it was a challenge to pick the best one!
Staff favorites were:
The true curse of Benjamin Button-ing is looking out of place among one’s peers.
Grandfather promised his friends would bring their granddaughters to this thing. #lies
I can’t wait to become a Tar Heel.
Keep a lookout for University Archives’ next caption contest!
Have you ever seen a picture and thought, I bet that person/cat/dog/inanimate object is thinking/saying…? Well if you’ve been wanting to creatively caption a photo, here’s your chance with University Archives’ caption contest!
Take a look at the photo below and the kid circled in red on the left. Doesn’t look too thrilled to be at his grandfather’s reunion, does he?
Taken at a 1946 reunion supper, the photograph above shows the “Old Students Club” and their guests. The club was comprised of students who had graduated 50 or more years previously. The circled child, Billy Turrentine, was the grandson of another man on the second row, Dr. Samuel Bryant Turrentine of Greensboro. Dr. Turrentine graduated from UNC in 1887 with both an AB and MA (presumably in journalism).
If you have an idea of what Billy might be thinking, leave us a comment below. We’ll post the winning caption next week along with a few of our favorites.
Inspired by the New Yorker Magazine’s cartoon caption contest. See the contest and past captions here.
In the winter of 1965, the Gamma Lambda Chapter of Phi Mu Sorority had moved into their new house at 211 Henderson Street. The move was festive and joyful. To celebrate the season, the sisters wrote their own version of the poem The Night Before Christmas.
We came across the poem in the scrapbook that the Gamma Lambda chapter recently loaned to us. The clatter that awoke the sisters in this poem, however, was not from reindeer on the roof but from “caroling boys with their bottles of cheer!”
Happy holidays from everyone at University Archives and Records Management Services!
Today, University Archives joins the world in remembering Nelson Mandela. Mr. Mandela passed away yesterday, December 5th.
An anti-apartheid activist and the first black president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela famously spent 27 years in prison for the charge of inciting workers’ strikes and leaving the country without permission. Mandela served as the president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999 after his unconditional release from prison on 11 February 1990.
Nelson Mandela and the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa were an inspiration to Carolina students in the 1980s. From 1985 to 1987, the student-run Anti-Apartheid Support Group called for divestiture of all UNC-CH holdings in companies operating in South Africa. The protests peaked in March and April of 1986 when student members erected a shanty-town in Polk Place in front of South Building. When the Endowment Board of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill voted to divest all of its holdings in companies operating in South Africa in October 1987, the group disbanded.
Check out coverage of the protests in Black Ink, the newspaper of the Black Student Movement.
Over the past year and a half, UNC Chapel Hill’s University Archives has actively pursued student groups in an effort to better represent the history of student life. However, there are a lot of student groups to choose from on our active campus. One of our priorities has been to collect Greek life materials. Because more than 3,000 students on our campus are involved in Greek life, fraternities and sororities are a part of the Carolina Experience for many students.
This semester, Phi Mu will be the first of UNC’s sororities to deposit its materials in University Archives for safekeeping. While we have some fraternity records (including Delta Kappa Epsilon and Chi Psi), sorority records have been noticeably absent in our holdings. As the Gamma Lambda chapter of Phi Mu approached planning for its 50th anniversary in 2014, alumnae began to reflect on their chapter’s history. Realizing that historic materials were stored in several disparate places and that many items could use conservation and preservation, they were eager to find a way to store them in a single location under archival conditions. Participating in the new University Archives initiative will accomplish this and facilitate all future anniversary research.
When Phi Mu’s Gamma Lambda chapter colonized at Carolina in 1964, the Board of Trustees had just approved the admittance of women regardless of their residence or major; however, admittance was still extremely competitive because of the scarcity of housing for female students. With the loan of Phi Mu’s 1964-1965 scrapbook and other materials to University Archives, researchers and chapter sisters alike will be able to understand how Phi Mu began its first 50 years on Carolina’s campus.
We look forward to working with Phi Mu as well as other sororities this year to increase the representation of Greek organizations in University Archives!
If you are a member of a Greek fraternity or sorority and wish to deposit materials in the archives for safe keeping, please contact us!
In 1982, UNC System President Bill Friday wrote suggestions to give before the House Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education. His suggestions were a response to President Reagan’s proposals to cut student financial aid. One of President Friday’s counterpoints to the proposed budget cuts follows.
“Transferring an increasing level of the cost of education from society to the current user of education services will create a new indentured class of individuals who may have borrowed more heavily for their education than their future earning power can accommodate.”
For many students, President Friday’s prediction of an indentured servitude may be becoming a reality. The Condition of Education 2013 was recently released by the Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics. According to this report: “In 2010–11, the average student loan amount, in constant 2011–12 dollars, was $6,800, which was a 39 percent increase from 2000–01, when the average student loan amount was $4,900. Of the 4.1 million students who entered the repayment phase on their student loans in fiscal year (FY) 2010, some 375,000, or 9 percent, had defaulted before FY 2011.” See the full report here.
This morning, the University of North Carolina Board of Governors unanimously voted to reject gender neutral housing on the system’s sixteen campus. In light of our latest blog post on the gender and sexuality dialogue on our campus, this decision comes as an interesting development. See an article on the vote from WRAL here.
One argument against the move to institute gender neutral housing is that it is a “social experiment” and thus an inappropriate use of university funds. The arguments in favor of gender neutral housing focus around the desire to appropriately accommodate transgender students and others who may feel uncomfortable or who are bullied in traditional dorm environments because of their sexuality.
As you can see from the pictures to the right, dorm life within the university has changed over the years. What are your thoughts on the Board of Governors’ ban on gender neutral housing?