university of north carolina

Al Capp brings Sadie Hawkins to campus

“On Nov. 8, the students of the co-educational University of North Carolina gave themselves over to a day of humorous osculation. It was Sadie Hawkins Day, only holiday based on events in a comic strip, and all over America 500 schools, colleges, clubs and Army camps were commemorating the day when the original Sadie Hawkins of Dogpatch, Ky., a fleet but uncomely lass, chased and nailed a husband.

“To North Carolina for the event repaired the originator of the famous Li’l Abner cartoon strip himself, Al Capp, to guide and instruct the celebrants in their burlesque. This year there is a new Dogpatch girl, Cynthia the Siren, who is out to get girl-shy Li’l Abner, and on these pages the co-eds from the University of North Carolina demonstrate her effective techniques for kissing the unwilling male.”

— From “On Sadie Hawkins Day, North Carolina co-eds show how to kiss girl-shy boys” in Life magazine (Nov. 24, 1941)

Stephen Fletcher and Elizabeth Hull have lots more on the barely prewar festivities, including the familiar names of Life’s photographer and the Daily Tar Heel’s.

Legislature hasn’t always valued mission of UNC

“[George Tayloe] Winston‘s accomplishments [as president of the University of North Carolina, 1891-1896] were impressive, especially at a time when the university was unpopular in some powerful political circles and among influential religious leaders, who insisted on a halt to public funding for higher education.

“These opponents of the state university… contended that it was not the public’s responsibility or the state government’s role to educate the masses beyond grade school, that only a few people could benefit by an education beyond elementary school, and denominational schools could better educate men for Christian leadership. Despite this serious and highly vocal opposition, Winston was ultimately successful in convincing the state legislature to continue its appropriations to public institutions of higher learning….”

— From Winston’s entry by Neil Fulgham in the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography

Colleges and slavery: belatedly, a hot topic for research

“The gathering [at Harvard], which featured a keynote address by Ta-Nehisi Coates, drew an overflow crowd of about 500, including researchers from more than 30 campuses. Between sessions… one scholar was overheard saying that ‘something we’ve been talking about for 200 years has suddenly become urgent.’

“Alfred L. Brophy, a legal historian at the University of North Carolina and the author of ‘University, Court and Slave,’ a study of pro-slavery thought at antebellum Southern colleges, described what he called a ‘sea change’ in attitude.

“ ‘People who engaged in this research were once criticized, or had their jobs threatened, or were rejected by their administrations,’ he said in an interview. ‘Now the people doing this work are lifted up.’ ”

— From “Confronting Academia’s Ties to Slavery” by Jennifer Schuessler in the New York Times (March 5)

Jordan’s loyalty to UNC spelled end for short shorts

“When [Michael Jordan] made his way into the NBA [in 1984], he wanted to keep his college experience close by….But Jordan’s UNC short shorts wouldn’t fit under his Chicago Bulls short shorts, so he had to wear baggy, knee-length Bulls shorts instead….

“Soon, these extra long shorts became the favored style. By 2003, almost every single NBA player had jettisoned the short shorts….”

— From “It’s Gotta Be the Shorts” at Now I Know (Jan. 27, 2012)

What UNC might learn from Black Mountain College

“Michael Behrent, history professor at App State, believes that the changes in how public universities are funded represent an ‘economic and political model that is hostile toward the very idea of public institutions’ — and one hostile to the teaching staff upon whose services it relies. Altha Cravey, a geography professor at UNC-CH… cites data from UNC showing that 59 percent of the faculty at Chapel Hill are now in non-tenure-track positions, versus only 12 percent in 2003….

“The future of academic work is at stake. The midcentury model of shared faculty governance in higher education is eroding, replaced by a top-down, corporate technocracy…. If current trends continue, an entire generation of academics will come of age in a world in which the gulf between the tenured and non-tenured is entrenched, in which work is precarious and low pay, in which profits flow upwards toward administrators….

“Black Mountain College reminds us that there are other ways forward….”

— From “The most influential college you’ve never heard of, why it folded and why it matters” by Sammy Feldblum at Scalawag (Aug. 24)

Feldblum makes a thoughtful and important argument, however quixotic.

French taught by Frenchman left memorable legacy

“There had been pious concern [at the University of North Carolina] that French taught by a Frenchman might inculcate immoralities. The university’s president, David Swain, recommended to the Board of Trustees that any tutor would have to be ‘an educated American.’ This nativist injunction may not have been unconnected with the sad tale of Charles Marey, who had taught French in Chapel Hill in the late 1830s. Marey was ‘a Frenchman born,’ as well as ‘a man of good accomplishments and handsome physique,’ whose ‘usefulness was ruined by his fondness for ardent spirits.’

“One day the president heard a great din in Marey’s classroom, entered to find him drunk and the class happily out of control. Swain is said to have grimly said, ‘Mr. Marey, I will take charge of this class. You are relieved, sir.’ To this, Marey loftily replied, ‘If you give this order as president of the university, I obey. But if you give it as David L. Swain, I demand satisfaction!’

“The former seems to have been the case, for Marey left Chapel Hill immediately. Reports drifted back that ‘he had been killed in a brawl in Charleston.’ ”

–– From “Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860″ by Michael O’Brien (2004)

‘A teacher has the right to state honest conviction’

“The creation of the ‘modern university’ dates back to the early 1900s when American professors fashioned for their institutions a mission of social service and defined themselves as truth-seekers whose expertise would bring social benefits.

“These academics also introduced a new idea to the American public: academic freedom. In 1925, University of North Carolina President Harry Woodburn Chase proclaimed, ‘What the university believes with all its heart, is that a teacher has a right to state the honest conviction to which he has come through his work, that he has the right of freedom of speech in teaching just as any other citizen has that right under the Constitution.’ ”

— From “The New Southern University: Academic Freedom and Liberalism at UNC” by Charles J. Holden (2012)

‘Some did not know N.C. even had a university….’

“Francis L. Hawks of Newbern, North Carolina, the Episcopal minister of Calvary Church in New York, a historian, and the founder of a New York Review, felt the force of these condescensions and explained them to David Swain in 1860. In Hawks’s experience, Northerners ‘thought that the people in the South were a set of craven imbeciles’….

“Once, in company, it was asked where Hawks was educated. One person said Yale, another ‘somewhere else at the North.’ Hawks volunteered that he had attended the University of North Carolina. ‘They coolly asked me how it was possible I could have acquired there such an education as they knew me to possess?’

” ‘Some did not know that North Carolina even had a university, let alone one dating from the 1790s and possessed of ‘400 undergraduates with as good a set of professors and instructors as Yale could show.’ ”

–– From “Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860″ by Michael O’Brien (2004)

UNC rudely rejected abolitionist professor

On this day in 1856: Benjamin Hedrick, chemistry professor at the University of North Carolina, publishes a defense of his abolitionist views in the North Carolina Standard of Raleigh.

In response, the faculty denounces him, the board of trustees dismisses him and an unsuccessful attempt is made to tar and feather him at an educational conference in Salisbury. Hedrick, a native of Davidson County, flees to New York and spends the rest of his life in the North.

As ‘boy wonder,’ John Birch founder enrolled at UNC

The New York Times: What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?

Rick Perlstein, author of “The Invisible Bridge”: I used to think some history graduate student looking for a dissertation topic should do a biography of Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society. Back then I thought of it as akin to studying some middling Romantic poet: worthy but slightly marginal. Now I think it’s a project ripe for some top-shelf biographer’s plucking. The Birch Society is thriving within the conservative “mainstream”…..

— From “Rick Perlstein: By the Book” in the New York Times (Aug. 28)

From his birth in Chowan County in 1899, Robert Welch certainly gave biographers plenty to work with. This is from his entry by Jonathan Houghton in NCpedia::

“Welch showed early signs of genius. He read at age 3, was graduated from high school at the top of his class at age 12, and, still wearing knee breeches, promptly matriculated at the University of North Carolina, where he was dubbed a ‘boy wonder.’ He was graduated at 17….”