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Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1900s
-
Josephus Daniels serves on the University of North Carolina board of trustees
Daniels became a member of the university board of trustees in 1901 and remained an active trustee until his death in 1948. During the 1920s he pressed for consolidating the state colleges at Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Greensboro into one university, and in 1930 he championed Frank P. Graham to succeed Harry Woodburn Chase as president.
- 1910s
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A YMCA lecture series on Black life in the South is held for students
Frank Graham and the campus YMCA organized lectures on 'Negro life in the South.' Professor Harry W. Chase told students that Black citizens were a third of the population but received a sixteenth of school spending, and that what they did not pay in property taxes they made up in fines. A second series was held five years later.
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The trustees make Marvin H. Stacy chairman of the faculty with a president's powers
Five days after Graham's death the trustees named his dean, Marvin Hendrix Stacy, chairman of the faculty with the full powers of the presidency. Stacy named Harry W. Chase acting dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and the trustees agreed.
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Chase takes charge of the college and then the faculty after two deaths
Chase was appointed acting dean of the College of Liberal Arts after President Edward Kidder Graham died in October 1918, and chairman of the faculty after Marvin H. Stacy died in January 1919.
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Acting dean of students A. H. Patterson reports on drinking at the spring dances
When complaints about drinking at the revived spring dances reached President Chase, Patterson, whom Chase had made acting dean of students, blamed most of it on visiting alumni and said there was little he could do about the newer dances.
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Chase keeps E. C. Branson at Chapel Hill with a Kenan professorship
When the University of Virginia tried to hire the rural sociologist to rebuild his program in Charlottesville, Chase made Branson a Kenan professor with $1,000 more in pay, and he stayed.
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Eugene C. Branson proposes calling the planned social science school the School of Public Welfare
Branson had urged a school of social science on Graham in 1916. In 1919, worried that "social science" sounded like socialism to North Carolinians, he proposed the name School of Public Welfare, which John Sprunt Hill endorsed, and suggested Hill endow it.
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Frank Porter Graham becomes dean of students
Chase brought Graham back from the Marines over the summer to fill the new post of dean of students, in charge of discipline and of reviving student government after the SATC, while also teaching history. He agreed to try it for a year.
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Inez Koonce Stacy becomes the University's adviser to women
After Clara Lingle left, the post went to Inez Koonce Stacy, widow of acting president Marvin Stacy. For years she was the only woman on the regular University payroll apart from stenographers and library aides.
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Lenoir Chambers is hired to teach journalism and run the University news service
Chase recruited Chambers, a newspaperman then still in France, to teach a journalism course and manage the University's news service, arranging the job through his father while Chambers was crossing the Atlantic.
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Paul John Weaver is hired as the University's first director of music
Chase completed the hiring, begun by Graham, of Weaver of St. Louis as the first director of music, a full professor at $2,750. Chase asked him to take music education out to the state's schools, as Frederick Koch was doing with drama.
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The University carries out a building program under President Chase
William M. Kendal of McKim, Mead and White planned an expansion for 3,000 students, proposing twenty-one new buildings. By December 1928 the University had built nine dormitories (eight for men, one for women) and Saunders, Murphey, Manning and Venable halls, with Bingham Hall and the library nearly done, and had remodeled the old campus buildings. Faculty above the rank of instructor grew from 66 to 158 over the decade.
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Richard H. Lewis chairs the trustees' search for a new university president
After Edward Kidder Graham's death, the trustees named a search committee chaired by Dr. Richard H. Lewis of Raleigh, which met students and faculty on the campus in mid-February. In mid-May it put forward Frank L. McVey, Robert J. Aley and Harry W. Chase, with McVey its favorite.
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UNC faculty adopt a three-quarter academic year
Under Chase's guidance the faculty dropped the old two-term year for three quarters at its February 1919 meeting, keeping a lesson of the wartime SATC schedule. Students back in January could finish two-thirds of a year's work in six months.
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The General Assembly grants the University's full $215,000 request
The 1919 legislature approved all $215,000 a year that Chase sought, up from $165,000, and added $20,000 toward a deficit of about $47,000. With the raises that took effect in September 1919, University pay stood about a quarter above 1914.
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Harry W. Chase is elected president of the university
The trustees elected Chase president of the University of North Carolina in June 1919. He had taught at Chapel Hill since September 1910 and had been chairman of the faculty since that January.
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The University opens its first postwar year with a record 1,350 students
On opening day almost 400 freshmen filled Memorial Hall to hear Chase. Enrollment reached 1,350, about 500 more than the spring before; three or four men shared rooms built for two, some 600 boarded in the village, and 80 veterans of the AEF formed a club.
- 1920s
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A Red Cross-funded summer institute trains social workers at the University
Before he left Emory, Howard Odum persuaded the American Red Cross to pay the summer faculty of a training institute on campus for social workers, teachers, nurses, ministers, probation officers and Red Cross, YMCA and YWCA staff. Chase let a woman instructor assist but not lead a course.
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Harry W. Chase is inaugurated as president in Memorial Hall
The new ROTC unit led a procession of students, faculty, alumni and delegates from over a hundred institutions to Memorial Hall, where Chief Justice Walter Clark gave Chase the oath. Chase asked the state to see its University as the university of the South; the day ended with a banquet at Swain Hall and a reception in Bynum Gymnasium.
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Trustees order a building plan for 3,000 students
At commencement Chase told the trustees the University had hit its limit, with laboratories running three shifts and 500 teachers turned away from summer school, and the visiting committee called the dormitories unsafe and unsanitary. The board told Chase to list what an enrollment of 3,000 would need.
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Forty-three alumni meet at the Coop and start the campaign for the state's colleges
Telegrams sent in Chase's name by Frank Porter Graham and alumni secretary Edgar R. Rankin brought 43 alumni to the Coop, an off-campus boardinghouse, where talk of the crowding went on past midnight. The book counts the meeting as the start of the citizens' movement that won the 1921 building appropriation.
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The University receives a life-size 1800 portrait of founder William R. Davie
Chase built the 1920 University Day program around the portrait, which had survived the Civil War buried at the Davie estate in South Carolina. He used Davie's example to argue the state should meet the University's needs now.
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Trustees let Chase ask for a six-year building program
On November 5 Governor Bickett and the trustees' executive committee reversed an earlier two-year limit and let Chase plan every building needed for six years. Near the end of November he gave the State Budget Commission a $5.6 million list: dormitories for about 1,275 men, a law building, classroom buildings, a gymnasium, a women's building and faculty houses.
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A General Education Board grant pays for 25 percent faculty raises
In late November the University learned it would get up to $50,000 from the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board, one of only two tax-supported schools helped. Chase used it for raises of 25 percent backdated to July 1.
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James Finch Royster returns as Kenan Professor of English Philology
After seven years in Texas, Royster accepted the Kenan Professorship of English Philology, which he held until his death. Covington says President Chase recruited him back from Austin.
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The legislature abolishes the State Building Commission
The commission whose delays had raised the cost of Steele Dormitory was ended in the closing hours of the 1921 session, leaving Chase answerable only to the trustees' building committee for the new campus.
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Charles E. Maddry urges the faculty to add religious instruction
At Harry W. Chase's invitation, Maddry, a university graduate just back from an Austin pastorate to lead the Baptist State Convention, met the faculty and described the University of Texas plan, under which denominations paid Bible teachers whose courses earned university credit. No decision was taken; Chase sent the question to the faculty committee on educational policy.
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Drought shrinks the University's water supply and delays the fall opening
After four hot, dry months Strowd's Creek, the main water source, had dwindled, and plants in the arboretum died. On local health officials' advice Chase asked students not to arrive before October 4, when a temporary six-inch line to Morgan's Creek was due to be ready.
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John Sprunt Hill offers the Graves lot and $10,000 for an alumni hotel
Hill offered the Graves property across from the west entrance plus $10,000 if 1,000 to 1,500 alumni would each give $100 toward a hotel whose profits would go to the University. The investors did not come, so he built the Carolina Inn himself.
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The law school moves to a three-year course with new entrance rules
By the end of 1922 the law curriculum had become a three-year course of study with new admission requirements, part of Dean Lucius McGehee's effort to meet American Bar Association standards.
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Trustees create a School of Engineering
The trustees joined the departments of civil and electrical engineering into a school of engineering, one of several steps Chase took in 1922 toward a full university.
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Trustees put Graham Memorial on the site of the burned University Inn
After other sites were floated, the trustees settled on the University Inn lot, set back from Franklin Street. Alumni pledges then stood near $120,000, only half of it paid.
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UNC is admitted to the Association of American Universities
Membership put the University beside Yale, Harvard, Columbia and Johns Hopkins. Virginia had been a founder, but Chapel Hill was the first Southern university voted in.
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Trustees vote to ask for a 200-bed teaching hospital in Chapel Hill
A June 1 report by Dean Isaac H. Manning, Chase and Dr. Richard H. Lewis found the state 45th in hospital beds and short of doctors. Twelve days later the full board voted to ask the legislature for a 200-bed teaching hospital at Chapel Hill, a memorial to the World War dead, so the two-year medical school could grow to four years.
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Trinity's William P. Few proposes a joint medical school with UNC
After the trustees' site committee split on December 16, Few met the committee at the governor's mansion and offered a four-year school with two years at Chapel Hill and two in Durham near Watts Hospital, backed by $1 million from each side and a Trinity endowment. Morrison endorsed it that night, but Baptist protest over church and state killed it within weeks.
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Robert W. Madry becomes the University's full-time publicity man
Persuaded by Louis Round Wilson that the University had to tell its story better, Chase hired Madry, an alumnus then writing for the New York Herald, as its first full-time publicity man.
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The faculty turns down church-paid Bible teachers at the university
Answering the churches, the faculty committee on educational policy, in a report drafted with Chase, refused to place instructors on campus who owed their posts and pay to a denomination, and warned that such a program would cut into the work of the church colleges. It offered instead Bible courses taught from a literary and historical standpoint by faculty the university chose.
-
UNC and the North Carolina College for Women agree to limit women to UNC's upper levels
After a quarrel over Chase's remarks and a meeting with President Julius I. Foust at a Durham hotel, the two schools agreed that women would enter UNC's graduate and professional schools but not its first two years, even if they lived in Chapel Hill, and that transfers from NCCW would need NCCW's consent.
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Trustees ask $350,000 to start a four-year medical college, and the legislature ignores it
With the joint plan dead, the trustees heard delegations from Raleigh, Charlotte, Greensboro and Durham, chose no site, and voted to ask the General Assembly for $350,000 toward a four-year medical college. The legislature did not act; in June 1923 the trustees voted for a four-year program at Chapel Hill.
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A Tar Heel special edition attacks coeducation
While Chase sought $224,000 for a women's dormitory, students voted 937 to 173 against it in a Tar Heel poll, and on March 14 a special edition ran editorials headed "Women Students Not Wanted Here." Chase answered in a long statement read at chapel and printed in the paper.
-
The 1923 legislature gives UNC $1.7 million for buildings
The University got about 15 percent of a $10.7 million bond issue for state institutions, letting the building program go on, but its operating budget was cut 7 percent below the request and it got $667,300 less than the $2.3 million in construction money sought.
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Church leaders spend a day with Chase and the faculty on teaching religion at the university
Baptist, Presbyterian, Moravian, Episcopal and Methodist leaders met in President Chase's office with the faculty committee on educational policy. All favored nonsectarian Bible courses; after a day of argument over who would choose and pay the teachers, the churchmen agreed on courses taught off campus by teachers the denominations selected, with credit from the university.
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Governor Morrison offers the law deanship to Justice Walter P. Stacy, who declines
At a trustees' executive committee meeting in early November, Morrison bypassed Chase and offered the deanship to Stacy on the spot. Stacy turned it down, and Chase saw the move as an intrusion on the president's role.
-
Trustees adopt higher law school standards over Governor Morrison's objection
At a four-hour meeting in the governor's office, attended by about half the trustees, 45 of them lawyers, Morrison argued against stiffer entrance rules, but a voice vote approved Chase's plans. The board put off naming a dean rather than accept Chase's out-of-state choice.
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Chase and Coates rally students to revive the Graham Memorial drive
President Chase, Albert Coates and student body president Julian Allsbrook held a special chapel meeting in Memorial Hall to restart the stalled fund drive, with plans cut back to a smaller building whose exterior was under way. In March Coates set out a University Life Unification Plan centered on the building.
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Trustees elect Merton L. Ferson dean of the law school
Ferson, an Iowan who had been law dean at Washington University in St. Louis, won with three times the votes of his nearest rival, ending months of resistance from trustees who wanted a North Carolinian.
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Trustees overrule the faculty and give a diploma to a senior who took a drink
The faculty, bound by a trustee rule against any drinking, had denied a diploma to a senior who celebrated the end of exams with a drink or two. His class petitioned the trustees, who reversed the faculty, leaving professors feeling their disciplinary role undercut.
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Chase opens the year with his address on the university's intellectual responsibility
Speaking to more than 2,200 students in Memorial Hall at the start of the fall term, Chase answered the university's critics without naming them: the attack on intellectual freedom fell on biology and the social sciences, and suppressing debate led to sterility. He offered a test for responsible free speech and defended the building program ahead of the legislature. The talk was printed more widely than any of his others.
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A state pay commission created at Governor McLean's request questions university faculty about their work
At McLean's request the 1925 legislature set up a commission on state pay. Its questionnaires asked faculty to account for their working hours and leave, and the attorney general ruled that its work covered university positions.
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Chase speaks against the Poole antievolution resolution at a legislative hearing
At an evening hearing of the House education committee, moved to the packed House chamber, Chase was the only college president to speak. He argued for freedom of teaching under the state constitution and asked why evolution could be preached on Sunday but not taught on weekdays. The committee split 11 to 11, and chairman Henry G. Connor Jr. broke the tie for an unfavorable report.
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Wake Forest president William Louis Poteat gives the McNair lectures
Poteat lectured on 'Can a Man Be a Christian Today?' and stayed with the Chases in the president's house; Chase introduced him as a defender of the faith. Days before, Chase had sought $6,000 a year for five years from H. Smith Richardson of Vick Chemical to bring Poteat to Chapel Hill as professor of moral philosophy, an offer Poteat declined.
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Chase tries a week of orientation for entering freshmen
At Chase's initiative, new students came to campus early for a full week of physical and academic testing, campus tours and preparation for the year. The book calls it an experiment that went well.
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University Day marks fifty years since the 1875 reopening
More than ninety representatives of American colleges joined a procession from the Alumni Building to Memorial Hall, where former commissioner of education Philander P. Claxton spoke. In his first address to the university, Governor McLean called it the head of the state's school system and asked it to help smooth religious and social divisions.
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Chase cancels all campus dances after reports of drinking at a Durham dance
After newspapers described liquor and broken fixtures at a German Club dance at Durham's Washington Duke Hotel following the 1925 Thanksgiving game, the club disciplined twenty-five students and alumni, and Chase called off all campus dances until Easter or later. He followed with a chapel talk urging students not to drink.
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Chase keeps Albert Coates with a raise and tenure
After Coates collapsed from exhaustion in June 1926 and sent Chase a private resignation, Chase gave him a pay raise and tenure as professor of law, and Coates was teaching again that fall.
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Chase keeps the University Press from publishing Collier Cobb's book on evolution
Geologist Collier Cobb had a manuscript on evolution in hand at the University of North Carolina Press. Chase wrote him that the book was good but that putting it out under the university's imprint would read to enemies as a challenge while the antievolution fight was still on. It was never published by the press.
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Frank Graham leads a faculty resolution urging Chase to stay
While Chase was in Oregon being offered that university's presidency, Frank Porter Graham took the floor at a specially called faculty meeting and won adoption, without a word of dissent, of a resolution praising Chase and tying his staying to the cause of freedom and tolerance. It was wired to Chase in Portland.
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Chase turns down the University of Oregon and stays at Chapel Hill
Oregon's regents had unanimously offered Chase their presidency at $10,000 a year. Back from a three-week trip west, he received a unanimous trustee resolution in Raleigh urging him to stay and said he would remain. He told Oregon that his staying had become tied in the public mind to liberal thought and teaching. In June the trustees raised his pay to $10,000.
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The Student Council removes the Carolina Magazine editors over the story 'Slaves'
Just as classes began, the council voted to remove the editor and assistant editor for printing a story with a hint of interracial sex. On appeal, a faculty committee Chase appointed called publication bad taste and poor judgment but not misconduct, and set the council's action aside. Durham textile executive Kemp Lewis protested; Chase defended the committee.
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Charles T. McCormick becomes dean of the law school
Merton L. Ferson had left in 1926 for the Cincinnati deanship, and the man Chase hired to replace him backed out months before the fall term. Chase then named McCormick, on the faculty only a year. The trustees consented but not unanimously, and James A. Gray Jr. moved that they be consulted before the next dean was chosen.
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Chase has an institute researcher's study of Winston-Salem Black businesses destroyed
Robinson E. Newcomb, a Brookings graduate student working with the Institute for Research in Social Science, had pieced together Black wage data from pay stubs outside R. J. Reynolds plants. After trustee James A. Gray Jr., a Reynolds vice president, complained, Chase and Odum gathered every copy, and Chase assured Gray he had seen to the destruction of the draft and notes. One copy survived at Brookings.
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The legislature allows $625,000 for a new university library
Plans had called for a library costing as much as $862,000. After Chase's pleading, the 1927 General Assembly provided $625,000, just over half of all the capital money for the campus. Robert B. House kept the project on schedule with the Advisory Budget Commission while Chase was abroad.
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Press governors object to Paul Green's introduction to Congaree Sketches
Called before Chase and the press's board, assistant editor William T. Couch heard Royster and the others condemn Green's introduction, which said neither race could leave the ditch until whites gave Blacks a hand. Couch pointed out that some 150 advance copies were already out, and the book went out as printed. Six months later, at Chase's order, unsold copies went to a commercial publisher, which reprinted it without Green's introduction.
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Chase's memorandum warns faculty against advocacy that embarrasses the university
Under attack from textile editor David Clark, Chase sent Howard Odum, Dudley D. Carroll and Frank Graham a discussion memo on proper activities for social scientists. Faculty whose causes involved colleagues in general embarrassment should leave, he wrote; in North Carolina such causes included certain taxes, labor organizing, racial equality and socialism.
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Meeting in the unfinished Graham Memorial, trustees add courses in religion
Chase seated the trustees on folding chairs in the empty lounge of Graham Memorial to shame alumni over the unfinished building. There they adopted the faculty's proposal for courses in the history and literature of religion with one dissenting vote, ending nearly ten years of debate.
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The university hosts a national conference on education in the South
More than thirty college and university presidents, a dozen state superintendents, librarians, governors and others met at Chapel Hill. The gathering tied the university to leading educators nationwide and supported its new emphasis on training high school teachers, principals and superintendents.
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Chase's annual report tallies a decade of growth at the university
More than $5 million in state money had built nine dormitories, five classroom buildings and laboratories. State operating funds had risen from $215,000 to $880,000; faculty above instructor from 66 to 158; the Graduate School from 40 to 205 students; and the library from 88,316 to 193,867 volumes. Enrollment had reached 2,825 and the press had issued fifty titles.
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The University Press publishes Harriet L. Herring's study of mill villages
Herring, a research associate of the Institute for Research in Social Science, had visited 322 of the state's roughly 500 mills after the manufacturers refused formal cooperation. It was the first systematic look at mill communities. Chase mailed copies to leading textile men, including Charles A. Cannon, as a model of social research.
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Trustees approve a library school paid for by a $100,000 Carnegie grant
At commencement Chase won the trustees' permission to set up a school to train librarians in the new library, with its first five years funded by a $100,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation.
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Chase asks alumni to build a private endowment for the university
With state money in doubt, Chase broke with the unwritten rule that state schools left private gifts to the church colleges and asked alumni to build an endowment alongside tax support. The Durham Herald endorsed the appeal, but four weeks later the stock market crashed and little came of it.
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Chase refuses a mill official's demand that Frank Graham be fired
After the Southern Textile Bulletin wrongly placed Graham at a Communist Labor Day rally, an official of the company that owned Gastonia's Loray Mill asked Governor Gardner to have him dismissed. In the reply Gardner passed along, Chase said Graham had been in New York and that faculty had the same right as other citizens to form and voice opinions, and he would resist any censorship of those seeking change by lawful means.
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Chase seeks money for a school of public affairs to train state and local officials
Chase asked Governor Gardner to help find about $30,000 a year in private money for a school to train city and county officials, public health and public safety officers and others, saying none existed in the South. Albert Coates's Institute of Government soon took up the same mission.
- 1930s
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Chase resigns to become president of the University of Illinois
The evening before, a full-dress reception at the Carolina Inn marked ten years since Chase's inauguration, with Governor Gardner already holding his resignation. When the Illinois trustees elected Chase the next day, Gardner announced it from Raleigh. The Illinois post reportedly paid $20,000, twice his salary.
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The university loses 20 percent of its next year's state budget
A month after Chase warned Governor Gardner that the university was at a crisis, $175,000 was cut from its budget for the coming year, a 20 percent reduction deeper than any Chase had seen as president.
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Commencement is held outdoors at the Davie Poplar, and Chase receives an honorary degree
With Memorial Hall torn down, the 339 graduates received diplomas at a stage by the Davie Poplar, seated on the old hall's benches as loudspeakers in the trees carried John H. Finley's address. Honorary degrees went to Ellen Glasgow, Martha Berry, Francis P. Venable and Governor Gardner, and Gardner conferred one on Chase that the trustees had voted without consulting the faculty.
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The Morehead-Patterson Bell Tower is dedicated at UNC
The bell tower given by John Motley Morehead III and Rufus Lenoir Patterson II was dedicated to the university on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 1931, with Governor O. Max Gardner giving the dedication address. Morehead had proposed a tower to President Harry Woodburn Chase in the 1920s and been turned down on three sites.
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