Chronology

The Alpha Theta Phi honor society enrolls the best scholars

Dr. Tolman, who taught at the University in 1893-94, introduced Alpha Theta Phi, a society open only to the best scholars; by spring 1895 nine members of the class of 1896 belonged. In 1898 Archibald Henderson was its president and E. K. Graham its secretary, and a few years later it merged into Phi Beta Kappa.

People: Archibald Henderson · Edward Kidder Graham

Six students found the Order of the Gorgon's Head

Edward Kidder Graham, then a junior, was one of six founders of the Gorgon's Head, a secret society of upperclassmen and professional students meant to promote fellowship across the fraternity divide.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Edward Kidder Graham wins the Mangum Medal

Added to the commencement orators after Horace Williams showed Alderman one of his papers, Graham won the top senior speaking prize with an address on "the economic man" that foresaw business coming to rule Southern life. He reworked the theme over the next decade into his argument for the university's service to the state.

People: Edwin Anderson Alderman · Henry Horace Williams

Subject: Memorial Hall

Edward Kidder Graham returns to Chapel Hill to manage the library

After a year teaching at a Charlotte private school, Graham came back at Alderman's request to run the university library, and before the year was out Alderman made him an instructor in English at $700 a year.

People: Edwin Anderson Alderman

Subject: UNC Libraries

Edward Kidder Graham organizes the Odd Number Club for student writers

Members met monthly to hear poems, sketches and prose by one another, kept ties with like clubs at Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, Texas and Vanderbilt, and worked to build up campus journalism.

A house is built on Battle Lane for English professor Edward Kidder Graham and his wife Susan

English professor Edward Kidder Graham, later president of the university, and his wife Susan Williams Moses Graham build a shingled two-story house at 115 Battle Lane that mixes Colonial Revival and Craftsman details.

Edward Kidder Graham marries Susan Williams Moses at the Chapel of the Cross

Moses, a daughter of school reformer Edward Pearson Moses, had studied at the university from 1898 to 1901 and headed Latin and Greek at Sweet Briar College; the reception was on the porch of Eben Alexander's house next door. The couple lived at Bulrushes, a shingled house at the east edge of the campus that Graham and Louis Graves had built on a lot they bought.

Subject: Chapel of the Cross

Gerrard Hall is refitted and daily chapel resumes for every undergraduate

With money Venable got from the legislature, Gerrard Hall's interior was renovated so that all undergraduates fit, and Dean Graham set a half-hour program before noon with ministers, faculty, trustees and other guest speakers. Upperclassmen had been excused from chapel for want of seats.

People: Edward Kidder Graham · Francis Preston Venable

Subject: Gerrard Hall

Venable names Edward Kidder Graham dean of the College of Liberal Arts

At 32 the youngest of the senior faculty, Graham took over the English department and replaced Eben Alexander, who was given a year's leave, as dean, with first responsibility for student discipline.

People: Francis Preston Venable · Eben Alexander

The Student Council resigns after the faculty reinstates a student it expelled

The council quit when a faculty committee put back a student it had dismissed for stealing; Dean Graham negotiated a settlement that affirmed the council's authority but let its decisions be appealed to the faculty.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Graham proposes a faculty committee on university extension

The committee formed at Graham's urging started a high school debating contest and a statewide high school track meet that drew hundreds of students to Chapel Hill by 1913. President Venable gave it little support, seeing extension as a drain on teaching at home.

People: Francis Preston Venable

Alumni begin publishing the Alumni Review

The alumni launched the Alumni Review, issued monthly during the college year, with Dean Edward Kidder Graham as an associate editor; his piece in the first issue memorialized his teacher Thomas Hume.

People: Edward Kidder Graham · Thomas Hume

Graham joins the student county clubs into a civic association

Dean Graham revived the clubs of students from the same county, which nearly half the student body joined after Rand's death, and federated more than a dozen of them as the North Carolina Civic Association of the University, urging members to study conditions at home.

Students form the Greater Council and open honor code hearings to the public

Working with Dean Graham after Rand's death, students set up the Greater Council, with members from every class, to give them more voice on campus questions, and the Student Council began trying honor code charges in public with the accused facing their accusers.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

A Chapel Hill conference turns football coaching and finances over to an alumni committee

Three weeks after a 66-0 Thanksgiving loss to Virginia, students, alumni and faculty agreed that alumni would clear the Athletic Association's debts and hire professional coaches under a new alumni-run General Athletic Committee, while the faculty kept control of eligibility. Weeks later the committee gave Thomas Trenchard a three-year contract.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Edward Kidder Graham serves as acting president while Venable is in Europe

Graham, head of the English department and dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Chapel Hill, acted as president in 1913 during President Francis P. Venable's absence in Europe.

People: Francis Preston Venable

The university calls off its football game with A&M over eligibility

Disputes over A&M players who had played for Brown, Holy Cross and Georgetown and over paid assistant coaches on the field led Carolina to cancel the game, a step Graham accepted with reluctance.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

The university organizes a Bureau of Extension under Louis Round Wilson

Set up as Venable left for Europe in mid-1913 and run by university librarian Louis Round Wilson with no budget of its own, the bureau started programs to take the university's work into the state; the trustees endorsed it in January 1914.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Acting president Graham pledges to carry the university to the whole state

In his University Day remarks in Memorial Hall, Graham said the new Bureau of Extension would put the university in close touch with every problem of North Carolina life, a break with Venable's narrower view, and he answered charges that students cared mostly for football. Raleigh and Greensboro papers praised the idea the next day.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Eugene C. Branson shows students how to survey their home counties

During a five-day stay as Graham's guest at Bulrushes, the Georgia rural sociologist led classes and seminars and coached the Johnston County club on gathering facts about illiteracy, tenancy, crops and the tax burden, a report meant to serve as the model for the other county clubs.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Graham proposes a statewide civic service week in a Charlotte speech

Closing Farm Life Week in Charlotte, the acting president called for a day of community self-study across North Carolina a year later, and Farmers Union president Henry Q. Alexander drafted a resolution asking the governor to back it. The book treats the speech as the moment the university openly took up the cause of farmers and wage earners.

About 250 county citizens meet at the Hillsboro courthouse for Community Service Week

As part of the university's Community Service Week, some 250 citizens gathered at the Orange County courthouse in Hillsboro to take up the county's needs and hear President Graham speak on community service.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Subject: Orange County Courthouse, Hillsborough

Edward Kidder Graham is elected president of the university

The board of trustees elected Graham president by unanimous vote in 1914, succeeding Francis P. Venable. He had been at Chapel Hill since 1899, first as librarian and then through the English department to the deanship.

People: Francis Preston Venable

James Finch Royster leaves the university for the University of Texas

Royster, who had been teaching the journalism course Edward Kidder Graham created, left Chapel Hill for the University of Texas, one of the faculty Graham could not keep during his year as acting president.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Marvin H. Stacy becomes permanent dean of the College of Liberal Arts

Graham had made Marvin Hendrix Stacy acting dean of the College of Liberal Arts during Venable's absence and made the post permanent at his first faculty meeting as president. Stacy, a civil engineering professor, handled student discipline and worked to replace written rules with reliance on student honor.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Students improve Franklin Street and Battle Park during Community Service Week

During Graham's first statewide Community Service Week, about a hundred students worked on Chapel Hill: one crew graded Franklin Street under Joseph Hyde Pratt with teams paid for by merchants and bankers, others cleared the grounds around Swain Hall, cleaned the Battle Park trails under the Rev. W. D. Moss and gathered trash from the alleys.

People: Edward Kidder Graham · Joseph Hyde Pratt · William Dygnum Moss

Subject: Battle Park

Trustees approve asking the Rockefeller Foundation for a student building

After a sharp debate the board agreed to seek $50,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation, to be matched by $25,000 raised at home, for a student center to replace the crowded YMCA quarters. The plan fell through when word reached the foundation that some trustees objected to tainted money.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Trustees create a chair of applied economics and rural sociology for Eugene C. Branson

Graham won approval to hire Branson at the top faculty salary of $2,500 and promised him a large office in the Peabody Building; Branson said he would come that fall and proposed starting a study of Orange County right away.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Trustees put athletic rules in the faculty's hands

At their winter meeting the trustees adopted Graham's view that the faculty alone should make and enforce athletic rules, turning aside coach Trenchard's lobbying for the board to overrule faculty eligibility decisions.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

The university assigns each freshman a faculty adviser

President Graham began a system of faculty advisers to help new students settle into university life, and fall 1914 was its first year. Albert Coates's adviser was Oliver Towles of romance languages.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Graham reports enrollment passing 1,000 students

Graham told the trustees in December 1914 that enrollment would pass 1,000, against 512 in 1900, and that counting summer students the university taught 1,578. The campus had grown from ten buildings in 1900 to two dozen.

Graham launches an Alumni Loyalty Fund

After the class of 1905 gave $1,000, Graham asked the trustees to back an alumni loyalty fund and turned the gift into a nationwide appeal for small yearly gifts from the university's roughly six thousand living alumni. It was a new idea to seek private money for a state institution, and the hoped-for sums never came.

Some 250 high school debaters come to Chapel Hill for state finals

About 250 high school students came to the campus for the final rounds of the university's statewide debating union, one of Graham's means of tying the university to towns across the state. Topics included woman suffrage and public ownership of railroads.

People: Edward Kidder Graham · Albert Coates

The 1915 General Assembly raises the university's appropriation

Graham's first legislative campaign won $115,000 a year for operations, against $95,000 before and the $125,000 he sought, plus $60,000 over two years for permanent improvements. Much of the building money went to pay for the University Inn property on Franklin Street and the land under Peabody Hall.

People: Edward Kidder Graham · R. D. W. Connor

William Howard Taft gives the first Weil lectures on American citizenship

Former president William Howard Taft spent three days in Chapel Hill as Graham's guest, giving a series of lectures on politics and the presidency. A photograph caption identifies the visit as the inaugural Weil Lecture on American citizenship.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Edward Kidder Graham is inaugurated president in Memorial Hall

A procession of about 1,400 marched to Memorial Hall, where Chief Justice Walter Clark gave Graham the oath and Governor Locke Craig presided. Graham's address cast the state university as the instrument of democracy. Three former presidents walked with him in the procession.

People: Edwin Anderson Alderman · Francis Preston Venable · Kemp Plummer Battle · Locke Craig · Walter Clark

Subject: Memorial Hall

Thomas J. Campbell arrives as the university's first athletic director

After coach T. G. Trenchard's contract ran out with the 1915 season, Graham and a faculty committee ended alumni control of athletics and put a director in charge. Thomas Joseph Campbell, a former Harvard football star, took the post by early March 1916 and coached under a new rule that made athletes wait a year before playing.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Susan Moses Graham, the president's wife, dies at Chapel Hill

Susan Moses Graham, 34, died on the last day of the fall session after six weeks of infection. Remaining classes were called off, and she was buried in the Chapel Hill cemetery on December 23 after a service at the Chapel of the Cross. She had helped found the Chapel Hill Community Club.

People: William Dygnum Moss

Subject: Chapel of the Cross · Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

Capt. J. Stuart Allen organizes the volunteer UNC Reserve Corps

Graham brought Captain J. Stuart Allen, a wounded Canadian veteran of Ypres and the Somme, to run military training, paying him $4,000 from the budget. Volunteers bought their own uniforms and earned five credit hours for twelve or more hours a week of drill and trench digging east of the campus.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Clara S. Lingle becomes the university's first advisor to women

Graham hired Clara S. Lingle as advisor to women, the first woman given administrative duties at the university. Formally on the extension staff working with women's clubs, she was meant to speak for the two dozen women students within the administration.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

President Edward K. Graham engages planner John Nolen to study the campus

Urged by a faculty grounds committee of W. C. Coker, George Howe and Collier Cobb, formed in 1913, and after the trustees endorsed a full campus plan in spring 1916, Graham brought in the national planner John Nolen. Between 1917 and 1919 Nolen studied the campus and recommended building out the land south of South Building, the direction the 1920s expansion took.

People: Collier Cobb · William Chambers Coker · George Howe

Students form volunteer companies and drill on Emerson Field

Before the university had a Reserve Officers' Training Corps unit, about five hundred students formed volunteer companies and drilled on Emerson Field with old Civil War rifles, some 250 of them lent by Julius Cone of Greensboro. In January Graham told the secretary of war that four hundred men were asking for a unit.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Subject: Emerson Field

The extension bureau offers war courses and Greenlaw starts the Lafayette Association

University extension centers offered free month-long courses on the war and on European history, taught by faculty without extra pay, and mailed pamphlets explaining why the country was at war. Edwin Greenlaw's Lafayette Association sought to rally high schools around patriotic essays and pageants; Winston-Salem's center took its name.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Students petition President Graham for military training

In January 1917, 344 of the 1,137 students registered that fall signed a petition asking that a military training course be set up on the campus. The Tar Heel under editor William Polk backed the drive.

The faculty approves summer banking jobs for credit with National City Bank

The faculty approved a plan Graham arranged with New York's National City Bank to hire rising juniors for summer jobs that taught banking, with university credit for the work. Graham meant it as a first step toward a school of commerce and began recruiting Dudley DeWitt Carroll at about the same time.

People: Edward Kidder Graham · Dudley Dewitt Carroll

The legislature passes a $3 million bond issue that funds university buildings

In the last hours of the 1917 session the house passed a $3 million bond issue, with only 14 of 120 votes against, for state institutions and public schools, giving the university $100,000 a year for five years for new buildings and repairs. Baptist leaders denounced the haste and the aid to state colleges.

People: Edward Kidder Graham · Thomas W. Bickett

Graham tells a Memorial Hall gathering how the university will serve in the war

Two weeks after the United States entered the war, more than a thousand people heard Graham in Memorial Hall urge students to stay in school until called. He promised military training on campus and a faculty program of instruction to aid the war effort.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Horace Williams's war remarks bring a trustee inquiry that clears the faculty

After the Charlotte Observer quoted philosophy professor Horace Williams in May 1917 calling the war a clash of national interests, critics questioned his loyalty, and trustee John Sprunt Hill pressed the matter. The trustees' visiting committee investigated and in June 1918 cleared Williams and the faculty of disloyalty.

People: John Sprunt Hill · Edward Kidder Graham

Secretary of War Newton D. Baker gives the wartime commencement address

Baker spoke to an overflowing Memorial Hall hung with flags, the day after draft registration, warning that the war would be long and urging those who stayed to keep learning. Of the 161 graduates in the class of 1917, 65 were already in training camps, and all dances were canceled.

People: Josephus Daniels · Edward Kidder Graham

Subject: Memorial Hall

Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham dies, leaving the university a fund for professors

Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham, the South's richest widow, died at Louisville, and her will gave the university an endowment expected to pay $75,000 a year to be known as the Kenan Professors Fund. Litigation over her estate delayed the money for years.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Wartime enrollment reaches 1,034

Graham had expected fewer than 800 students, but by October 1, 1917, 1,034 had registered, more than five hundred of them in the military courses. Entering freshmen averaged seventeen, two years younger than in 1915, and about two hundred students left during the term.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Governor Bickett gives a wartime University Day address

A month after the term opened, Governor Thomas W. Bickett spoke at University Day in a chilly Memorial Hall, denouncing slackers. Marshals led the academic procession through ranks of uniformed men.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Subject: Memorial Hall

John Nolen recommends a site for the engineering building

As plans took shape for the School of Applied Science building paid for by the 1917 bonds, planner John Nolen advised placing it between Memorial Hall and the Peabody Building and chose a spot for a flagpole. He promised broader campus plans by the June 1918 commencement.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Trustees name the first five Kenan professors

The trustees adopted President Edward Kidder Graham's recommendations for the new Kenan professorships, funded under the will of Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham. Venable was named Kenan Professor of Chemistry, with H. V. Wilson, Edwin Greenlaw, William MacNider and William Cain.

People: Edward Kidder Graham · H. V. Wilson · Robert Worth Bingham · Edwin Greenlaw

The trustees give the faculty a second $250 raise

Following a $250 raise in September 1917, the trustees added another $250 in January 1918, bringing a full professor's top pay to $3,000. Graham turned down the increase in his own salary, from $4,000 to $6,000, that the board had voted at the 1917 commencement.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Frederick H. Koch is hired as professor of dramatic literature

Recruited by Edwin Greenlaw from the University of North Dakota, where he had founded the Dakota Playmakers, Frederick Henry Koch signed in late May 1918 at $2,500 a year to teach dramatic literature, a title he chose. He arrived that summer meaning to build a folk drama program in North Carolina.

People: Frederick H. Koch · Edwin Greenlaw · Edward Kidder Graham

Subject: Carolina Playmakers

The Students' Army Training Corps takes over the campus

Registration, put off to September 24 and 25, opened a year run by the army: dormitories became Barracks 1 through 8, Swain Hall the Mess Hall, and the year was cut into twelve-week quarters with classes grouped by age. About seven hundred enrolled, nearly all of them required to take a course on the issues of the war, and the commander worked from the Sigma Chi house.

People: Edward Kidder Graham · Charles T. Woollen

750 University students are inducted into the Students' Army Training Corps

At noon on October 1, 1918, about 750 University students took the oath at the campus flag pole from Lt. Col. Stevens, the commandant, and became members of the Students' Army Training Corps, at the same moment as students at about 500 colleges across the country. President Edward Kidder Graham gave the address, and the corps was reviewed from the steps of the Alumni Building.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

President Edward Kidder Graham dies of influenza and pneumonia at his home in Chapel Hill

Graham, 42, president since 1914 and regional director of the Student Army Training Corps for the South Atlantic states, died on Saturday night after five days' illness. The SATC battalion escorted the funeral, conducted at the grave by W. D. Moss of the Presbyterian church; Josephus Daniels and Newton D. Baker sent tributes.

People: Edward Kidder Graham · William Dygnum Moss

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.

People: Edward Kidder Graham · Marvin Hendrix Stacy

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.

People: John Sprunt Hill · Harry Woodburn Chase · Edward Kidder Graham

Graham Memorial is completed as the university's student union

The building named for Edward Kidder Graham was completed in 1931 and served as the student union, holding the Horace Williams Library, a barber shop, a bowling alley, a game room and offices for student publications.

Subject: Graham Memorial