Chronology

The university dedicates Memorial Hall

Memorial Hall, the big arched-roof auditorium near the west end of Cameron Avenue, was dedicated in June 1885. It had no heat and swallowed speakers' voices, so it served mainly during commencement week and at times as a gymnasium until it was judged unsafe and torn down.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Princeton's Thomas Trenchard coaches Carolina to its best football season yet

The Athletic Association hired Thomas G. "Doggie" Trenchard, an 1893 Princeton all-American, and his team won seven games and tied one before losing again to Virginia. In February 1896 President Winston called off a planned tribute to the coach, saying he had been drinking and betting on games while in Chapel Hill.

People: George Tayloe Winston

President Winston turns back a legislative effort to cut the university's funding

Two years after the move to confine the university to graduate study failed, church-college allies in the 1895 General Assembly tried to shrink its state appropriation; Winston rallied alumni legislators and prevailed after Populist leader Marion Butler came out for the university. Students met him at the west gate on his return and escorted his hired coach and four to a bonfire and celebration at Gerrard Hall.

People: Marion Butler

Subject: Gerrard Hall

Joshua Gore's steam plant brings electricity to the campus and village

A steam engine near South Building drove a small dynamo and the pumps that filled the campus water tanks, and lines ran from it to university buildings and to shops, cafes and hotels in the village. Physics professor Joshua W. Gore planned the work; the library in Smith Hall got power late in 1896, and arc lights later went up along campus walks.

People: Joshua W. Gore

Subject: South Building

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

Work begins on the foundation of the Alumni Building

With about $7,000 of the alumni's $20,000 in pledges in hand, the trustees started the foundation and basement of a building for the president's, registrar's and bursar's offices and the physics and electrical engineering departments. Charlotte architect Frank Pierce Milburn drew the design, the first on campus planned for steam heat and electric lights.

Subject: Alumni Building

Edwin Alderman is inaugurated as president in Gerrard Hall

About a hundred legislators and Governor Daniel L. Russell rode a special train from Raleigh through sleet for the ceremony, where Kemp P. Battle presented Alderman and the new president spoke for an hour and a half on the university as the people's school. The lawmakers were made honorary members of the Di and Phi societies and met with school superintendents who had come to honor one of their own.

People: Daniel Lindsay Russell · Kemp Plummer Battle

Subject: Gerrard Hall

The Glee Club first sings the song that became Hark the Sound

William Starr Myers's verses, set to the campus tune "Amici" and first called "Hail to the Brightest Star," were sung by the Glee Club at a commencement concert. Printed in the 1907 Yackety Yack, the song became the university's anthem.

Acting president Joshua Gore demonstrates an X-ray machine at the university

While Alderman was abroad from February to May 1898, physics professor Joshua W. Gore ran the university and set up an X-ray apparatus in his laboratory. A Raleigh doctor brought over a patient to look for a shawl pin thought to be in her throat, which Gore could not find.

People: Joshua W. Gore

University students in the National Guard await orders as war with Spain begins

When the United States went to war with Spain, about thirty university men who belonged to the National Guard waited for active duty orders, and freshman Joseph Monroe Morris left for Durham to enlist in the Durham Light Infantry.

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

President Alderman resigns to head Tulane University

Offered the Tulane presidency in April 1900 at more than twice his Chapel Hill pay, Alderman resigned in May despite the trustees' pleas. The book suggests thin state funding after the 1898 campaign, when Democrats promised the church colleges not to seek more for the university, weighed on his decision.

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 freshman shoots a sophomore during a hazing attack

Set upon by three sophomores as he crossed the campus, a freshman pulled a pistol and shot one of them, who was gravely wounded but survived. It was the most serious hazing case at the university before Isaac William Rand's death in 1912.

Nonfraternity juniors elect a fraternity man class president and hold an open junior prom

Frank Porter Graham helped rally the nonfraternity majority of his class to elect a fraternity member as president on merit, breaking a long custom, and the class held a junior promenade open to every man in it.

People: Frank Porter Graham

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

Students nominate Woodrow Wilson for president after his campus speech

Students impressed by Woodrow Wilson's speech on Robert E. Lee met in the YMCA building right afterward and nominated him for president of the United States. One of them, Frank Porter Graham, was in the floor demonstration when the Democrats nominated Wilson in 1912.

People: Frank Porter Graham

Subject: University YMCA

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

Students start night classes for the Black men who served the dormitories

Asked for help by the young Black workers who cut firewood and carried water in the dormitories, students began teaching them reading and arithmetic in what were called moonlight schools. Under Frank Porter Graham at the campus YMCA the classes grew to take in history, English, writing, debating, home sanitation and the Bible.

People: Frank Porter Graham

Subject: University YMCA

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

Sophomores besiege a freshman cottage and fire a pistol into a room

After a class banquet a crowd of sophomores surrounded a university-owned cottage where freshmen lived, threw rocks at one room and fired a shot into it when the freshmen would not come out. Neither a faculty committee nor the Student Council could name the culprits until the inquiry into Isaac William Rand's death that fall.

Freshman Isaac William Rand dies in a hazing incident on the athletic field

Taken from his Old East room near midnight by sophomores, the Smithfield freshman was made to stand on a barrel behind Bynum Gymnasium, fell onto broken glass that cut his carotid artery, and died within minutes on the gymnasium steps. Four students were arrested for manslaughter that day after a coroner's inquest, and Governor W. W. Kitchin demanded a full public investigation.

People: William W. (William Walton) Kitchin · Francis Preston Venable

Venable's faculty committee reports on the Rand death and the spring hazing

After questioning nearly fifty students, the committee gave the trustees a full account of the night Rand died and of the March attack on the freshman cottage. Sixteen more students were punished, four dismissed and twelve suspended for a year, and the trustees' executive committee in Raleigh turned down fathers' appeals.

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

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.

People: Frank Porter Graham · Harry Woodburn Chase

Subject: University YMCA

Smallpox breaks out on the campus

In the last weeks of the 1912-13 term President Venable had to deal with an outbreak of smallpox at the university, one of the worries of the year that led him to seek leave.

People: Francis Preston Venable

The Chapel Hill Community Club runs an improvement contest in a Black neighborhood

Susan Moses Graham and the Community Club, with YMCA students under Frank Porter Graham, organized a project in an African American neighborhood at the edge of town, giving prizes for the cleanest house, the cleanest yard and the best fence.

People: Frank Porter Graham

Subject: University YMCA

The General Assembly makes hazing a crime

After the outcry over Rand's death the 1913 legislature outlawed hazing; the same session gave the university enough to keep growing and money for a new dining hall.

The new School of Education building is dedicated

Before the 1913 commencement Venable presided at the dedication of the building for the university's new School of Education, later called the Peabody Building.

People: Francis Preston Venable

Subject: Peabody Hall

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

Three students are convicted in Hillsborough in Isaac William Rand's death

At the Orange County Courthouse one of the four defendants was freed after the first testimony, and a jury of Orange County farmers found the other three guilty within a few hours. The judge gave the minimum four months with the option of hiring them out, and their families paid the fees and took them home the same day.

People: John W. Graham · Isaac William Rand

Subject: Orange County Courthouse, Hillsborough

Vice President Thomas R. Marshall gives the commencement address

Newly inaugurated with Woodrow Wilson, Marshall was the 1913 commencement speaker and stayed at the President's House because there was no decent hotel within fifteen miles of the campus.

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

Cora Zeta Corpening enrolls as the university's first woman candidate for a medical degree

When the 1914-15 session opened, Cora Zeta Corpening of Mars Hill became the first woman to enroll at the university as a candidate for a medical degree.

Subject: UNC School of Medicine

Fire damages the Alumni Building

A fire probably started by Joshua Gore's X-ray machine in the basement did about $1,800 in damage to the Alumni Building.

Subject: Alumni Building

Isaac Emerson gives $25,000 for a new athletic field and stadium

Isaac Emerson of Baltimore, an 1879 graduate who made his fortune with Bromo-Seltzer, gave $25,000 for an athletic field and stadium. The field was under construction when students returned in September 1914 and was named Emerson Field for him.

Subject: Emerson Field

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

Six students and the track trainer are arrested in a Chapel Hill craps game

The authorities found the floating game when a loser wrote a bad check; a few townspeople were arrested too, the faculty suspended the students, and the trainer resigned.

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

The Bureau of Extension begins correspondence courses for credit

Under Louis R. Wilson, the university's new Bureau of Extension began organizing correspondence courses for credit during the 1914-15 term. It had already widened its free advice for teachers to help town officials with water systems and streets.

People: Louis Round Wilson

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 first Good Roads Institute meets at Chapel Hill

State geologist and faculty member Joseph Hyde Pratt chaired the first Good Roads Institute held at Chapel Hill. The institute later became part of the university's extension program.

People: Joseph Hyde Pratt

Francis P. Venable resigns the presidency from London

Writing to the trustees from London, Venable resigned on his doctor's warning against another breakdown and asked to return to teaching chemistry. His letter reached board secretary Richard H. Lewis about the same time Graham got a personal note, which Graham called a great shock.

People: Richard H. Lewis

E. C. Branson takes up rural economics and sociology and starts the North Carolina Club

Eugene Cunningham Branson arrived in Chapel Hill in September 1914 as Graham's new professor of rural economics and sociology. He at once gathered the students' county clubs into the North Carolina Club to study conditions back home.

Branson's University News Letter publishes its first issue

E. C. Branson's University News Letter, a weekly one-page sheet packed with facts about North Carolina gathered by him and his students, first appeared in mid-November 1914 with a run of four thousand copies. Its items were widely reprinted by the state's papers, and circulation grew to fifteen thousand.

People: John Sprunt Hill

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.

Student engineers wire the first campus telephone network

The electrical engineering laboratory rebuilt used telephones salvaged from a Durham textile mill to link the Alumni Building offices of the president, business manager, treasurer and registrar. Student engineers also put a radio antenna on New East to receive baseball scores.

Subject: Alumni Building

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

A brass plate from the Old East cornerstone is returned on University Day

University Day 1916 brought back a brass plate that had once been part of the Old East cornerstone. A Tennessee foundry owner had found it in a pile of scrap metal, and how it got there was unknown.

Subject: Old East

Julian S. Carr endows a scholarship on his class's fiftieth anniversary

At the 1916 commencement, fifty years after his class was due to graduate, Durham industrialist Julian S. Carr gave $4,000 to endow a scholarship fund. Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo gave the address.

William Jennings Bryan argues against entering the war in Memorial Hall

Former secretary of state William Jennings Bryan, campaigning for peace, spoke in Memorial Hall to students and townspeople, a crowd that spilled into the street, and urged Americans to keep out of Europe's war.

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

Emerson Field's concrete stadium is ready for the 1916 baseball season

The stadium paid for by Isaac Emerson, with white concrete stands behind Bynum Gymnasium seating up to 3,200, was ready for a baseball game with Virginia set for April 3, 1916. Its plans were the first at the university to allow parking for automobiles.

Subject: Emerson Field

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

A Department of Military Science opens with more than half the students enrolled

For 1917-18 the university added a Department of Military Science with three faculty, as large as the Greek department, and more than half the student body took its courses.

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.

Part of Orange County in the First World War, 1917–1919 · 84 events

People: Edward Kidder Graham · J. Stuart Allen

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

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.

Part of Orange County in the First World War, 1917–1919 · 84 events

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

The university suspends intercollegiate football for the war

Intercollegiate football was dropped in the fall of 1917 as drilling men took over Emerson Field in the afternoons. Captain Allen took on the coach's duties, conditioning students with trench digging and mock attacks.

People: J. Stuart Allen

Subject: Emerson Field

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.

Part of Orange County in the First World War, 1917–1919 · 84 events

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.

Part of Orange County in the First World War, 1917–1919 · 84 events

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 · J. Stuart Allen

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

The trustees approve a three-year wartime engineering degree

Before the SATC arrived, the trustees approved an accelerated engineering course leading to a bachelor's degree in three years, with military training and military French. Students were deferred while enrolled and then went on to army or navy service.

University Day is canceled because of the influenza epidemic

Fear of the influenza epidemic led the university to cancel its University Day observance in the fall of 1918. The literary societies also failed to meet that fall.

University janitors organize with the Industrial Workers of the World

Black janitors at the university formed an affiliate of the IWW and weighed a strike for higher wages as the spring term closed. Business manager Charles T. Woollen answered that he would hire a new crew from Durham, and the effort faded. That fall all the campus help lost their jobs when the SATC took over the buildings.

People: Charles T. Woollen

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

A subdued wartime commencement honors the governor, Senator Overman and the Rev. W. D. Moss

With about a third of the class of 1918 already in camps, the university gave honorary degrees to Governor Bickett, Senator Lee S. Overman, Edwin Mims and the Presbyterian pastor W. D. Moss. Frederic C. Howe, immigration commissioner at New York, gave the address.

People: William Dygnum Moss · Thomas W. Bickett

Subject: Memorial Hall

The university gets an ROTC unit under Lt. Col. Gustave W. S. Stevens

With the university's ROTC application finally approved, the army called Lieutenant Colonel Gustave W. S. Stevens out of retirement in New Orleans and sent him to Chapel Hill in June 1918 to run the program. He stayed on to command the campus when the SATC replaced it.

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.

Part of Orange County in the First World War, 1917–1919 · 84 events

People: Edward Kidder Graham · Charles T. Woollen

Capt. J. Stuart Allen returns to command the students outside the SATC

When the Students' Army Training Corps took over the campus in the fall of 1918, about 300 students too young or otherwise ineligible had to room in the village. Capt. J. Stuart Allen, back for a second year, commanded their non-SATC training company, which drilled on the old class field.

Part of Orange County in the First World War, 1917–1919 · 84 events

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

About 2,240 university men are in uniform when the war ends

At the armistice about 2,240 university men, counting alumni and faculty, were in service. The Alumni Review's October to December issues listed 33 dead, and the only faculty member killed was Lt. Joseph Henry Johnston of the School of Education.

Part of Orange County in the First World War, 1917–1919 · 84 events

A memorial service for President Graham fills Gerrard Hall

Every seat in Gerrard Hall was taken for the formal memorial service for Edward Kidder Graham, held after the epidemic had eased. Horace Williams and R. D. W. Connor spoke, and J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton read a tribute from C. Alphonso Smith.

People: R. D. W. Connor · J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton · Henry Horace Williams · Charles Alphonso Smith

Subject: Gerrard Hall

The SATC is demobilized and half its men leave Chapel Hill

Demobilization of the Students' Army Training Corps was completed on December 10, 1918, ending military control of the campus, and half of the SATC men left on the next train. Faculty judged the arrangement a failure because the university had answered to two masters.

Part of Orange County in the First World War, 1917–1919 · 84 events

People: Louis Round Wilson · Marvin Hendrix Stacy

Trustees and faculty back a $150,000 student building as Edward Kidder Graham's memorial

A joint committee of trustees and faculty, meeting in the governor's office in mid-December, agreed to raise $150,000 privately for the student activities building Graham had hoped for, to stand where Person Hall was. Albert Coates ran the drive and by the end of January 1919 announced $20,000 pledged by students, $14,500 of it in one night.

People: Louis Round Wilson · Albert Coates

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase · R. D. W. Connor

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

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

George Howe becomes dean of the College of Liberal Arts

Howe, professor of Latin since 1903, took over the College of Liberal Arts in 1919 to handle academic affairs while the new dean of students handled discipline.

People: George Howe

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Enrollment drops to 759 for the postwar winter quarter

When the winter quarter opened after the SATC left, 759 students registered, the lowest count in more than a decade. Officials hoped returning soldiers would add about 150 in March.

People: Marvin Hendrix Stacy

Former president Kemp Plummer Battle dies at Senlac

Kemp Plummer Battle, who helped reopen the university in 1875, served as its president from 1876 and wrote its history, died in his sleep at Senlac, his home at the edge of campus. He had turned 87 in December, and his death came two weeks after Stacy's.

Subject: Senlac (Battle house)

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Some 300 county officials meet at the University as the State and County Council

Two weeks before classes, about 300 school board members, county commissioners, superintendents, health and welfare officers and juvenile judges from 76 counties met on campus to compare work under the new state welfare and school laws. Governor Thomas W. Bickett gave the welcome.

People: Thomas W. Bickett

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase · Frank Porter Graham

Subject: Memorial Hall

Carolina plays Virginia in Chapel Hill for the first time

The Thanksgiving Day game with Virginia, the high point of the season, was held in Chapel Hill for the first time, and more than 8,000 people crowded Emerson Field.

Subject: Emerson Field

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.

People: Howard W. Odum · Harry Woodburn Chase

Biologist Edwin Grant Conklin gives the McNair lectures on evolution

Over three evenings in Memorial Hall, the Princeton biologist dismissed the clay-molding account of creation and said scientific doctrines stood or fell on evidence alone. His lectures were printed as part of the McNair series, and Presbyterians later cited them in charging that the university ignored the terms of John Calvin McNair's bequest.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Louis Graves reports that Orange County has the state's biggest illicit distilling

Writing in the New Republic, Graves said North Carolina led the country in illicit still capacity and that Orange County, home of the University, had the largest distilling operations in the state, ahead of Wilkes.

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.

People: Josephus Daniels · Walter Clark

Subject: Memorial Hall

Louis R. Wilson and W. C. Coker are raised to Kenan professorships

At the 1920 commencement meeting the trustees made librarian Louis Round Wilson and botanist William C. Coker Kenan professors, in the same action that recognized Horace Williams.

People: William Chambers Coker

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase · Charles T. Woollen

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.

People: Frank Porter Graham · Harry Woodburn Chase

Frank Porter Graham takes the higher-education campaign to Hillsboro alumni

A day after Greensboro alumni founded the Association for the Promotion of Higher Education, Graham spoke to an alumni meeting in Hillsboro, one of nearly two dozen club gatherings across the state that October.

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

People: Thomas W. Bickett

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

A rail spur from Carrboro brings building materials to the campus

With the nearest railhead in Carrboro, convict labor built a $73,000 spur that ran south of Franklin Street, crossed Pittsboro Street and ended near Raleigh Road at the new dormitory sites; it was later moved toward the new mall. Neighbors blamed the Chapel Hill Limited for cracked plaster, cinders and smoke.

Memorial Hall is renovated with heat, electric light and sound padding

Builders laid cork on the floors and padded the vaulted ceiling with felt and burlap to fix the acoustics, and added electric lights and heat so the hall could be used year-round. It reopened for the fall 1921 term.

People: Thomas C. Atwood

Subject: Memorial Hall

The campus contractor builds separate quarters for white and Black workers

The trustees made T. C. Thompson and Brothers of Charlotte sole contractor for the $1.1 million building program, a first in the state. Its first job was housing the initial 200 workers, in one dormitory for white men and another for African American men.

People: Thomas C. Atwood

The university drops its postwar ROTC unit for lack of students

An ROTC program organized at the university after World War I was ended in 1921 because too few students took part. It was 1924 before a visiting general's call for a new unit drew applause in Memorial Hall.

Women students at UNC organize a basketball team

Women, then a small group mostly in upper classes and graduate study, formed a basketball team in 1921, and men on campus wondered whether a woman would have to be given a letter.

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Tuskegee principal Robert Russa Moton speaks in Gerrard Hall

Moton, Booker T. Washington's successor at Tuskegee Institute, told his campus audience that he accepted social separation of the races and promised good relations so long as whites gave Black people education and industrial fairness.

Subject: Gerrard Hall

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Courts clear the University's claim to $75,000 a year from the Bingham estate

Five years of litigation over Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham's bequest ended in late 1922, confirming the University's right to an annual income of $75,000 from her estate.

John M. Booker outlines sixteen more buildings for the growing campus

With enrollment rising past 1,600, English professor John M. Booker, a member of the faculty building committee, presented a plan with sites for sixteen buildings beyond the seven already funded, which he said would be needed within a few years to serve 3,000 students. He had also urged grouping buildings by purpose in the new campus plan.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase · William Chambers Coker

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Subject: The Carolina Inn

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Subject: UNC School of Law

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Subject: Eagle Hotel (Chapel Hill) · Graham Memorial

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

New health rules cover Chapel Hill dairies, restaurants and boardinghouses

To head off food-borne illness as off-campus eateries fed more and more students, new health regulations on dairies, restaurants and boardinghouses took effect in January 1922.

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.

People: Isaac Hall Manning · Harry Woodburn Chase · Richard H. Lewis

Subject: UNC School of Medicine · UNC Medical Center (N.C. Memorial Hospital)

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase · Isaac Hall Manning · Cameron Morrison

Subject: UNC School of Medicine

Fire guts the upper story of Edward Kidder Graham's former house

A 1923 fire burned out the upper floor of the late president's house, then rented to faculty, and destroyed many of Graham's personal papers stored there. The house still stood in the twenty-first century.

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase · Louis Round Wilson

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase · John Sprunt Hill

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

People: Charles Edward Maddry · Joseph Blount Cheshire Jr.

Law dean Lucius McGehee dies

McGehee, dean since 1910 and the man who brought the casebook method to Chapel Hill, broke down weeks before the fall term and died in Richmond in early October. Atwell C. McIntosh became acting dean, and the trustees gave his estate $2,000 for burial and debts.

Subject: UNC School of Law

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase · William H. S. Burgwyn · John Sprunt Hill

Subject: UNC School of Law

General Albert J. Bowley warns of campus radicals in a Memorial Hall address

Two weeks after he had berated extension director Chester D. Snell at a Raleigh luncheon, the commander of Fort Bragg spoke for nearly an hour in Memorial Hall on the occasion of Washington's birthday before a crowd of about 3,000. He repeated his charges that Soviet-backed agitators were working through colleges and welfare groups, and his closing call for an ROTC unit at the university drew long applause.

Subject: Memorial Hall

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Subject: UNC School of Law

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

Subject: Memorial Hall

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Dean James F. Royster refuses Shaw University debaters seats in the gallery

When the debate team of Shaw University, a Black college in Raleigh, asked only to sit in the gallery and watch Carolina's debaters meet Washington and Lee, Royster, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, said no, fearing it would reflect poorly on the university.

George Washington Carver speaks in Gerrard Hall

The Tuskegee scientist visited the campus, speaking from the platform of Gerrard Hall and showing a display at the YMCA, without the outcry that met James Weldon Johnson's classroom visits two years later.

Subject: Gerrard Hall

The Dialectic Society condemns the Glee Club for singing to a mixed audience at Hampton

The Dialectic Literary Society censured the university Glee Club for performing before Black and white listeners together at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, a Black college in Virginia.

Subject: Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies

The legislature puts university spending under the governor's budget control

Governor Angus W. McLean's plan, passed by the 1925 General Assembly, made the governor director of the budget and chair of a stronger Advisory Budget Commission. Moving money between accounts in an institution's budget now needed approval in Raleigh, and the university's budget stayed under review through the biennium. As both budget director and chair of the trustees, the governor gained far more say over the university.

People: Angus W. McLean

Manning Hall is dedicated as the law school's new home

Supreme court justices, superior court judges, lawyers and alumni, 200 or more, came for the dedication and lunched at the new Carolina Inn with John Sprunt Hill as host.

People: John Sprunt Hill

Subject: UNC School of Law

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.

The state House defeats the Poole antievolution resolution

After two days of debate, the House voted 70 to 41 against Henry Connor's compromise bill and then 67 to 46 against the minority report on David Scott Poole's resolution, which would have declared it harmful for any tax-paid teacher to teach human descent from lower life as fact. Former speaker Walter Murphy's speech was credited with settling the outcome.

Governor McLean cuts the university's appropriation by 5 percent

Facing a projected deficit, McLean as budget director cut all state appropriations for the coming year by 5 percent in mid-May. The cut erased the $25,000 increase the legislature had voted, and for the first time in the century the university faced a smaller state appropriation than the year before.

People: Angus W. McLean

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Edwin Greenlaw leaves the Graduate School deanship for Johns Hopkins

Greenlaw left after five years as dean, during which graduate enrollment had tripled to 346 students in eighteen departments. The Alumni Review said he was being driven from the state by tight budgets. James F. Royster followed him as dean.

People: James Finch Royster

Trustees raise tuition 20 percent after the governor insists on a balanced budget

At their commencement-week meeting the trustees split over what they read as a legislative order to raise tuition. Governor McLean told them they could keep tuition only by cutting the operating budget, and after three hours they voted 38 to 23 for a 20 percent increase.

People: Angus W. McLean

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.

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase · Edwin Anderson Alderman · Francis Preston Venable · Angus W. McLean

Subject: Memorial Hall

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.

People: Andrew Henry Patterson

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase · Collier Cobb

Robert B. House becomes the university's first executive secretary

The trustees created the post of executive secretary to carry part of the president's load, and House, class of 1916, came from the North Carolina Historical Commission to fill it. His first major task was a plan for better teacher training; he ran the office while Chase was abroad in 1927.

Subject: South Building

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

Commencement moves from midweek to a weekend

To draw more alumni, the 1926 exercises were shifted to the weekend for the first time, with a president's reception and an alumni ball added. The 366 graduates heard Richmond editor Douglas Southall Freeman, and Governor McLean received an honorary doctor of laws with a faculty citation that gently mocked his economies.

People: Angus W. McLean

Subject: Memorial Hall

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

A revived Poole antievolution bill dies in committee

Representative David Scott Poole brought his measure back in the 1927 General Assembly, and it died in committee. A university law student presented the institution's side, telling legislators the young cared more about where they were going than where they came from.

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Subject: UNC School of Law

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.

People: Howard W. Odum

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase · R. B. House

Subject: UNC Libraries

James Weldon Johnson speaks at the YMCA's Institute of Human Relations

Harry F. Comer's weeklong institute, approved by Chase, brought speakers on race, labor and world affairs. Johnson, NAACP executive secretary, spoke in Memorial Hall and met classes. History chair J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton walked out when Howard Odum introduced him as 'Mister Johnson' and protested to Chase, while a Tar Heel editorial by David Donald Carroll welcomed the visit.

People: Howard W. Odum · J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton

Subject: Memorial Hall · University YMCA

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.

People: William T. Couch · Paul Green · Harry Woodburn Chase · James Finch Royster

The Carolina Magazine prints an issue of work by Black writers, including Langston Hughes's 'Mulatto'

The student magazine's 'Negro Number' carried only work by African American writers. Hughes's 'Mulatto' drew none of the reaction that the story 'Slaves' had caused the fall before, though both dealt with the same subject.

Trustees appoint Sallie Belle Marks and Cecilia Hatrick Bason, the first women on the faculty

With little discussion, the June trustees made both women assistant professors as part of a push to improve teacher training. Marks became supervising principal of the elementary grades at the university's training school in Chapel Hill; Bason worked for the Extension Division from Asheville. Once women were on the faculty, women graduates could join the American Association of University Women.

People: N. W. Walker

Trustees name the women's dormitory for Cornelia Phillips Spencer

At the same meeting that appointed the first women faculty, the trustees named the campus's one women's dormitory, in use for two years, Spencer Hall.

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.

People: Howard W. Odum · Dudley Dewitt Carroll · Frank Porter Graham

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Subject: Graham Memorial

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

A workmen's compensation law that Frank Graham and Harry Wolf helped write passes

Sixteen earlier bills had failed, but with Governor O. Max Gardner's backing the 1929 General Assembly passed a no-fault workmen's compensation act. Frank Graham lobbied for it, and he and economics professor Harry Wolf helped draft it; the governor's support kept textile interests from objecting to Graham's role.

People: O. Max Gardner

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

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.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Subject: UNC Libraries

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.

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.

People: Frank Porter Graham · O. Max Gardner

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.

People: O. Max Gardner

Thomas C. Atwood reports that Memorial Hall could collapse

After President Chase closed Memorial Hall over a bulge in its slate roof, university architect Thomas C. Atwood found the bases of the wooden roof arches rotted to powder. In a late November report to the building committee he warned that the building could fall at any minute and endanger passersby.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Subject: Memorial Hall