Storyline · 1970–1994
From 1970 UNC women challenged the University's limits on admitting women and its treatment of women employees, through Female Liberation's demands, a federal complaint by the Women's Equity Action League and later complaints by NOW and the Association of Women Students. The Faculty Council's 1973 report found gaps between men and women in hiring, pay and promotion. UNC's first affirmative action plan took effect in July 1973 but was rejected by HEW, and a revised plan followed in 1974; by that fall women made up 17.6 percent of the faculty. A federal agency upheld NOW's complaint in 1976, a religion professor lost her discrimination suit in 1978, and in 1981 Gillian Cell became UNC's first full-time affirmative action officer. In 1980 the Faculty Council's women's committee found no women hired as full professors since 1974, and in 1984 it reported that women in tenure-track posts had barely grown in a decade. Cell left the post in 1983 and in 1985 became dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. The University adopted a maternity leave policy in 1985, and in 1989 the women's committee reported that women held only 9 percent of full professorships. In 1990 and 1991 women in University housing maintenance and the School of Dentistry filed harassment grievances, and in 1992 the women's committee reported that all four full professorships awarded in 1990-91 went to men. In 1993 a state judge found sexual harassment in a Physical Plant grievance and the EEOC found sex discrimination in a tenure denial, and in 1994 the Faculty Council set goals for hiring women.
In March 1970 UNC's Female Liberation group gave Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson 21 demands headed by an end to admissions limits that left women 15 percent of the freshman class, and the Women's Equity Action League filed a complaint with the Labor Department charging the University with admitting freshman women only if they were especially well qualified. About 500 people heard Female Liberation speakers in the Pit on April 6 call for an end to the quota, equal pay and child care, and they reported that married-student housing was now open to couples in which the wife was the student. That spring Graduate English Women asked their department for equal treatment, and the Student Legislature voted 25 to 15 to make rules that applied to one sex unenforceable in student courts. In June HEW agreed to review the league's complaint, and in July the Women's Committee for Equality in Employment asked Sitterson to add sex to the University's equal opportunity pledge.
On September 15, 1972 the Faculty Council approved a report from its Committee on the Recruitment of Black Faculty, which called UNC's hiring record embarrassing, with about 10 or 12 Black teachers in a state a quarter Black, and asked departments to give first priority to finding a qualified Black candidate for any opening. On November 17 the council asked for a committee on the status of women on the faculty, and on March 30, 1973 it adopted the committee's report finding gaps between men and women in hiring, promotion, tenure and pay; in April Professor John W. Dixon reported 19 Black teachers at the University, 14 of them full time. Women faculty, students and staff formed University Women for Affirmative Action that February. Chancellor N. Ferebee Taylor named an Affirmative Action Committee of seven administrators under John L. Sanders and in April refused the women's group a seat on it, and the committee sent preliminary proposals toward the plans the campuses owed HEW by May 1. The plan took effect on July 1, 1973 with goals for women and Black faculty, and in September Taylor confirmed Vice Chancellor Douglass Hunt as affirmative action officer and named an advisory committee of nine men and nine women. HEW found the plan unacceptable in a September 21 letter, faulting among other things Hunt's part-time role. That fall the Association of Women Students filed an HEW complaint over the intramural program, the Chapel Hill chapter of the National Organization for Women filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of women employees, the advisory committee voted to add four students, and in December the Campus Governing Council asked for a full-time officer.
In January 1974 Greensboro attorney Marquis D. Street joined Hunt's office, and in February the University sent HEW a 200-page expanded plan. In March Black Student Movement chairman Willie Mebane challenged an all-white panel on the plan, and in April an EEOC investigator came to campus to look into NOW's complaint. In October Taylor reported that Black faculty had risen to 36 and women to 17.6 percent of the faculty. In December the Association of Women Students and NOW charged the University with sex discrimination in its residency rules for in-state tuition, and in 1975 law professor Charles E. Daye was elected to chair the restructured Affirmative Action Committee.
In December 1974 the trustees voted 11 to 2 against student body president Marcus Williams's resolution for a full-time affirmative action officer independent of other offices, with Williams and Walter Tucker, the board's only Black members, for it, and the duty stayed with Hunt. Taylor's October 1975 report put Black faculty at 2.6 percent of the Academic Affairs faculty against a goal of 5.2 percent. By February 1976 the University had issued a fifth revision of its plan; HEW had formally approved none of the five but had told it to carry them out. In July 1976 a woman assistant professor of religion sued President William Friday, Taylor and members of her department, charging she was not reappointed because of her sex, age and Catholic faith, and on August 30 a federal appeals court ordered an injunction keeping her on the faculty while the suit went forward. In September the EEOC's district office upheld NOW's 1973 charge for women faculty and exempt staff, finding that men's average faculty salaries in 1975 exceeded women's by $5,000 to $7,000; the University denied the findings. By March 1977 Black faculty numbered 46 of 1,730, up from 41 a year earlier.
In 1978 a federal jury rejected the religion professor's age and religion claims, and on November 9 Judge Eugene A. Gordon ruled there had been no sex discrimination under Title VII, finding the department chairman "honestly mistaken" about her competence rather than biased; her lawyer said she would appeal. In July 1979 a Labor Department inquiry into wage and sex discrimination at UNC, under way since 1975, passed to the EEOC; Miriam Slifkin, state president of NOW, said she had asked for a class action covering all women employees, but it covered only faculty and exempt staff. That October Taylor reported that the number of women on the faculty had fallen by 10 while the faculty grew by 20, which he called going backward. That year the University's chapter of the American Association of University Professors found strong evidence that women doing the same jobs as men were paid less; a chapter member said many corrections were made after the report reached University officials.
On March 21, 1980 the Faculty Council took up a report by its Committee on the Status of Women, which found that no women had been hired as full professors since 1974 and that women were nearly absent from department chairs and higher posts. The council asked Chancellor Christopher C. Fordham III to name a committee on the gap between men's and women's financial aid and asked the Morehead Foundation to review its selection process, and it recommended a full-time affirmative action officer, written hiring, promotion and tenure procedures in every department and records comparing men's and women's careers. The same day the trustees, meeting in closed session, accepted a special committee's finding that the geology department had shown no sex discrimination or personal malice in denying tenure to Judith B. Moody, whom the Daily Tar Heel called the department's first woman assistant professor. Rated excellent in research but inadequate in teaching, Moody said she would appeal to the Board of Governors and that she had not been allowed the outside witnesses granted Sonja Stone. On April 18 Fordham accepted the women's committee's recommendation for a full-time officer and thanked Hunt, who had done the work part time, and in May he named a search committee chaired by Slavic languages chairman Madeline Levine; it later added two graduate students, one a former Black Student Movement president, and held a public hearing in Dey Hall on July 1. On January 15, 1981 history professor Gillian Cell became the University's first full-time affirmative action officer, and that September the chancellor's report counted 54 Black faculty among 1,880. On November 20 the Faculty Council was told that the University would end its disability insurance with Pilot Life, which had declined to change premiums and benefits that differed for men and women, and seek bids from other companies. In March 1982 Cell reported new rules requiring every department to tell her when a position opened, where it would be advertised and what would be done to recruit minority and women candidates, and to notify her when a faculty member resigned, so that exit interviews could explain the losses. The University had lost 10 Black faculty members the year before and added seven that year, and 35 of the 52 women faculty it lost had resigned.
On June 30, 1983 Cell resigned to become chairman of the history department, and her assistant, Benjamin E. Rawlins, became acting officer; on July 26 a six-member search committee limited to University faculty and staff recommended him for the permanent job. The University's July 1983 affirmative action report showed the faculty 94 percent white and 80.8 percent male. On November 18 Fordham gave the Faculty Council the annual report on women and minorities, which counted 59 Black faculty members, 3.1 percent of 1,917, and 376 women, 19.6 percent, the highest levels in UNC's history; he called the progress substantial but inadequate. The report set goals of 83 Black and 335 women faculty on the tenure track by the end of 1986 and showed Black enrollment falling from 1,913 to 1,883, while women were a majority of students for the sixth straight year. In January 1984 national figures for 1982–83 showed women full professors at Chapel Hill averaging $36,400 against $43,000 for men, and women assistant professors $22,500 against $24,500; acting affirmative action officer Harold Wallace and Jeffrey Orleans of the UNC system office said seniority explained most of the gap and that it was closing. On April 27 the Committee on the Status of Women, chaired by Mary Turner Lane, told the Faculty Council that women in tenure-track faculty posts had grown only from 270 in 1974 to 276 in 1983, that no women had been named to administrative posts and that the University needed child care and a formal maternity-leave policy. After more than a year without a full-time officer, the trustees named Robert J. Cannon the second on August 15, 1984, reporting to Fordham. In 1985 Fordham made Cell dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the first woman in the post by Pamela Dean's account in Women on the Hill (1987).
In August 1985 the University adopted a policy on disability and pregnancy-related absence that set the length of leave, provided coverage of classes and opened leave for child care to both men and women; it came out of research by the Committee on the Status of Women and members of the faculty welfare committee, who found no model elsewhere in the UNC system. By March 1988 the Faculty Council had passed five resolutions from the women's committee asking the administration to back the revision of the sexual harassment policy, watch departments' career development of women, report on salary monitoring, consider day care alternatives and gather information on women and minorities; the committee's survey of 237 women faculty and administrators found more than two-thirds reporting some sexual harassment in two years and over 70 percent naming pay equity among their top concerns. On March 31, 1989 the committee reported that women held only 9 percent of full professorships, ranking UNC ninth of 20 institutions, and that only five women were distinguished professors. It urged using distinguished professorships to recruit senior women, more University support for day care and a more flexible maternity leave policy.
On September 19, 1990 the only woman mechanic in housing support filed a sexual harassment grievance, and on October 30 the Physical Plant fired a maintenance mechanic. Represented by Alan McSurely, she said she would keep pressing her complaints of retaliation by supervisors; at least 22 housing support employees had complained to Human Resources since late August, and a Black maintenance supervisor had filed a race discrimination grievance. On March 22, 1991 Chancellor Paul Hardin upheld a Step 3 panel's rejection of the discrimination and sexual harassment grievance of the only woman carpenter in University housing maintenance, though her supervisor and the housing superintendent had been transferred and a co-worker fired during the case. On April 19 a School of Dentistry department manager settled her harassment grievance against a faculty member at Step 3, with a final written warning placed in his file, his office kept out of the school and a human relations committee created in the school to handle such complaints. On October 25 the Faculty Council's committee on the status of women reported that women's share of administrative positions had risen from 10.7 percent in 1972 to 35.2 percent in 1991, but that most were non-academic posts: few women were deans, directors or department chairs, and none was a vice chancellor. A committee report discussed on October 16, 1992 found that all four full professorships awarded in 1990-91 went to men and that women fell from 30.65 percent of new faculty in 1989-90 to 27 percent in 1990-91.
In a decision dated January 29, 1993, administrative law judge Brenda Becton ruled in a former Physical Plant worker's Step 4 grievance that her co-workers' circulation of vulgar and suggestive pictures was sexual harassment; on February 12 University counsel Susan Ehringhaus and sexual discrimination officer Judith Scott said UNC was working to improve its sexual harassment policy. On March 1 more than 50 students of the Department of Radio, Television and Motion Pictures marched to Swain Hall, where outside reviewers were meeting, against a faculty plan to remake the department. In a determination dated March 31 and released April 16, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that an assistant professor in that department had been denied tenure through sex discrimination and retaliation; the Board of Governors granted her tenure in the School of Journalism on April 16, after she and the University had reached an agreement. On January 14, 1994, hearing the Committee on the Status of Women report that women were 26.2 percent of the faculty, below the national average, the Faculty Council unanimously adopted goals tying hiring to the share of doctorates women earned in each field, and on February 18, at Chancellor Paul Hardin's proposal, the Board of Governors let UNC-Chapel Hill faculty take a year off the tenure clock for childbirth, child care or poor health.
Every statement above comes from these dated entries in the chronology. Each links to its source.
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows them all.
Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange, Orange County GIS, OpenStreetMap and a few other published sources named on each site’s page; town and community pins show approximate locations.
People with a page of their own whom the dated events above name, those named most often first.
No indexed work is about this storyline itself yet. These are about the sites and people its dated events name, those named most often first, so they may discuss the storyline only in part. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Photograph from about 1903 of South Building on the university campus in Chapel Hill. Work on the building started in 1798 under Samuel Hopkins, was later carried on by John Clare, and finished in 1814. Part of the Images of North Carolina collection.
Draft minutes of the Grand Lodge of North Carolina for 14 April 1798, recording the Masonic ceremony for laying the cornerstone of the University of North Carolina's Old South Building in Chapel Hill.
South Building at UNC on 22 April 1987, showing its columns with flowers in bloom, in a Hugh Morton color photograph. Mounted 35 mm slide.
South Building on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, probably shot on infrared film by Hugh Morton in late 1946 or early 1947. Morton gave six photographs to the Alumni Office that autumn, and this one ran on page 216 of the April 1947 Alumni Review. Black-and-white sheet film negative.
Office records documenting equal opportunity and disability compliance work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1965 to 2006, about 48,000 items across 79.5 linear feet in the University Archives at UNC, collection 40029. Topics include affirmative action programs, discrimination in higher education, barrier free design, services for people with disabilities, and dealings with the federal Departments of Labor and of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Committee records documenting the North Carolina Distinguished Service Award for Women, 1953 to 1995, approximately 600 items in 1.5 linear feet, in the University Archives at UNC, collection 40192. The selection committee was based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Subjects include Katherine Kennedy Carmichael and Douglass Hunt, the Epsilon Beta chapter of Chi Omega, and Greek letter societies in Chapel Hill.
Administrative files covering 1945 to 1990 from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Administration at UNC, about 22,800 items in 28.5 linear feet, in the University Archives at UNC, collection 40301. Admissions and student recruiting in North Carolina, including the recruiting of minority college students, sit alongside scholarships, personnel management and university regulations, with the registrar's office and Douglass Hunt represented.
Office files of Douglass Hunt (1924-2011), assistant to the chancellor at Chapel Hill, dated 1900 to 2002 with the bulk from 1980 onward, about 16,800 items in 21.5 linear feet, University Archives at UNC, collection 40209. Topics include Frank Porter Graham, Albert Coates and Allard Lowenstein, the C. Knox Massey awards, Carolina Seminars, student government, and state law and policy on higher education.
Chancellor N. Ferebee Taylor of UNC-Chapel Hill stands before the sundial at Morehead Planetarium in June 1973, on a color slide by Hugh Morton.
Miriam Slifkin started the Rape Crisis Center in Orange County and was active in feminist organizing there. Interviewed by Lynne Degitz in March 1995, she describes the center's work on violence against women and her role in NOW (National Organization for Women), and she is frank about friction between NOW and other parts of the local movement. About an hour and fifty minutes, part of the Southern Oral History Program; electronic edition from the UNC library, 2006, through Documenting the American South.
Papers of Miriam Slifkin, the Chapel Hill women's rights activist who founded and led North Carolina's chapter of the National Organization for Women and founded the Orange County Rape Crisis Center. Much of the 7.5 linear feet, about 5,000 items dating from 1961, is the NOW chapter's working files: letters, newsletters, speeches, budgets, fund raising and material on sex discrimination. A Rubenstein Library collection at Duke.
Episode of the North Carolina People television program, broadcast in 1988 by North Carolina Public Television as program number 1750 and recorded here as a 29 minute videocassette. The guest is Christopher C. Fordham III, chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Chancellor's office records from the tenure of Carol L. Folt at Chapel Hill, 2013 to 2018, 8 linear feet in the University Archives at UNC, collection 40024. Topics include university administration and educational fund raising, curriculum planning, health occupations schools and medical education, and race relations and college integration in North Carolina. Holden Thorp and Christopher C. Fordham also appear.
Groundbreaking for the George Watts Hill Alumni Center at UNC-Chapel Hill on 13 May 1989. The group includes Ralph Strayhorn, George Watts Hill, Doug Dibbert, trustees chairman Robert C. Eubanks and Tom Lambeth, with Paul Hardin and Christopher C. Fordham also pictured. Hugh Morton photograph.
Chancellor Christopher C. Fordham III posed with the scholar Robin Hadley in 1985. A single print among the UNC Faculty and Administration photographs of the Chapel Hill Historical Society, CHHS.002.
Sydney Nathans's biography of Mary Walker, an enslaved woman from Orange County who escaped to the North in the mid nineteenth century and spent the following decades in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working to free the family she had left behind. Chapter titles trace her flight, her years among Northern friends, a rescue plot, a long silence, and the reunion that gives the book its close. Published 2012 by Harvard University Press, 330 pages with 20 pages of plates, illustrations and maps.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (2012), Civil War Book Review (2012).
H. G. Jones follows the fortune of Mary Ruffin Smith (1814-1885), the unmarried heiress whose Orange and Chatham County lands passed at her death to the University of North Carolina and the Episcopal Church. Chapters profile her grandfather Francis Jones, then trace the bequest through a quarrel among Episcopalians over Price Creek, the Chapel of the Cross and the university's buildings. A December 1885 New York Times report called the gift money; Jones shows it was land. Published by McFarland in 2014, 231 pages.
Charles Phillips Russell's biography of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825-1908), the Chapel Hill writer remembered for ringing the bell of South Building when the university reopened in 1875 after its closure during Reconstruction. It doubles as a history of Chapel Hill and the university. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 293 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1949).
Hope Summerell Chamberlain's life and letters of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825 to 1908), published in 1926, which doubles as a picture of Chapel Hill and the university in the nineteenth century. It runs 325 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Selected writings of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825 to 1908), the Chapel Hill writer who campaigned for the university's reopening after Reconstruction, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1953. The 753 pages touch on Chapel Hill life, education and the university in the nineteenth century.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1954).
Rosalind Rosenberg's 2017 biography of Pauli Murray (1910-1985), lawyer, poet and Episcopal priest, raised in Durham. Its six parts follow a Southern childhood, the move to New York, the 1938 application to the University of North Carolina that was refused because Murray was Black (the chapter is titled 'Members of your race are not admitted'), law school and the coining of the phrase Jane Crow, the Cold War years, the push toward 'an NAACP for women', and a late-life ordination. 494 pages with portraits.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2018).
Sarah Brandes Madry's history of the Old Well at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, treating both its architecture and the ideas attached to it. It takes in drinking fountains and water use in Chapel Hill and the university's history, with a chapter on Edwin Anderson Alderman, the president under whom the well took its present form in 1897, and one on water at the university. Published by iUniverse in 2003, 399 pages with illustrations.
Jennifer Fleischner's double biography of Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley, the dressmaker who had been enslaved, including years in Hillsborough, before buying her freedom and becoming the First Lady's confidante. Published by Broadway Books in New York in 2003, 372 pages with illustrations and a map. Topics include enslaved women in Hillsborough and the United States, dressmakers and women's friendships in the nineteenth century.
Mary Claire Engstrom's biographical register of the young women who attended the Burwell School in Hillsborough, subtitled lives of educated women in the antebellum South. The school was kept by Margaret Anna Burwell and her husband, and the book bears on women's education in nineteenth-century North Carolina. Published by the Historic Hillsborough Commission, 1979, 256 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Cornelia Phillips Spencer's account of the closing weeks of the Civil War in North Carolina, reissued in 2005 as an electronic edition by the University Library at UNC-Chapel Hill. Topics include the 1865 campaigns, Sherman's march through the Carolinas, Stoneman's raid, and the history of Chapel Hill and the university in the nineteenth century, where Spencer, 1825 to 1908, spent her working life.
Scotti Cohn's short biographies of notable North Carolina women, including Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Annie Lowrie Alexander and Cornelia Phillips Spencer of Chapel Hill. Published by Twodot in 2000, 198 pages with illustrations.
A Women's History Month project of 1993 and 1994 from the Orange County Women's History Month Committee, profiling women who were firsts in the county. Published in Chapel Hill in 1994, 13 pages plus unnumbered leaves with illustrations, facsimiles and portraits.
Each dated event above names its source, the place to start. For finding more on an event across newspapers, records and histories, see the research guide Follow an event across several accounts. Ask at the North Carolina Room of the Orange County Public Library for help with local sources.
Friends of the Orange County Public Library. “Women's complaints and affirmative action at UNC, 1970–1994.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/unc-women-affirmative-action-storyline-1970/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
