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How Chapel Hill, State College and the Greensboro college became one University of North Carolina: the 1931 act, the 1932 survey and commission plan, the trustees’ rejection of a chancellor, Frank P. Graham’s election, and the 1934 deans of administration.
In briefIn 1931 the legislature merged the University, State College and the North Carolina College for Women into one University of North Carolina, and by 1936 the trustees had divided the work among the three campuses. They put the schools under one president, electing Frank P. Graham in November 1932, and in 1934 provided a dean of administration at each unit. In June 1935 they voted 58 to 11 for Graham's plan to combine the engineering schools at State College, move its science and business work to Chapel Hill and center graduate work there. In 1936 the University faculty voted 80 to 19 to send the trustees resolutions against moving the engineering school, but the trustees refused to reconsider.
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In late March 1931 the legislature approved Governor O. Max Gardner's plan to merge the University, State College in Raleigh and the North Carolina College for Women in Greensboro into one University of North Carolina under a board of 100, taking control July 1, 1932. On June 13, 1932 the survey committee of George A. Works, Frank L. McVey and Guy Stanton Ford proposed moving State College to Chapel Hill over time, but the consolidation commission left that out. Meeting June 13 and 14, the commission recommended one executive for the three units, moving elementary teacher training to Greensboro, closing State College's School of Business to new students in favor of the School of Commerce at Chapel Hill, and moving library training to Chapel Hill.
At their first meeting, on July 11, the consolidated trustees voted down the proposed office of chancellor and put the three schools under one president. On November 14 they unanimously elected Frank P. Graham president, with E. C. Brooks and Julius I. Foust as vice-presidents for State College and the Greensboro college. On June 5, 1934 the trustees retired Brooks and Foust, abolished the vice-presidencies and provided a dean of administration at each unit. The first consolidated summer school opened on June 13 under W. C. Jackson, and on July 2 a trustees' committee named Robert Burton House dean of administration at Chapel Hill.
Meeting in Chapel Hill on June 11, 1935, the trustees voted 58 to 11 for President Graham's plan to combine the engineering schools at State College in Raleigh within three years, move State College's science and business work to Chapel Hill, stop admitting women to the freshman and sophomore classes at Chapel Hill and Raleigh, and center graduate work in Chapel Hill; John Sprunt Hill and Walter Murphy had led the opposition in the executive committee.
On May 12, 1936 the University faculty voted 80 to 19 to ask Graham to lay before the trustees resolutions against moving the engineering school, proposing a single school with divisions at Chapel Hill and Raleigh, but on May 30 in Greensboro, after a committee of Chapel Hill professors argued that other departments, public health among them, depended on the school, the trustees voted down Hill's motion to reconsider, with Graham speaking for the consolidation plan. When the School of Engineering was dissolved that year, T. Felix Hickerson chose to stay in Chapel Hill in the mathematics department rather than move to Raleigh.
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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.
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A 2026 novel set in Carrboro. Frances, thirty and grieving her mother, and her husband Ben open their marriage, and the book follows what that decision does to them and to the people closest to them. The characters include college teachers and a ghostwriter. 296 pages.
An illustrated online timeline of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing, issued by the school in 2025. One page with portraits.
A 2025 history of University of North Carolina baseball from its nineteenth-century beginnings to the program's rise as an ACC power. Chapters cover the early years on campus, the building of Boshamer Stadium, and the Mike Fox era. Self-published by the author, 288 pages.
Joanna Pearson's novel of a cold case at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Karlie Richards was a nineteen-year-old student when she was murdered; decades later her onetime roommate, divorced and in middle age, finds herself drawn back to the crime as online conspiracy theories about it multiply. A psychological thriller with a Chapel Hill setting, published by Bloomsbury in 2024, 275 pages.
The 2023 issue of Carrboro High School's literary magazine, featuring fiction and poetry written by its students.
William R. Burk's history of botany at the University of North Carolina, from its early natural scientists such as Denison Olmsted and Elisha Mitchell through later figures including George Francis Atkinson, Joseph Austin Holmes and Henry Van Peters Wilson, closing with a chapter on the Department of Botany itself. Published in Fort Worth in 2023.
Willis P. Whichard's biography of David Lowry Swain, governor of North Carolina from 1832 to 1835 and president of the University of North Carolina from 1835 until his death in 1868. The subtitle ties Swain, nineteenth-century North Carolina and the university together, and the book belongs with the lives of college presidents and governors. Published in 2022.
Jim Grimsley's coming-of-age novel about Ronny, who grew up in a trailer alongside his mother and a string of stepfathers, kept his head down, earned good grades and won a scholarship to UNC in Chapel Hill. On campus he finds his first love and begins to sort out who he is. Subjects include gay college students, first loves and mothers and sons. Published by Levine Querido in 2022, 322 pages.
Scott Madry's recollections of the student tech crew at Memorial Hall, the University of North Carolina's auditorium in Chapel Hill, presented under the banner of the Carolina Union, the campus student union. Published in Chapel Hill in 2021.
Geeta Kapur's history of race at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from the enslaved labor that built the campus through desegregation and the Black student protests that followed. Twelve chapters, with a foreword by William Barber II, move from the founding era and the Great Depression controversies to the state's response to integration and the turmoil of later decades; North Carolina Central University also figures. Published 2021 by Blair in Durham.
Tracy Deonn's young adult fantasy about an African American teenager who arrives as a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after her mother's death and finds a secret society bound to Arthurian legend, with demons, magic and her own family's past. Published by Margaret K. McElderry Books in 2020, 501 pages, for ages 14 and up. Winner of the 2021 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent.
Reviewed in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books./Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (2020).
Sylvia D. Hoffert's article on Margaret Anna Burwell, 1810 to 1871, and the work of being a Presbyterian minister's wife in North Carolina from 1835 to 1857, the years of the female school she and her husband kept in Hillsborough. Pages 245 to 275 with illustrations, facsimiles and portraits, issued by the Office of Archives and History in Raleigh in 2019.
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