Education: Chapel Hill and Williamstown

One of the brightest liberal ornaments of the South, the first U.S. state university to open its doors, last week celebrated its 150th anniversary. At Chapel Hill the Tarheels of the University of North Carolina had every reason to congratulate themselves on their sesquicentennial. North Carolina had had to grow in a climate which had often been desolating to the liberal spirit. But the University had grown lustily and had substantially changed the very air in which it breathed.

North Carolina was founded on Columbus Day, 1793 by a Princeton graduate, Revolutionary Cavalryman William Richardson Davie, later governor of the state. Draping himself in his finery as a Masonic Grand Master, he repaired to a rude country crossroads where the local citizenry had provided free land for a college. There he was aided in laying the cornerstone of what is now East Hall by his fellow Princetonian Samuel Eusebius McCorkle, who hoped to see the land “adorned with an elegant village.”

Chapel Hill became one of the most elegant communities among the 25 U.S. colleges founded by Princetonians. Its breadth of mind, to be sure, did not always keep pace with its leafy and pillared loveliness. In 1856, for example, one professor was ejected for the simple reason that he was said to be planning to vote for the Republican Presidential candidate, John C. Fremont. But as the decades passed, North Carolina made an increasingly vigorous response to the narrow challenges of its environment and stands its liberal ground proudly today. In Chapel Hill last week were:

> One of the South’s liveliest, best faculties, including Archibald Henderson (biographer of George Bernard Shaw), Sociologist Howard Washington Odum (Rain bow Round My Shoulder), Pulitzer Prize Playwright Paul Eliot Green (In Abraham’s Bosom), Milton Joseph Rosenau (communicable diseases), Joseph Grégoire de Roulhac Hamilton (biographer of Henry Ford), Rupert Bayless Vance (Human Geography of the South).

> One of the leading U.S. university presses, publishing many pioneer studies in Southern sociology, especially those of Odum and his followers. In 1935 the press brought out Clarence Cason’s 90° in the Shade a few days after the Alabamian blew out his brains, fearing the reaction of his University of Alabama colleagues to his acid study of Southern culture.

> 1,750 civilian students.

> 2,000 Navy preflight cadets.

> 1,300 Navy V-12s including seamen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen.

> 250 soldiers taking Army area-language instruction (TIME, Oct. 18).

Chapel Hill must nowadays often live without its little, bushy-browed President Frank Porter Graham, active in Washington as a member of WLB. Frank Graham is a cousin of former President of North Carolina Edward Kidder Graham. Frank Graham holds no Ph.D. But he has many an honorary doctorate and has taught history. An admirer once remarked: “If Frank Graham is a historian, then Kelly is a Chinaman. He makes history. . . .”

In World War I, Graham was one of the runtiest of U.S. marines. Back in North Carolina, he defended teachers of evolution against Fundamentalists in the ’20s, labor’s right to strike during the textile rows of the ’30s and he has even said a good word for the right of others to talk about Negro social equality. His 1941 mediator’s vote against the closed shop in the captive coal mines may have cost him some old labor friends, but Carolina conservatives are far from sure that Frank Graham is a fellow conservative. He is generally recognized as a first-class university administrator and one of North Carolina’s most sizable alumni. Others:

U.S. President James Knox Polk, 1818; Bandmaster James Kern (“Kay”) Kyser, ’28; Author Thomas Wolfe, ’20 (the University is the “Old Catawba” of his Look Homeward Angel); Statesman Josephus Daniels, ’85; Journalist Jonathan Worth Daniels, ’21.

Also 150 years old is one of the country’s patrician small colleges, Williams of Williamstowri, Mass. As it has to all hills and plains, the war has come to the college’s lovely wooded heights. U.S. President James Abram Garfield (Williams ’56) said of the college under its fourth president: “The ideal college is one with Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.” But last week more than 1,226 students were crowded into neocolonial quarters built for a peacetime total of 820. For the duration, Williams will teach aviation cadets and apprentice seamen almost exclusively.

Williams President James Phinney Baxter III (’14) is chairman of a group of U.S. college presidents concerned with postwar reforms in liberal education. The group favors simplifying college-entrance requirements for war veterans; reducing the importance of lectures (since many postwar students will have had richer personal experience than many a college instructor); more use of primary source materials as against textbook boning; stress on teaching rather than on research work by faculty members; increased use of individual instruction methods.