Universities: The School Miss Bonnie Built

The school started as a gleam in its mother’s eye. Two decades ago, tiny Bonnie Cone, a math teacher hardly taller than a blackboard pointer, began directing a program of college extension courses for ex-G.I.s, using what had been the lost-and-found department of a Charlotte, N.C., high school. This month the school that grew from there, with Miss Bonnie pushing it all the way, was designated the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the juridical coequal of the state university branches at Chapel Hill, Greensboro and Raleigh.

“I knew I wanted to be a teacher before I even started the first grade,” Miss Bonnie says. After graduating from South Carolina’s tiny Coker College in 1928, she taught mathematics in South Carolina high schools, and in 1940 moved on to Charlotte Central High School. During World War II, she taught math to hundreds of men in the armed forces’ V12 program at Duke University, finding time to pick up her own master’s degree on the side.

In 1946 the University of North Carolina set up a dozen extension centers, including one at Charlotte’s Central High School, to meet the demands of returning veterans. Miss Bonnie became director of the Central center in 1947, nourished the place through a series of crises, still recalls the struggle to keep her faculty on the same pay scale as public-school teachers. “It was the only time I’ve ever cringed to see schoolteachers get a pay increase,” she says. Working an average 14-hour day, seven days a week, Miss Bonnie still managed to get to the bedside of a sick child of a staff member—and to show up at the right doorstep in town when the school needed help from the community. Promoting higher taxes, she got local authorities to buy 227 acres for a campus eight miles northeast of Charlotte and build a plant worth $3,000,000. With skillful lobbying from Charlotte, the 1963 general assembly was persuaded to put Miss Bonnie’s school—now Charlotte College—into the state’s four-year system.

This fall, as a branch of the university, Charlotte expects an enrollment of 2,000 commuting students and a faculty of 84. With its future growth seemingly assured, the big question for the campus now is: Will Miss Bonnie, who is acting chancellor, be appointed permanently? Although her sex and her lack of an earned doctorate might be considered handicaps by some, Miss Bonnie, now 58, is unconcerned. “Nobody here is worried about the future,” she says, “and I least of all. We are not here to elevate ourselves, but the institution.”