Delivered October 12, 2006 at the release of the Virtual Museum of UNC History
We've spent a long time coming to this place. As the Chancellor mentioned, the movement for a museum of UNC history got started two and a half years ago, inspired by a protest over the name of the Cornelia Philips Spencer Bell Award. As the University community explored the issues raised by that experience, many participants expressed the belief that the history of UNC is not well known, not even on this campus, not around the state, certainly not farther than that. And the idea for a virtual museum of university history grew out of that concern.
There are books on UNC history, but like all books, they began to age as soon as they were printed. In particular, the existing books on UNC have neglected some of the questions raised by the controversy over the Bell Award, and especially the role of racial injustice in the University's past. So there's an urgent need to know and understand those things. First because silence implies a cover-up or a denial of the truth, and the university must always side with truth. Second, the recent past of places as diverse as South Africa or Eastern Europe, and North Carolina communities like Wilmington and Greensboro, shows that past injuries can never begin to heal unless victims and perpetrators come together and try to create a common public memory of what happened, based on full disclosure and acknowledgement of the facts, without exaggeration or dismissal on any side. Absent that reckoning, injuries fester and never heal, leaving us all crippled and less able to move forward.
But the idea for a virtual museum is bigger than the specific incident which inspired it. Carolina has a long history, and there is much in it that we can take great pride in. There is also a great deal that lovers of the University will simply find interesting and rewarding, like stories of student life or great professors or campus personalities. We have wanted to tell all aspects of that story, the proud moments and the painful ones, and those that are simply fun to know, so that the great body of university experience, which has done so much to shape our contemporary experience at Carolina, will be available to everyone.
We settled on the format of a Web-based museum for convenience, flexibility, and accessibility. Unlike a book, a website can easily change and improve over time. Unlike a physical museum that you can walk through, a virtual museum does not take up precious space and is also easy to alter and expand. For we are acutely aware that the present museum does not include everything. We look forward to adding more in the years ahead, so please send us your suggestions for more exhibits.
This project has taught those of us who worked on it many things, both specific and more general. Contrary to some widely circulated reports, for example, we have found no evidence—and to our knowledge, no one else has produced any evidence—that the much-criticized Mrs. Spencer ever advocated the closing of the University. She was guilty of several things, and justly famous for others, but not that.
More broadly, we have been able to watch UNC grow and change over two long centuries. The University began in the recent aftermath of the American Revolution. Its mission then was the training of a small elite to guide a still-fragile experiment in self-government. Embedded in a society based on human bondage—and hardly democratic for its free majority—the University could scarcely avoid the flaws of the state that created it. Even so, this University, far more than many of its regional counterparts, could inspire home-grown critics like Benjamin Hedrick and William Gaston. And even when those critics were ignored—as Gaston was—or even stifled—as Hedrick was—their alma mater sustained a drive for growth and excellence that made it the largest college in the US on the eve of the Civil War.
And in the aftermath of that war, the University's history shows that there were people in North Carolina who aspired to something new and different. Though guilty of class and racial injustice, leaders like Presidents Battle and Winston and their successors still thought there were more important tasks for the state than endless weeping over a Lost Cause. That is why the advocates of a serious system of public primary and secondary schools in North Carolina—men like Charles Duncan McIver and President Edwin A. Alderman—were so close to UNC in the late nineteenth century. And that is also why the university committed itself to the expansion of human knowledge as early as the 1890s, with enterprises ranging from scientific experiments with great industrial value to the blossoming of the arts represented by Playmakers Theater and the works of Thomas Wolfe. That same impulse eventually led this university—more than many others—to create a new generation of home-grown critics like Howard Odum and Frank Porter Graham who expressed their love of state and region by calling us to higher standards and more democratic values.
We could go on from there, from one great chancellor and president to another, and from one progressive social movement to another, just as we could continue to list the University's shortcomings. But that's what the museum is for. I urge you to follow that story yourselves. The larger message I have gained from this process, and that I would like to share with you, is that the history of UNC is greater than the catalogue of its sins, serious as they were and are. Throughout its history and for all its faults, Carolina has fostered people determined that the University would be a crucial part of every important movement to make North Carolina and the world better places. That's a record we can all take great pride in—if we'll commit ourselves to continuing it.
