Delivered October 12, 2006 at the release of the Virtual Museum of UNC History
Today, we champion public service as a critical part of the university's mission. Indeed, the idea of service-that is, the idea of active engagement with the world beyond the walls of the academy-defines our understanding of what it means to be a public university. But that has not always been so. In 1914, Carolina president Edward Kidder Graham uttered in his inaugural address a phrase with which we are all familiar. The boundaries of the university, he declared, should be coterminous with the boundaries of the state. What he meant by that was that the university should be no ivory tower; instead, its faculty and students should actively engage the world beyond and make themselves and their institution into agents of constructive change. Today, that strikes us as a rather commonplace notion. But in Graham's time it marked a sharp departure from the university's past; it was an audacious effort to assert the authority of expert knowledge, and to fashion for the university and its faculty a role that the larger society would not only find useful but, over time, would come to view as invaluable.
What I'd like to do in the time I have this afternoon is explore with you where this idea of service cam from, and why it has become so embedded in our understanding of the value and meaning of what we do. Those, of course, are complicated questions, and any explanation offered in the space of 15 minutes is bound to suffer from over-simplification. But with that said, let me see if I can sketch some answers, at least in broad strokes.
The idea of service as an integral part of higher education's purpose grew, in large measure, from the work of America's land-grant universities during the late 19th century, particularly the great state universities of the Midwest. Those institutions were established by the federal government's first investment in higher education, the Morrill Act of 1862, which gave the states 30,000 acres of public land for each of their seats in Congress and authorized the sale of that land for the support of colleges that would promote education in scientific agriculture and the mechanic arts, or what today we'd call engineering. Over the years, with the subsequent development of federal research stations and the agricultural extension service, the land-grant universities became powerful engines of economic development. They drove the industrialization of American agriculture; they transformed the Midwest into the bread basket and manufacturing heartland of the nation; and in the process, they redefined the value of a college education, making it less a mark of gentlemanly refinement and more a practical tool for reshaping the world.
This shift in the understanding of higher education's value coincided with a period of dramatic social upheaval in America. Remember the turmoil of the late 19th and early 20th centuries-the arrival of unprecedented numbers of immigrants, the rise of large-scale factory production, the at times brutal exploitation of labor and violent clashes over workers' rights, the explosive growth of American cities and all of the problems that arose as urban populations outstripped the capacity of those cities to provide sanitation and decent housing. (By 1900, New York alone had as many residents as all of the cities in the United States combined back in 1865). This was a moment of profound economic transformation and social crisis-a moment characterized by growing recognition that the challenges of modern life could no longer be addressed by 19th-century forms of voluntarism, or even by the political process, which was hobbled by corruption and the limited reach of local government.
These historical developments provided the stage on which a new professoriate and a new generation of university leaders played out their personal and institutional aspirations. These academic professionals of the late 19th century, "unlike . . . older college teachers, viewed knowledge as ever-expanding," not fixed, and they "engaged actively in the production of new knowledge through research." The new academicians were narrowly trained in specialized fields of study; their claims to authority were certified by possession of the Ph.D., a degree borrowed from-and in many instances, earned at-the research universities of Germany; and they jealously guarded access to their worlds of expertise through the founding of new professional organizations. For example:
American Chemical Society 1876
Modern Language Association 1883
American Historical Association 1884
American Economics Association 1885
American Mathematical Society 1888
American Physical Society 1889
American Political Science Association 1889
Members of the new professoriate offered their services for the sake of the common good, and at the same time enhanced their own status by arguing that they alone possessed the knowledge necessary to resolve the challenges of modern life, a knowledge rooted in neither self-interest nor provincialism, but grounded instead in scientific study and rational inquiry. Theirs was an expertise offered by students of politics, who were not themselves politicians; students of economics, who were not themselves bankers or industrialists; students of society, who were not themselves involved in the direct delivery of social services or the making of social policy.
These were powerful new ideas, and they captured the imagination of leaders of this university, who in the years following the Civil War were eager to remake the institution and to integrate this state and region back into the life of the nation. In 1875, the trustees radically remodeled the university. They scuttled the classical curriculum of the antebellum era, divided the university into six colleges, and introduced an elective system of study-all with an eye, they explained, of making Carolina into a "a great metropolis of thought," which by "gathering, creating, and distributing knowledge" would become "a potent force in the world's progress," a dynamo of change. But such aspirations for the university did not immediately win public favor. Rural folk viewed the institution with deep skepticism, and pointed out with bitterness that it had squandered North Carolina's land-grant funds with little or no return for farming communities. In the mid-1880s, those voters supported an insurrection in the state legislature that stripped Carolina of its entitlement to federal land-grant resources and steered the money toward establishment of a competing institution, a true agricultural and mechanical college-I'm talking, of course, about North Carolina State.
A decade later, those same rural voters, organized in this instance through the third-party Populist movement, sought to deny Chapel Hill even its meager state appropriation and to turn undergraduate instruction over to the state's private denominational colleges, which Carolina's critics argued, were more closely tied to local communities of kinship and faith, and were free of Chapel Hill's arrogance and aristocratic pretensions. The attack failed, but it so wounded the university that alumnus Edwin Alderman, who at the time was serving as Carolina's president, resigned his post and abandoned his alma mater for greener fields at Tulane University, and later, the University of Virginia.
By the second decade of the 20th century, however, the political landscape had changed. North Carolina was in the throes of a dramatic industrial transformation that by the 1920s would make it the global center of cotton textile production. That process fueled the growth of towns and cities, and with them, an expanding middle class whose very livelihood was tied to the increase of trade and commerce, who promoted the construction of new railroads and highways and championed that state's first comprehensive system of public education-in short, a middle class who shared the university men's vision of a commercial South, and who desired for themselves, and especially their children, the credentials that the university dispensed, the credentials that were becoming essential prerequisites for employment and mobility in an ever larger segment of economic life. In fact, it was these middle-class voters to whom the university appealed in 1921, when it successfully campaigned for a $20 million bond issue for public institutions, more than a third of which was set aside to modernize and the enlarge the campus at Chapel Hill, to make room for the growing number of graduates from the state's new high schools, and to make more readily available the forms of cultural capital on which the middle class relied to pass its achievements, its standing, its prerogative and opportunities from one generation to the next.
Under the leadership of Edward Kidder Graham, Carolina's president from 1914 to 1919, and his successor, Harry Woodburn Chase, the university struck a bargain with that middle-class constituency. It offered its faculty's expertise in service to the common good and the modernization of the state and region in return for a broad measure of academic freedom-the faculty's right to pursue inquiry wherever it might lead, and to publish and teach as they pleased. What followed in the 1920s and 30s was a period of remarkable scholarly activity. Several figures stand out:
A few days ago, as my students and I discussed this period in Carolina's history, one of them asked quite perceptively, how did Odum and his compatriots get away with it? The answer is, in part, that the university had leaders-particularly Harry Chase-who stood resolute in the defense of free inquiry. And in part the answer is that the knowledge that was so valuable to conquering the South's ills-its poverty, illiteracy, and ill health-was intimately tied up with the probing inquiry into racism and economic exploitation that made so many outside the university uncomfortable. One could not easily be separated from the other.
That said, a caveat is in order. We should remember that for all its openness, Carolina remained during this time all-white and predominantly male, and that in subsequent decades it would adjust with uneven willingness to the changes brought by the civil rights and women's movements. There was, for instance, no place on the faculty for one of Howard Odum's most gifted students, a woman historian named Guion Johnson, whose research on the early South anticipated by decades the new social history of the 1960s and 70s. As Paul Green once noted with some frustration, Carolina could at times resemble a lighthouse whose beacon illuminated the territory all around, but whose base remained shrouded in darkness. Even so, there was something distinctive here-a willingness to engage in open self-reflection and social criticism that, as one detractor grudgingly acknowledged, won Chapel Hill its reputation as a "'sanctuary of freedom' [and] a Mecca of learning and creativity." The irony, of course, is that Carolina won that reputation-national and even international-by focusing on its own back yard.
Today, the university aspires to an even broader reach. We lead the nation's public research universities in the percentage of students who study abroad, and our faculty teach, research, and serve in virtually every corner of the globe. Later this year we will dedicated our new FedEx Global Education Center and Winston House, the College of Arts and Sciences new European study center in central London. Some might ask-some, indeed, have asked-if in undertaking these initiatives Carolina has lost sight of its primary mission to serve the people of North Carolina. The answer, I think, is a clear and unequivocal `no.' True, many of our students will leave here and make their careers in places far-flung around the globe. But the vast majority will settle in towns and cities across the state. They'll start businesses, serve on local chambers of commerce, and run for election to county boards of commissioners. And in every instance, their efforts to ensure the economic future of those places, to create jobs and build more bountiful local economies will depend on knowledge of the world. For the fortunes of even the smallest communities in this state are inextricably linked to global movements of people, goods, and capital. In the 21st century, I can think of few ways for the university to better fulfill its mission of service than to educate North Carolina's young people as citizens of the world.
For similar developments at other American universities, see Steven J. Diner, A City and Its Universities: Public Policy in Chicago, 1892-1919 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), especially chapters 1 and 2. I am indebted to Diner for the broad historical insights around which the argument to follow is framed.
