Thus one is kinda long.
#OTD in 1795 Hinton James arrived on the UNC campus-The 1st student at the 1st state university. Legend is that he walked from present day Pender County. After Carolina he became a civil engineer and legislator. You can read more on James at this link from the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources:
Hinton James: First Student at Chapel Hill
When James arrived, three weeks after the official opening of the University on January 15, there was one Professor, David Ker, and two buildings. (Old) East Building stood, its cornerstone had been laid on October 12, 1793 - a date celebrated as University Day on campus - and an unpainted wooden house served as a place for Ker to live. There was, as I understand it, a tavern near where Raleigh, Hillsborough, and East Franklin Streets converge. To this old bartender that seems somehow right. Eventually 40 more young men joined James that first semester. That they were all late for class also somehow seems right.
It has always struck me as one of the many paradoxes of The Tar Heel State that we had led in higher education from the very start yet were such historically consistent laggards in primary and secondary public schooling. I’m not sure, I haven’t studied it enough, about the motivations of those earliest legislators in establishing the first state university. I do know that “on December 18, 1776, delegates to the state's constitutional convention approved Article 41: ‘That a school or schools be established by the Legislature, for the convenient Instruction of Youth, with such Salaries to the Masters, paid by the Public, as may enable them to instruct at low prices; and all useful Learning shall be duly encouraged and promoted in one or more Universities.’”
1795-1819: The Establishment of the University: Electronic Edition.
Today the North Carolina Constitution states in Article 9, Section 9, “Benefits of public institutions of higher education. The General Assembly shall provide that the benefits of The University of North Carolina and other public institutions of higher education, as far as practicable, be extended to the people of the State free of expense.” So much for Originalism of Constitutional Text.
Education always seemed to be abuzz in my world growing up in #DeepChatham. Neither of my parents went beyond high school but I had two teacher-aunts, Burdine and Leisel, that taught me and everyone around them with their every breath. Aunt Burdine was, eventually, Supervisor of Chatham County Schools and Aunt Leisel taught for decades in Bennett (#DeepestChatham). I only recently learned that my Grandfather Floyd Womble had also been a school teacher before taking up surveying. And despite their own brief education my parents were voracious readers and backers of local schools and teachers. There was never a question that I would not go to college. My dream was always Carolina.
I recall the respect held for the work that teachers had put in to achieve their places in front of the classroom. I also remember the high regard that everyone surrounding me showed our teachers for their daily work of educating the community and, of course, local children and teens. Being in the trenches of public instruction meant they were experts on learning. How could that be doubted - after all, they had studied hard, harder than the rest, and more important, continued to do so as life-long learners. As all teachers know - there is nothing quite like teaching to literally make you learn.
Now that did not mean that there was no wisdom outside of the school. Examples of sharp people were certainly all around. I saw it regularly in my Deddy’s hardware store as farmers worked out solutions to the everyday challenges of agriculture on the family farm. ‘The Progressive Farmer Magazine’ always provided ideas. Book-learning seemed to have its esteemed place just the same. The assertion that teachers lived in an “Ivory Tower” was heard from time-to-time and of course the Jesse Helmses of the air belittled the profession exactly because of the impulse, the necessity, if you will, to make learning a living thing, constantly corrected and revised as new information was discovered about old ways and times. The “Ivory Tower” insult has always seemed childishly absurd and simplistic - as if teachers lived in a world devoid of mortgages or taxes or personal liabilities or broken water pumps.
Still, the respect for teachers has nigh onto disappeared today - they - WE - are but contributors to the Social Contract and the common good alongside our fellow citizens. But the enmity so prevalent today in some - I have paid attention to School Board gatherings and viewed many exchanges while reading about others - is elevated. Rather than the historical or the scientific record as established by research, teachers now seem subject to the unique, sundry, and hoodwinked worldviews of a vocal cadre of Extreme Rightist parents as to what they can teach. The inexperienced want to mandate curriculum to the teachers now.
Do teachers have ‘unique worldviews’ as well? No doubt about it. Are they “pushing” those ways of seeing on students? In as much as reality is embedded in subjects such as history, math, chemistry, and geography and reality is the stuff of studying those things and more - then probably so. Teachers are also “pushing” reading and analysis and thinking critically on their students. Sometimes the critiques arrived upon by those students stray from the mainstream. Sometimes those critiques range far from those of their parents. Far more often than not, that is due to good, old fashioned, hard work.
At UNC these days the teachers are being told that they can no longer lead in decisions over what will be taught but rather the Board of Trustees will order such things. The BOT at the behest of the Big Wigs that put them there have created the School of Civic Life and Leadership. “The Wall Street Journal” has praised this “conservative safe space’s”direction as addressing “abstruse woke politics” in the university. (
) The student newspaper, “The Daily Tar Heel” has brought solid coverage to the affair. Read here for an example:
Role of chancellor, provost in proposed UNC School of Civic Life and Leadership unclear
The entire imagining of The Carolina “Anti-Woke Studies” Curriculum smacks of amateur, uninformed, unprepared, Rightist utopian dreaming. And with a current price tag, absolutely guaranteed to skyrocket, of $5 million dollars. (
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On many of the branch campuses of the UNC System under the direction of the Board of Governors (bosses to the Board of Trustees), administrators have taken their long knives to departments that do not provide properly quantifiable $$$$ “Return On Investment” - A ‘buy-out’ of Professors is afoot in some places - and adjuncts have been terminated. Staff, the tenders of campus infrastructure and providers of multiple student and faculty services face the concrete threat of dismissal. And the consultants and private investigative agencies write their General Assembly commissioned reports. Read here for a critique of the “Return on Investment” study that helped to slice and dice the System:
New study looks at "return on investment" of a UNC System education • NC Newsline
And finally a combo NCGA/MAGA mandate has ordered diversity as a concept in coursework a verboten focus prohibited from graduation requirements. Snowflakes rejoice!!
Hinton James purportedly walked from Wilmington to Chapel Hill to gain an education from the teachers there - at the time only David Ker awaited him but over the decades to come thousands of amazing faculty who had studied and researched have taught the students and designed the courses at Carolina and the other System campuses. They have labored over what readings to assign, and in what order, how to fairly test and assess, and spent out-of-class time keeping up with, and contributing to, their disciplines. One has to wonder to what depth the Board of Trustees has delved in thinking through the syllabi for the courses in their new program. What readings by which authors will they assign for such classes? Of course they have not, and will not work on such things. Wonder who they will hire to do that work since the UNC faculty has been cut out of this process?
In the System schools now being required to slash one must also wonder how the Board of Governors’ Bottom Lining of Education will work for the students and children of the state. Quantitative measures have a place but they’re also likely, even prone, to politically self-serving self-fulfilling prophecy. This angle of attack, one surely would make our long-departed Senator No/Helms look up and grin that crooked smile, will bring us low and wrench us for all time from any competitive position among thinkers, but also among dancers, singers, and artists of all stripes. The Leveling of Carolina is in full swing.
One also has to wonder if Hinton James had thought that partisan political appointees would be choosing his course work and limiting his thought horizons to simply ‘Return On Investment’ markers that he might just have headed north, or worse, stopped in Durham for his education.* He was no Snowflake after all - his legendary trek is a testament to that.
*Yes I know that Duke didn’t exist yet.