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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview L-0030, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Former University of North Carolina Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson recalls the dramatic changes the university underwent during the 1960s. Appointed chancellor in 1966, Sitterson was immediately faced with a variety of student issues, including student visitation, dress codes, and privacy issues. Additionally, Sitterson cites the Speaker Ban law, Jim Crow facilities, and the Vietnam War as flashpoint topics for student activists. To maintain communication with students, Sitterson employed an open-door policy for student advisory committees, which brought concerns to him. Sitterson notes that UNC officials used open forums with university administrators or state politicians to preempt violent student riots. The proliferation of radical student activities on campuses nationwide produced fears of student sit-ins at UNC. Desegregating the university student body and faculty were additional changes facing Sitterson. The desegregation of faculty, Sitterson argues, was a more difficult proposition, since black faculty cost more due to the limited number of skilled applicants. Sitterson says that he walked a tightrope between his superiors and his faculty and that his support of hiring black staff further distanced him from the Board of Trustees.
J. Carlyle Sitterson discusses his tenure as University of North Carolina chancellor during the 1960s and 1970s. He describes the difficult balance he struck between the Board of Trustees and the student body on issues of student rights.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is Pamela Dean. It's the fourth of November, 1987. I'm going to be talking to former Chancellor Carlyle Sitterson in his office in Hamilton Hall.
So let's start with the fall before you became Chancellor in February of '66. There was this controversy where the president of the student body and his girl friend had been charged with…
They were charged with spending the night in a fraternity house, which was presumably closed at that time.
It happened during the summer?
During the summer, that's right. I don't remember what month, but I think August sometime. Now wasn't she a student at Greensboro during the regular year?
I believe so. She was here during summer school.
That's right. That's correct.
This came up before the various judicial…
It came up before the various student agencies. At that time, the University, as you know, had separate councils, procedures, and so on for female and male students. It was separate, and that was just a part of the tradition. I expect that all southern colleges, and maybe colleges everywhere at that time [had this]. I think it was probably general. Now, when that happened, it meant, of course, that these two offenses went before different bodies. The Women's Council disciplined this young woman, and it resulted in, as I recall, a rather serious penalty for her at her own institution, Greensboro.
Well, she was expelled from here.
Well, suspended, I guess, what it's now called. Whereas the male involved, who happened to be the president of the student body here, received little or no—I don't remember what is was…
He got an official reprimand.
A reprimand.
Which meant that it was just a notice written on his record.
Exactly.
A slap on the hand.
Now in the discussion at the Chancellor's level, and there were a number of people involved. Students were present, and I was present, of course. The Dean of Students was present.
You were Dean of the College at that time, is that right?
I was Dean of the College, that's right, and my view of it from the beginning was these were two people, to be sure, one happened to be male, one happened to be female. They were both charged with precisely the same offense at exactly the same time under exactly the same circumstances, as I saw it. Thus, it seemed to me to be elemental justice that they should both be dealt with in precisely the same manner. Now, that did not prevail. That view did not prevail, and…
This was in part in response to students who said that this was a student justice affair, and the administration should not be dictating…
Exactly.
However, a lot of the students agreed that this was not a fair disposition of it.
Oh yes, I'm sure a lot of people did.
And there was a recall?
Yes, that's right.
There was a recall petition to recall him from the office.
Yes, that's right. It didn't prevail. That's correct. Well, I think this is an illustration of one of things that could come out of one kind of structure that reflects a different age with different mores and different practices, and a new age in which new groups would not perceive things in precisely the same way that they did earlier. For example, under the double standard of a long time ago, people would say, well, it's quite all right for a man to do what he wants to but a woman's got to pay the price, you know. So I think that this was a period, in a way, in which you had new mores emerging. People were beginning to see the injustice of that kind of double standard. I think that's really about all I had to say on that subject. I felt very strongly. I remember that I was so incensed by the obvious, it seemed to me to be. Trying to find a solution to it wasn't easy but the injustice of it was just to me, just almost unbearable.
I think this is really typical of the immense changes that were going on
in this period. As you say, you've got an archaic system on one hand
which deals with women differently;
Exactly, that's right.
Your position on this, in favor of equality, was putting you at odds with some students who wanted to say, "It's our business."
Exactly.
The administration should have nothing to do with it.
That's right.
But other students were not in disagreement with you because they were saying, "Yes, equality is important."
Well, it's one of those things that there wasn't any clear-cut way it could be resolved to the satisfaction of everybody.
Right. So you became chancellor in February.
I became chancellor the first of February, 1966. That was right in the middle of the Speaker Ban. That was another factor that in a sense kind of, it would have been probably a lot better for my chancellorship if I could have come in at a time of tranquility in which there wasn't any…
Certainly.
But that just wasn't to be. The Speaker Ban thing had been, of course, a
major source of tension for the preceding two years. There was an
intensity about the thing. As you know we had the governor set up a
special commission. We had a special session of the legislature. They
had modified but not repealed the Speaker Ban Law. They had then put the
responsibility on the
Right.
So we said we'll obviate that by having both sides present for
discussion. Well, the trustees were very wary of this. They were very
wary of immediately taking action as soon as the thing was amended to
overturn the decision which had already been made. So they were
sensitive. I think it's hard for us in Chapel Hill, we're kind of
insulated. It's hard for us
And they didn't want to jump in and make decisions without the basis of…
That's right. So then they made all these, that's when the trustees did
establish all these procedures. That would have been between February
and May. All this was going on. Well now, soon as they got all of the
procedures, and under that procedure you had to have a faculty-student
committee to review all persons who fell in this category of speakers
who were either communist or had taken the Fifth Amendment, those two
categories, of which both Aptheker and Wilkinson, they fell into that
category. Now, the interesting thing to me was my view of Aptheker.
Well, Aptheker had come here on the eve of World War II, and I had
appeared on a penel with him at that time. I mean it was no big deal
from my point of view with Aptheker or Wilkerson. The absurdity of the
thing was just so overwhelming but that didn't mean it was unimportant
to those forces because it had become blown up into a great issue in the
public mind. I've forgotten the exact date when the invitation came to
me. I was then Acting Chancellor, you have to remember, so it came to me
again. So we put it in the procedures. It went through the
faculty-student
This was the one who was going to be president in the fall of '66?
That's correct, that's right.
This is not…
Not Paul Dickson anymore.
Not Paul Dickson who was the one who we were discussing before.
That's right. Now, he had not, I don't think, I'm trying to think of
whether he had already taken office by May. I can't remember. Anyway, he
was known to be the major figure for the student body. They recommended
that it not be approved. Well, I then took it to the Advisory Committee,
the Chancellor's Advisory Committee, which is a faculty committee. They
likewise recommended that it not be approved. I didn't approve, setting
forth what I thought was my basic reasoning. Mainly that the issue was
whether or not I, as a subordinate official at the University, should
override the Governing Board, which had already turned down the same
invitation. During all that time I tried to get the students to invite,
in fact, we announced that we would be glad to entertain invitations to
communists to come, and various departments did invite several to come
during that time. But that didn't deal with these two. So I don't know
at
How did you feel about that? What did you think of that idea?
Well, to tell you the honest truth, I think that's correct. My only
complaint about it is why it hadn't started a couple of years before
then, and I have raised that question. If you go back to '63, right
after it was passed, I joined with a group of people here called the
Friends of the University. We met privately, and we raised some funds,
and we put out a documentary critique of the thing. That was in the fall
of '63 and through '64, during the time that Chancellor Aycock was
Chancellor. The tactics at that time were to educate the public so that
the public would understand this, and then the Legislature would repeal
it and so on. Well, that's very good ideally, but I guarantee, you get
out in the public domain and try to educate in an environment, mental
environment, that was present at that time and try to educate them to
this… Another thing I think we have to recognize is that this
University, this state, and the South were going through some
Chapel Hill has always been seen as the hotbed of liberalism in North Carolina and seen with both a mixture, I think, of pride and fear, anxiety.
Pride and also uneasiness. That's right, that's correct. It's always been that way.
And this was another example of it.
It doesn't really mean that Chapel Hill as the University is so far out in left field at all. It just means that in the society and environment in which it functions, it's always been ahead of the society at large, and it would be very sad if it were not.
Well, it's function is to educate, not just students, is what your suggesting, I think.
That's right. Take the history of Chapel Hill and the University together. That's been true. Well, let's see now, have we, do we need to…
One point I want to clarify. The way you saw your role in this was, and your objection to permitting these two speakers to speak, was a matter of procedure and hierarchy of the University. It was not on the issue itself in any way.
No, that's correct. That's absolutely right. So far as those two were concerned, again, as I intimated, I couldn't put all this in writing, but as I intimated to them, I said it isn't even these two speakers that I object to, it's the timing of the thing. What action I take would be clearly perceived to be a conflict between me and the Governing Board.
And you're just coming into the position of Chancellor.
Exactly.
That's not the way you start off if you want to get anything done.
It couldn't have happened, the Dean of the Law School (a member of the
Advisory Committee), said. I proposed to the Advisory Committee, I said,
"What if I just do this and just overrule these trustee decisions?" And
he said, "You're talking about anarchy. It won't prevail." He said, "If
you take this action, what you've done is taken on your superiors, in
structure, in code, and so on." And the reason I remember that so well
is because I had gotten so sick of this, I went home at lunch, and I
said to Nancy (my wife), "You know, I just can't stand going through
this anymore. I think I'm just going to go ahead and admit these
speakers, and I'm going to tell the Advisory Committee this afternoon
I've considered it finally, and I've had all I'm going to deal with
this." That's when these
What would have happened if you had gone ahead and done it?
I don't know.
Would you have been fired?
I don't know that I'd have been fired. I hadn't been made Chancellor yet.
You would not have been made Chancellor?
Well, I probably would not have been made Chancellor. I think that's, although I don't know. There's no way to really know what would have happened. Let's put it this way, it would have created a crisis in the working relationship between the Chancellor and the Board which would have been really untenable. I think that's the thing we'd have to say. It might well have been that I would still have been made Chancellor, but I can tell you this, from some later episodes I had, if you get yourself in this kind of relationship with the Board, it's impossible to function.
Let's go on and look at some of these additional issues that came up during this period, particularly the ones that focused on women again. The self-limiting hours issue, the question of closing hours in the dormitories for women, came up about the same time. This came up in…
There were some interesting, and retrospectively they seem amusing, but
they were hot issues at the time. One of the
Let's stay with this closing hours because there's one specific thing I want to ask you about here. In February of 1968, the Women's Residence Council had already, let's see exactly when it was, proposed that women over 21 and seniors with parental permission be permitted to come and go without closing hours. The Administrative Board of Student Affairs approved this in general. I think they were suggesting that one dormitory be set aside with this arrangement. You, however, said at that point that closing hours had to be maintained.
I don't remember this at all, so I can't…
Quote, "University residences assigned for occupancy by women students must maintain set closing hours." The Women's Resource Council appealed and shortly after that in late March…
This is '68?
This is '68. You set up a joint committee of students, faculty, and administrators to consider this question of closing hours. Do you recall that process at all?
I don't recall that because, one reason I can't recall it is because we had so many different things going that I can't remember which was which.
Your initial impulse, despite the recommendations of the Women's Residence Council and the Administrative Board of Student Affairs, was to say, "No, the rules have to stand."
Maybe so.
Okay, I was hoping we could recall some of your thought process.
I just don't recall that. I know the Dean of Women, the then Dean of Student Affairs, and so on were dealing with this, but I don't know how many times I looked at [it] or under what circumstances.
Okay. Well, when the Residence Council appealed your decision, you did set up a committee and charge them with coming up with a policy.
Okay.
Committees were something you resorted to frequently.
Well, I did it for two or three reasons. Number one, at that time, students were not involved in much protest, although we had a great tradition of student government. The student government would operate here, and the rest of the University would operate here, and they didn't really have…
Student government could only decide those very narrow things that the University had decided.
Exactly. We had virtually no students on any committees to speak of. About the only ones that I know of that had any students on them were scholarships and student aid.
Did you come into the chancellorship with the intent of including students or was that a response to student pressure?
Well, I came in with an idea that things were changing on American
college campuses and university campuses. Among those changes would be a
greater involvement of students in the life of the University. Now, I
did not have a clear perception of how that involvement should take
place. In other words, I didn't have any structures in mind but an
obvious early area, as I saw it, was student affairs because that, in a
sense, was the life of the students. They should be involved in all
those processes. Again, I wrote a letter at some stage—you'll find that
I sent out a letter to all the University committees in which I pointed
out the change in past traditions, the change in mores and so on and
suggested that they take under consideration the addition of student
members to all of these committees. That, I thought, was a very
important symbolic step about the directions that the University should
go in. But I did not have
She was, among other things, a representative to student government from the Residence Council, if I remember rightly?
That's right.
She was very active and a leader among the women advocating these changes.
That's correct, and she could perceive the complexity of the process of change and the different clienteles that were involved in all this. One of the particulars is it got more sensitive in respect to visitation because that was…
Yes, let's talk about that main factor.
My view of visitation was that certainly there ought to be an opportunity
for men and women to have social relations with
That the University has no role in setting controls on…
That's right. See, we get the whole questions of in
loco parentis.
In loco parentis was the accepted doctrine under which
women went to college at that time, universal, as far as I can tell,
throughout the whole country, not a particular southern phenomena.
No, you're right.
But probably more entrenched maybe in the South in the sense that the South has always been a little reluctant to see women and men treated exactly alike and may still be, I don't know, in some areas. All you've got to do is look at the attitude of the southern states on women's suffrage. I mean, even that thing, how far…
Was it '72 or something like that before North Carolina passed it?
North Carolina, exactly. I mean that's an illustration of what I'm
talking about. On the visitation, my view of that, and it still is to
this extent, that visitation is certainly all right at any day and time,
but there has to be some kind of rule
But what can the University, what is a legitimate role for the University?
That was it. At that time, what we attempted to do was to say you can have visitation up to a certain time of the night. During the week, up to twelve o'clock, maybe, the week-end, one or two o'clock. I've forgotten the exact time. And that was simply an effort to try to find a way to deal with this practical question. If we were trying to keep men and women away from one another, there're plenty of times for them to be together between, all day long up until one or two o'clock at night.
You suggested that Sharon Rose was one of the student leaders who could see the complexity of those kinds of issues.
Exactly, and as I said to Sharon, I said, "We are an educational
institution, and if we're truly one, this is one of the greatest changes
taking place in our society. It's our responsibility to try to educate
people, not to say you're just
How about some of the other people that you had to work with on this? You had multiple constituencies here as in everything you did.
Well, one of the interesting things about this, when we set up these various regulations for visitation, the students did not like it. They requested that they be permitted to present their views to the Visiting Committee of the Board of Trustees when the Visiting Committee came here. I said, "Well, sure, I'll be delighted for you…" Of course, no Board of Trustees is going to issue a statement in which they would approve unlimited visitation of the sexes, not in North Carolina at that date.
One of the issues maybe we should mention here is the open door rule which was part of the complexity of this.
Yes.
That doors should remain open during visitation.
Well, a lot of those details, of course, what it illustrates is the
difficulty of trying to write down things like that for what should be
normal relations between male and female undergraduates. The details and
how they were written down at different times were really written down
by the Board or special committees of Student Affairs, but I don't
really think I had any
Yet she herself is a professional woman who is like, in some ways, a new [southern woman].
Well, that's true, but it's… Katherine took a great deal of pride in what, I think, she would perceive as the ideal of the southern woman. That is an ideal that included education, a profession, but nevertheless, still that traditional lady. That's the way I perceive it. I never saw anything about it that didn't correspond with that. Thus, a lot of the new things were coming in. There was a time in which the women had regulations about what they could wear. It even went that far.
And she… ?
She was a great subscriber to that, as far as I could remember.
No shorts, no slacks?
That's right, that kind of thing.
It's about ten thirty.
I've got an engagement, that's the reason I've got to leave.
Fine, fine.
If there's something else…
Do you want to go over that other incident that we were talking about?
Yes, why don't we talk about that, the role of faculty in the…
You asked about the role of faculty in some of the crises of the sixties.
Off the top of my head, I can remember several, I think, that we might
talk about. One was their role in the food workers strike. The Faculty
Council appointed a committee to represent the faculty and provide its
good offices to try to mediate whatever problems had been unresolved and
were keeping the strike going. The Chairman of that committee was a
professor in the Department of Economics, Paul Guthrie. That committee—I
don't remember the other members, but they would be on record
somewhere—and they were meeting with representatives of the food
workers. One night about one or two o'clock in the morning I got a
telephone call, and it was from Paul Guthrie, and he was calling from
one of the restaurants. I think it was The Pines, but I'm not positive
about that. And he said they'd been meeting for a number of hours, and
they'd finally reached a
Right.
Well, as I said, I had as my responsibility as Chancellor to keep the University going. We did have a lot of demonstrations and so on, and people went to Washington, as you know, to protest the invasion of Cambodia and so on. As that went on many classes were not meeting regularly, and the faculty took, there was a big meeting of the faculty. I went to that meeting and addressed the faculty in the beginning of the meeting, but then, so that I would not be involved in their discussions or present, I left the meeting. They went on, and in the course of that they also set up loud speakers. They met over in Hill Hall, which holds about 800, and there must have been a thousand or two students outside…
Really?
They had loud speakers out so they could listen to all the debates. A lot
of the debate revolved around a critique on national, all of this was
really national policy involving the Nixon policies in Vietnam. So that
went on, and eventually, at that meeting, they resolved one issue, and
that was the question of whether the University should have its full
spring term, finish it, and under what conditions. The faculty finally
voted to say that classes would continue. That the term would be
finished, but that students could elect to either take final
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
So, in that respect, we came through that all right.
Quite remarkable. There weren't very many other major universities that came through with as little…
Yes, it was remarkable. I think that two or three things that explain that… I think a lot of people really had a role in it. I think traditions in student government on campus were important in that. The power structure of student government, while in many instances critical of University policies, at the same time was a positive force in trying to keep the students involved in the processes of orderly consideration of things, rather than departing from that and damning the whole system.
They shared your commitment to procedures?
That's right. That's correct.
To maintaining the basic structure?
That's right, and so I think that was one thing. I think the second thing
was that when I came, I came in first in the midst of a crisis, as we've
already seen in the Speaker Ban crisis. And I knew that one of the major
tasks that I would face in the years immediately ahead was to maintain
an orderly examination of the things with which the University was
concerned. I recognized that there would be a lot of dissension, a lot
of difference of opinion. My goal, that I kept above all else, was that
when this was over, and I knew it would be over in some years, how many
nobody knew, but I knew the period of the
Why were you able to do that when so many other places weren't? Is this something unique to you and were you particularly fortunate in the student leaders you worked with? Is it something endemic to the University?
I think a combination of all those. I was going to say this, one of the things in pursuing this goal, that I just indicated, I maintained all the time personal communication with all elements of the campus. My door was open all the time, day or night. Any student who wanted to see me or to give his protest, what was going on, could come in my office and do so.
You had been a very popular teacher. You had a reputation for that. Do you think that contributed to the students believing that you were, in fact, open?
Well, I think, I'm not sure of that because, actually, one thing we should not forget is that the number of students who were activists, in the sense of actively doing something as distinct from watching on the sidelines, was always a very small percentage.
Was it smaller here than at some of the other campuses?
Not necessarily smaller in force. I think it was smaller probably than at
Columbia, for example, or Berkeley, let's say, but it was a small
percentage. Here, I would guess
Certainly within the state there would have been considerable disagreement.
Oh yes, and when I decided to leave the Chancellorship, however, I did join the Committee to End the War and allowed my name to be used publicly.
But as Chancellor…
As Chancellor, I still have a feeling that the Chancellor is invited to
undertake a certain role and responsibility in the University, and that
he should not, in
Some would say that you had a higher moral obligation to speak out and use your power…
Use the power and prestige of my office. That's quite true, and that's a valid point. As I've said, I have considered that from time to time, but I don't know, again, whether that would have made any real difference or not. It might have done harm, I don't know.
Basically, you were taking as your prime responsibility, at that time, your primary loyalty to the University and to the Chancellorship. Conceivably, if you'd taken a more public stand on the war, you could have alienated supporters of the University.
Well, I don't think there's any doubt that it would have caused some tension on that point. But whether or not it would have been fatal is a different question.
But that had to be one of the kinds of things you had to weigh.
Yes. Now let me give you another illustration of the relationship of
faculty members. The period, and it happened also to be the period in
which integration really became a force on campus. To be sure, the Brown decision had occurred long ago, more than ten
years before I became Chancellor, but little had really been done
between 1954 and 1965 so far as the number of blacks was concerned on
campus, and so far as black faculty were concerned. Not a single black
faculty member. Well, I recommended appointment of the first black
faculty member, and of course, I was the one who had to take the cases
to the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees. Very few members of
the Executive Committee were really sympathetic with what had to be
done. And of course, let's recognize that as far as southern
institutions were concerned, not a single fundamentally white one had
any black faculty. They had a few black students, but not many.
Now, normally, you would not take a faculty appointment, that issue would not go to the Board of Trustees?
Oh yes, all appointments to the faculty from the rank of Assistant Professor up had to be approved by the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees.
Oh, I wasn't aware of that.
They all, that is, most of them were just automatically approved by the
Executive Committee. They'd be reviewed internally, and we'd recommend
them. When letters of appointment
I see. I wasn't aware that you had to go to that level. So you had to go to them and make a case for this specific individual who happened to be black?
Well, what I would do… Well, I would, of course, inform them. If I were
keeping it a secret, that would be a terrible thing to do. If the
Administrative Office said I wasn't informing [them]… Because this was a
clear-cut issue. This wasn't something that people weren't aware of. The
first appointments weren't at the rank of full professor. They were at
lower ranks. The first one was at the School of Social Work which is not
so surprising. Then we had some in the medical area. The first black
full professor who was appointed to the faculty was Blyden Jackson,
professor of English. He was appointed as a full professor. We never got
many, as indeed you can see right now with all the discussion that goes
on, and there are a lot of reasons for that. One, and the most important
reason quantitatively, frankly, is the shortage of qualified black
professionals, particularly in certain fields. Another one is the
faculty's own determination to be absolutely certain that when they
appoint a black faculty member that that black faculty member is one who
really qualifies in a competitive way. Whether or not they're completely
unbiased in that is a different question. It's something you can't,
can't get into their minds. I think on the whole we've been kind of
fortunate in history in some of the black faculty we've had, but again,
we have had, in a
Yes, I watch that also.
Do you see that this is exactly, I thought to myself, there it goes, the same thing over again. In order to get this black lawyer, they would pay him ten or twelve thousand more than people who are better qualified.
Or at least who didn't happen to be black.
That's right. That's correct. So that's an illustration of what I was
talking about. Probably one of the biggest hassles I had with the
Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees involved the appointment,
well, there were two. One involved the appointment of Howard Lee to the
School of Social Work faculty. Howard was a public figure. At that time
he was running for mayor I believe, and the School of Social Work, the
Dean, came in to talk to me about making an appointment for him. He did
not have a Ph.D degree, a doctorate degree, and first the school
proposed to appoint him at a rank above people who were already there
and who had superior qualifications. Well, I said I wouldn't agree to
that because I thought that was unwise policy, but I would agree to
appointment at an appropriate rank and salary, and so we agreed on that.
Then that got into the public domain, somehow or another, before it was
even
To dictate.
Yes, to dictate, or that kind of thing. So then I talked to another
member of the Executive Committee who, while not particularly approving
of the decision to do it, was cognizant of the situation and wanted to
try to find a way that we could… So finally it really got down to the
point that it was known that it was going to come before the Executive
Committee at a given time, and I decided myself, in this case, that rank
was, I think we would make a rank of lecturer or something like that,
would not have been required, but I decided that it was prudent for me
not to bypass them since it was in the public domain. So I put it before
the Executive Committee. Now, I didn't know what the Executive Committee
would do about it. But, of course, I presented it and defended the
appointment. But it was all in the public domain, over radio and
television and press and everything else while this was going on.
Because that illustrates what I was just saying about the process of
integration. The desegregation of institutions was a complex one
It's not just going to be routine.
That's right. It's not going to be routine when some other people get to
examine it. Lo and behold, the Department
Was it because he was black or because he was an activist?
I think it was primarily because he was an activist but the association of the two certainly didn't help it any. But again, that went through.
Did they ever turn down?
Never turned down. But the thing is, I said, "Nobody knows how much prestige and influence I lost by that." See, that's not something you can put, it's in the public domain. In other words, I knew good and well that the Executive Committee, or that many members of it, let's put it that way, I don't mean to imply that it was a unanimous view because that certainly was not true, but certainly in the view of a substantial number, they didn't have much use for what I was going to do from that point on.
This had been a white man's University since it was established…
As most all American universities were.
Exactly. And you were involved, you had to be the point man for the changes.
I happened to be there at a certain time when certain great social changes were under way.
This was ceasing to be both a white man's University and a man's
University.
We did a lot of things to try to speed up the process of integration. We really started, I read with some interest now these people who think they're doing something in order to increase the black presence in Chapel Hill. Well, all these things we've done years ago, and they just fell into disuse, apparently. For example, inviting black Merit seniors here. Well, the Black Student Movement and the Chancellor's Office together started that way back in 1967 or '8. I wrote letters and these students went out to visit the high schools. At that time, you must remember, the schools were not integrated. I mean, in the sense…
Theoretically they were, but…
I mean, they were in the sense that there were a few good
At the same time, the student body as a whole has grown at a much higher percentage than that.
That's right. So I, retrospectively, given the realities, I think we accomplished far more in a short period of time and under circumstances that were not near as propitious as they are now. So while people might not think we accomplished very much because they don't recognize where you were and how far you had to go. I think we did. Let's see what else…
There's one little follow-up. You said that advocating to the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees the hiring of black faculty cost you in…
No, no. I said that instant involving Fuller, particularly, because one,
Fuller had been known to advocate going beyond the use of discussion and
so on and to use whatever
Wild eyed radical.
That's correct. And an active radical, not just a person who spoke but a person who was willing to act. To give Fuller his credit, he did say to the University that he intended to fulfill his responsibilities in his position, did not intend to engage in any agitation, and if he ever did decide to do that, he would resign his position. So he dealt honorably. But at the same time, as far as these people, the Trustees looking as they were looking at it from their responsibility, they felt that they had a responsibility, in a sense, to look at all these proposed appointees and to see whether or not they met, as they saw it, all of their judgment about qualifications. And this instance, their view was that this was a questionable appointment. I'm not particularly criticizing them. I don't know whether I would have done it had I been in the position they were in. I was in a different position. So what I said was that, what I meant to say certainly, was that, in a sense, when that kind of thing happens, persons who have a wholly different view of it then tend to have reservations about your judgment in the decisions that you are making at your level. Am I…
I understand perfectly. Were there any subsequent issues where you had to go to them that you felt that they were less ready to take your recommendations because of this? Is there anything specific you lost?
Well, let's put it this way, I wouldn't say less ready to take, they always took the recommendations. They never turned one down. That's not what I meant. It wasn't that they turned them down, but they had reservations about the judgment that I was exercising.
You had to make your case. It was a little harder to make your case?
That's right. Let's put it this way, I was just one of the four, after all there was State, Greensboro, no instances of, nothing of any kind was going through them from any other campus except this one. Suppose you had been a member of that board. You would be bound to have said, "Why is all this coming here from one campus? We don't have any problems with anybody else?"
How about your relationship with President Friday when all these things that were going on?
Well, Friday. In fact Governor Scott said that when he was in a big
hassle with the structure of higher education because we were
undergoing, said that everybody knows that President Friday runs the
Chapel Hill campus. In respect to all these things we've been talking
about, President Friday was involved in all of them. I always involved
him. In other words, because, after all, who knows, any one of them
might come to an instance in which he's either got to overrule me or
affirm it. So he was kept, well, he kept well-informed about every one
of these, and of course, he was involved in the Speaker Ban controversy
all the way through and a party to the suit, as I was. I didn't take any
position on these issues that I hadn't
There was no time when he said, you know, "Let's not do that. It's not going to go."
No, I don't remember that. I don't remember that. He was not the person who was personally identified with the policy because, unless he was going to overrule it or do something else, it was something that had been decided by this campus. That was true even of the Speaker Ban, except less true of that because that involved passage of procedures by the Board of Trustees and all that kind of thing.
It was a system-wide policy. This happened to be the place that was testing it.
Right. But these other things, he was not the person who was identified
with presenting it and justifying it and so on, even though he had been
informed and consented to it before… Because I don't recall, I don't
think Friday would cut off if the Chancellor and he got into a
disagreement about an issue, and this Chancellor wanted to take it to
the trustees anyway. I don't believe Friday would cut it off. I think he
would say to the trustees that he did not agree with that, but he wanted
the Chancellor to have an opportunity to present it. But I didn't have
any instances of that kind, so I don't know. Didn't have that problem at
all. People talk about the relationships between the President and the
Chancellor. In one sense, the problem here is that the President's
office and personal presence is here, and this is a small town, and the
plain fact is, I've said all the
But did, I don't recall, were the student marches for various issues, did they march on your house, or did they march on President Friday's?
Both, both. But I'll tell you one instance. One night, they came to my house—hundreds. Now, it happened that Nancy and I had gone to bed, and the lights were out, and they were chanting and what not and so on.
Do you remember what the issue was in this case?
I think it was in the wake of the Kent State thing. Really, the campus got more incensed over that. There were more people who were involved.
Yes, it was a very hot issue.
I said to Nancy, "I'm not about to turn on the lights or get up and go out. This is not a time that I want to because they were probably not in a state of mind to engage in a rational discussion." And Chief Beaumont, do you know who Beaumont is? [Arthur Beaumont, Chief of Campus Police].
Yes.
Beaumont apparently came up and told them that the Chancellor was out for
the evening. So I could hear them
Very fine line, then, that you had to walk between being accessible and maintaining a position.
Exactly, because if you get in a certain position, then you're placed in a position in order to correct that, you have to take unacceptable action. Again, I don't want you to leave with the impression that I didn't do things that some people sometime didn't like at all. I'll tell you one of them right now. You saw in the paper where some people were arrested over here for blocking the way to the CIA interviews?
Yes, right, just recently.
That happened in respect to Dow Chemical, Agent Orange.
Right, that was the big…
All right, so the students didn't, at least the activists, did not want
Dow Chemical to be permitted to come to this campus to interview. I took
the position that there were students on this campus who had a right to
be interviewed by Dow Chemical. Again, they wanted to keep them from
coming, and we made clear to them that they were perfectly free to
picket, to
If you're going to let Communists speak on campus, you have to let Dow Chemical recruit on campus.
Well, as you well know, one of the dilemmas of American universities is
this—that American faculties are great advocates of freedom so long as
it's freedom on the left. We might as well be honest about that. We,
this campus right here, we could not keep the student group from
obstructing the speaking of a Ku Klux Klan… And his speech was
terminated. He couldn't speak. That wouldn't happen for a leftist
speaker. Now, I have no
What would you say, within the University as a whole over your whole tenure, the main sources of resistance to the changes that were going on?
I think the main sources of resistance in respect to food workers and maintenance workers came from what I would call low-level managerial positions at that time. I think that's one of the most difficult things to accomplish—not to persuade people who are at the faculty level or the student level, but at the non-academic. I think they're the most difficult, and I spent lots of time personally trying to educate low-level management to the changes that were underway and that had to come and trying to teach them how to do that. To give an example, the mere matter of addressing people by Mr. or Miss or Mrs. if you were not personal friends of theirs.
Now that goes against the basic southern pattern that had been for years the way…
Whoever would have heard twenty years ago a white employer referring to a black person by Mr.?
Right.
For example, in our house, I can give you an illustration of it. We had
two blacks who worked at the Chancellor's house, and what we did, we
asked the person how would you like for us to [address you]. One of them
wanted to be called Mrs. So and So. The other wanted to be called by her
Two different responses.
We're very close friends of both of them, but they had a slightly different relationship to us by their own choice.
How about in the case of the changes for women? What would you say were the chief sources of resistance there to the increased presence of women and all the changes that went on?
We didn't have any resistance to the increased presence of women. I think that what you've seen…
How about the changes in the social rules and so forth?
What you've seen recently about how many should be in the university and that kind [of thing]. You see, at that time, we didn't have that big a percentage of women. So the number of women was not an issue. We wanted more.
How about the changes that went on in the rules for women—the housing rules, the limitations on where they could go and what they could wear and closing hours and so forth? All of that was being challenged and changed.
It was. I'm not sure, I may be wrong about this, but my guess is that the
structure, the institutional structure involving the Dean of Women,
would have been the main… I may be wrong, and Katherine was a good
friend of mine, but I don't think Katherine was a great advocate of
changing all these patterns of identification of the southern woman at
all. Now she was, from the standpoint of the southern woman's access to
career opportunities and that kind [of thing], but not these little
How about the faculty and students?
I don't think, in fact, I never detected that there was any resistance on the part of the faculty and students. I think there was resistance at the Governing Board, trustee level, to certain aspects of things, like visitation, which we've already discussed. But I don't think about the wearing slacks or shorts, or whatever, I don't think there was any.
How about the community as a whole? When you were passing on these things, did you feel you really had to think about the…
The Chapel Hill community much?
The state?
Or the state?
All those parents out there.
I don't think there's any doubt that the changing of things like the residence halls, you know, co-ed residence halls, things of that sort, that parents, some parents, were concerned about that and didn't like it and so on. I'm certain of that. They would have been resistant, but I don't think the University, I think the University tried to explain and to justify what it was doing. No doubt about that. But I don't think the University failed to do things because of the…
Perhaps things went a little slower?
Maybe, but the women, of course, up until, and as far as student
government is concerned, they were involved in student government. But
for the most part, women didn't hold the top post until fairly recently.
The one exception was the editor of the Tar Heel. We
had a woman editor of the Tar Heel, the Hardin girl.
But that came much earlier.
We're getting real close to the end of this. Let me ask you the same question in terms of sources of support for the changes, for the racial changes, the changes in the rules for women, the student activism?
I think the faculty was always generally supportive of that kind of thing. Student government, structurally, always generally positive support on all these changes.
How about other people in the administration?
Well, yes, I'd say most of the, of course, there was diversity of those
you would expect from a large administrative structure, although we
didn't have the big administrative structure that we have now. I would
say that our top administrators in the campus would probably not be one
half in number what you have now. One of the problems we had, in fact,
was educating the trustees to the fact that we needed a kind of
restructured personnel and so on. That's a whole story in itself, and a
big one to get the University staffed and equipped so it could do the
job it would have to do for 20,000 students and so on as compared with
the university of five or six
Made a real difference.
So we went from 12,000 students to more than eighteen when I left. So the University hasn't grown much in…
END OF INTERVIEW