slrhe newt in thii publica-
i'i.
Ition is released for the pr«s on
eipl.
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA
NEWS LETTER
Published weekly by the
University of North Carolina
for its Bureau of Elxtension.
bVEMBER 24, 1920
CHAPEL Hn.T^ N. C.
VOL VIL NO. 3
idUtorinl Board t Os Branson, L. B. Wilson, E. W. Knight^ D. D. Carroll, J. B. Bullitt.
Entered as seoond-class matter November 14, 1914. at the Postoffloe at Chapel Hill, N* C., under the act of August 24, I9is
THE COLLEGES OF CAROLINA
A HUMILIATING RECORD
North Carolina after two and a half
;enturies of history has college plants
jnd equipments valued at $14,008,771.
Phis is the total of the figures turned
n to the department of Rural Social
Science at the State University by the
lutiiorities of 31 white colleges, junior
eoBeges, technical training schools, and
flwlUniversity.
‘ It is almost exactly the wealth we
^^duce by our sweet potato crop alone
in a single year.
I^he plant and equipments of the Uni
versity of California are valued at two
^ a half million dollars more than the
Bty-one college properties of North
Mrolina all put together.
Blhe total annual working income of
)ur thirty-one colleges is $2,434,646.
iVe spend 20 millions a year to keep
>ur motor cars going and less than two
and a half million a year to keep our
colleges going. The working income of
toe University of Michigan alone is a
kali' million dollars more than the com
bined income of all the colleges of North
Carolina.
'The students enrolled in our thirty-
jne colleges this fall number 10,586,
and the applicants turned away for lack
>f room were 2,308. These are the ex
act figures reported by responsible col
lege officials.
! 'Which is to say, nearly one of every
spiritual prosperity for North Carolina—
a matter, if I mistake not, as funda
mental as taxation, and the proper so
lution of which will result in the further
liberation of North Carolina’s League
of Youth for high service to the state.
As business and professional men you
may not have realized that your college
authorities are facing an educational
problem in North Carolina as grave as
your financial-crop situation here in
Rocky Mount. They, too, are sitting
up at night struggling, with such grave
facts as these: (1) The total amount
invested in the thirty-odd college plants
of the state is the ridiculously small
sum of $14,000,000. (2) Their annual
working income is less than $2,500,000
all told. (3) Their dormitories, with
four students to the room in many in
stances, are packed and jammed with a
total of 10,685 students. While (4) the
records of their registrars and secre
taries show that for lack of room they
have turned away 2,308 applicants for
admission this fall.
They understand too that the high
schools of the State are just now be
ginning to function at high speed. Five
years ago only 800 students were grad
uated from four-year high schools.
Over three thousand were graduated
last June. Within the next five years
the number will be doubled or trebled.
They see a crop whose acreage cannot
be cut, and which will further over
IT IS IMPERATIVE
For the interests of our people it
is imperative that we bring our State
University to the full equal of Har
vard, Yale, the University of Michi
gan or the University of Wisconsin,
and our State Agricultural and Me
chanical College to be the equal of
the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
the Columbia School of Mines, or
the Massachusetts School of Tech
nology.—D. A. Tompkins.
The supreme problem in North
Carolina today is to reconcile two
mutually contradictory facts: the
splendid circumstance that North
Carolina in agricultural resources is
fourth from the top in the United
States and the humiliating circum
stance that North Carolina in illiter
acy is fourth from the bottom in the
United States. Our problem is to
bridge over this hideous gap, this
yawning crevasse, between progress
and reaction, between our financial
wealth and educational poverty, be
tween our agricultural glory and our
cultural shame.—Archibald Hendey-
Bon,
^ve students who sought to enter failed them unless succor comes in-
get into the colleges they fondly g^^ntly and in full measure.
It present our four-year high schools j Adequate Salaries
graduating students at the rate of ' I" undertaking to meet this situation
J)00 a year, and the colleges of their ' our colleges find themselves confronted
Aoice have this fall closed thsir doors ' another equally distressmg set of
Elainst 2,308 of them. 1 facts. They discover that in their at-
^t is a college situation that is well ’ tempts to secure instructors they are
nigh unbelievable. It is wholly unen-1 i" keen competition with institutions in
lurable. And if it cannot instantly be ! other sections of the country whose
:nired, we ought never again to prate , problems, though acute twelve months
about our amazing agricultural wealth *80. have already been happily solved
and rank, or our-industrial development! or rendered far simpler through instant
and leadership in the South, or our pre-1 action by their supporters
niership in Dixie in the payment of legislatures. They find
federal taxes on incomes and excess
[irofits.
iWe talk about the highway policies
of North Carolina in terms of millions
and hundreds of millions of dollars.
^nd the time has come when the col-
ze policies of North Carolina must be
fcussed and decided in terms of mil-
jpns and hundred of millions of dollars.
^In a righteous cause of this sort, the
|ate has a right to expect her college
Khorities, church and state, to be
(lid as a lion.
The Current Topics Club
fhat these college figures mean was
burden of Dr. L. R. Wilson’s ad-
Bss to the Current Topics Club at
|)cky Mount the other night.
This club is a unique open forum,
and its like ought to be in a hundred
counties of the state.
(And Dr. Wilson’s address is so graphic
and stirring that we are passing it on in
full to our readers.
OUR CRIPPLED COLLEGES
The outcome of three matters of tre
mendous importance engages your
thought tonight. Almost in spite of
•HOurselves at this dinner hour your
t ids are constantly turning back to
m and weighing them. They are (1)
the holding and underwriting of the to
bacco and cotton crops of North Caro
lina in such a way as to increase the
prosperity of the men and women who
toiled in their production; (2) the decis
ion by ballot tomorrow of the tax pro
gram of the State; and (3) the verdict
of the nation upon the League of Na
tions, which, whether with reservations
or modifications, I trust will yet become
the great new document of world peace
,and human liberty.
Tonight I wish to divert your thought
from these matters to one of like im-
)tt, namely, the critical situation, the
rightful congestion, the woful lack of
plants and funds in the thirty-odd col-
sges and junior colleges of North Car-
■^ina dedicated to the higher education
■of your sons and daughters. I want you
to consider with me our bumper crop of
•high school graduates which, for lack
'Of educational warehouses, laboratories,
libraries, and underwriting organiza-
t ons, is not being properly moved into
le ultimate channels of material and
and state
that Harvard
has had but one cause of worry. All it
has had to do was to raise enough en
dowment to increase its salary scale
fifty per cent, thereby raising its maxi
mum rewards for skilled teachers from
less than $6000 to $8000. This it accom
plished by putting on a drive last October
for $16,000,000, $13,000,000 of which has
already been paid in or subscribed. At
the same time Princeton put on a cam
paign for $14,000,000, while Yale began
to assimilate the $18,000,000 bequest
from the Sterling estate in 1918 and a
special gift of more than $600,000 from
her alumni for immediate running ex
penses.
They find again that they have to un
derwrite building programs as well,
from which Harvard and Yale and Prince
ton have escaped because the public
schools in the states in which they are
located have been functioning success
fully for decades.
Furthermore they discover that states
like Michigan, which have witnessed in
the last two years an unprecedented
rush of high school graduates to college,
have largely anticipated their building
programs, or, like Minnesota, have
money already appropriated to take
care of them.
Carolina, The Unready
There is another thing they find which
isn’t an easy or pleasant thing to say.
They find when they put on cam
paigns for maintenance funds and build
ings, that the State has not yet fully
awakened to the meaning of a thor
ough-going, adequate educational pro
gram. We have not backed our pro
fessions of belief in higher education
with our dollars. The meager $14,000,-
000 invested in college buildings and
laboratories and libraries and equip
ment tells the story. And further tes
timony is added by the fact that the
University of Michigan has a working
income of over $3,000,000 representing
an investment of $60,000,000 at 6 per
cent and that a college like Dartmouth
could announce in June gifts and lega
cies amounting to more than $1,600,000,
while all of the thirty-odd colleges of
North Carolina have a total working
income of less than $2,600,000,
Again, our colleges find that their
alnmni were not organized to leap in
stantly into the breach when the evil
hour was first upon them. While Har
vard and Princeton and Cornell and
Smith and Bryn Mawr and more than
a hundred other Northern and Western
institutions and state legislatures were
putting on drives for increased endow
ment or appropriations from public
funds. Trinity and Wake Forest, and
the A. and E. were just announcing the
appointment of full-time alumni secre
taries, officers which numbers of other
colleges of the State still do not have,
because they haven’t the money!
And intimately connected with these
facts they discover that when Mr.
Rockefeller turned over to the General
Education Board $60,000,000 as a 1919
Christmas gift to be applied to the re
lief of this critical situation in the col
leges of the nation, our local institu
tions were not ready, except in a few
instances, to take advantage of this
source of assistance on a fifty-fifty
basis.
How to hold their college faculties
together, how to raise salaries, how to
recruit their teaching staffs with proper
new material, how to secure funds to
build dormitories, and laboratories, and
dining halls, and libraries and classrooms
to take care of your sons and daughters
and brothers and sisters—these are the
problems with which college presidents
and boards of trustees have been con
fronted and for which they must find
the proper solution.
here in North Carolina, which, with all
of its vaunted agricultural wealth, stands
fourth from the bottom in the scale of
public school accomplishment.
Impossible Conditions
But the matter does not end here.
What about the health of these boys
and girls in overcrowded conditions? I
know a girl accustomed, for precaution
ary reasons, to a sleeping porch. After
ten days of crowding with three other
girls in one room, she went home. The
situation was impossible for her from
the viewpoint of health. Every day as I
pass rooms on the campus I see double
deck beds, two to the room, which four
boys occupy in rooms intended for two.
What about the standards of living
gained by our young people under these
conditions? Is it right to force a boy
who has had proper standards of sani
tation and hygiene and methods of Ijvr
ing at home to lower them at QoBega
while rooming as some men ^ ^now
quarters over grocery %totes and ga?
rages? On the qthpf- fignd shopldn’t
the boy wfinsp standards of living at
hOjnQ have feeen low, fiave better ones
@et him while at college, particularly,
• if Ijf is te become the teacher or office^
or leader to whom some North Carolina
school, or community, or special inter
est is to commit its program of sanita
tion and beautification of grounds?
Shouldn’t he be so sensitized in college
to things sanitary, and hygienic, and
beautiful as to demand similar stand
ards in a work-a.day world?
Can our thirty-one colleges with only
$14,000,000 invested in plants and a to
tal working income of only $2,435,000 a
year provide the best type of instruc-
iams which has a working income that
enables it to spend $495 annually on
each student who enters its doors? Or
with Haverford which has $750 or with
more than a hundred other institutions
throughout theNorth and West that have
working incomes per student that aver
age from 50 to 200 per cent more than
those of the colleges in North Carolina?
The Penalties We Pay
tion? Can they stack up in this all im-
A Personal Problem
But has it occurred to you that there
are questions involved in this situation
which concern you more than they do
the colleges?
This is not a case in which you can
say “we should worry.” These high
school boys and girls, these ninety sen
iors enrolled in your own city high
school, have sprung up around your own
hearth stones. They are yours, and
your responsibility does not end when
you bid them goodbye, hand them a
check, and turn them over to a college
faculty.
If you will permit me, I shall ask you
some of the questions you should be
asking yourselves. First, what do our
colleges mean when they say that they
turned away 2,308 applicants in Septem
ber? What does Meredith mean when
it says it turned away 100, or Trinity
75, or Davidson 175, or the North Caro
lina College for Women 260, or Flora
McDonald 205, or Wake Forest 40, or
Queen’s 144, or Davenport 71? Cer
tainly it does not mean that 2,308 boys
and girls were unable to enter some
college, because, in many instances,
when entrance could not be obtained in
one institution it was sought in another
and another until an opening finally was
found. But it does mean that in hun
dreds of cases students who had planned
their courses in high schools to en
ter specific colleges found it impossible
to carry out their cherished plans.
Again, some had to go to other states
and so may be lost in later years to
North Carolina, a loss which the State
can no more aiford to sustain than losses
through freight rate discriminations
which tend to enrich other common
wealths and impoverish our own.
The picture I want you to get is this.
On Commencement day in June Presi
dent Chase of the University announced
that every room on the campus was al
ready taken by upper-classmen before
applications from the incoming fresh
man were placed in the mails. David
son in mid-summer had to say that its
rooms were running over, and parents
took the trains to go in person to this
and that and the other institution to
hunt down a room “for just one more
student.” One boy in Monroe wrote 26
letters before he found a room, and a
girl in an eastern county found only
four out of 28 southern colleges writ
ten to that could take her in.
It means that some students whom the
State had inspired to equip themselves
fully, grew tired of this desperate hunt
and gave up this greatest of all the
quests of youth. This happened right
I portant particular with Williams and
I Haverford and Wesleyan and Wellesley
and hundreds of other institutions?
I I shall not attempt to size up the sit
uation in other North Carolina institu
tions, but will confine myself to my
own. I was particularly interested in
one freshman in the 'University last
year. After he had been in college
three weeks I asked him one day who
■ his instructors were. He named four.
’Two of them had been graduated the
preceding June. The third came from
another institution and was teaching at
the University for the first time. The
fourth was a professor who had com
pleted his work for the doctorate and
i had had a long and rich experience as a
teacher. 'Three-fourths of his instruc-
: tors in his freshman year when he was
most in need of skilled guidance were
1 inexperienced men. The point I am
j making is that too many North Carolina
I students receive instruction from callow
' instructors. I also know a Carolina
freshman who entered a small Pennsyl
vania college twenty-five years ago
I who, at the very beginning of his col-
; ege career, received instruction from
, one of America’s greatest professors
I of English, and whose other instructors
j with only one exception held the rank
of professor and had long records of
preparation and successful teaching be
hind them. He sat at the feet of Gam
aliels, not of raw recruits whose diplo
mas bore the date of the preceding
, spring.
Meagre Equipments
Laboratories and libraries play a large
. part in instruction. A study of our col-
■ lege catalogues will show that fewer
; than a dozen institutions in North Caro-
: lina have more than one entire building
' devoted to laboratory uses. This means
, that for the acquirement of skill in de
tailed experimentation essential to the
• proper development of our industries,
i such as your cotton seed oil industry
i here. North Carolina has not given her
students the necessary buildings and
: apparatus.
'The same is true of library resources.
: Only three of our college libraries added
I more than 1000 volumes to their collec-
' tions during 1918-19. In eight of our
colleges, junior colleges and technical
j training schools the new library volumes
! added during the year range from 10 to
I 781. Contrast these figures with those
of Dartmouth, and 'Williams, and Smith,
and Bryn Mawr, and Harvard, and the
University of Michigan which add from
3,000 to 40,000 volumes a year!
Worhing Incomes too Small
Another question follows hard after
these. It involves the working incomes
of our colleges which can be put back
into the instruction and cultural enrich
ment of students. You understand that
■ colleges do not declare money dividends.
On the contrary, they put every cent
they can, through scholarships, and
fellowships, and lectureship, and equip
ment, back into your boys and girls.
Think of colleges with working incomes
that range from $130 to $271 per stu
dent; can our colleges with these a-
mounts to spend upon their students,
give back to them as much cultural en
richment as your sons and daughters
ought to receive? Can they carry out
programs through which the youth of
North Carolina can be brought in touch
with the thinkers and leaders in the
various fields of technical or scholarly
or artistic attainment? Do they compare
favorably in these respects with Will
The two weightiest questions still re
main unasked. (1) Are we giving the
boys and girls in our colleges as good a
chance as parents in Michigan or Mass
achusetts or California are giving theirs?
(2) Are we equipping them to do the
big jobs awaiting them here in North
Carolina?
The answer to the first can be found
in the figures already submitted. It is
an emphatic no. I shall answer the sec
ond with two observations.
A very thoughtful gentleman said to
me a few days ago that cotton had en
riched every man that, touched it except
the men who produced it. 'What he had
in mind was that England and New
England, through technical knowledge,
have reaped the reward of our cotton
plfuiting. The 'Worcester Poljrtechnij
■ l55t!tute of Massachusetts and the fi-
' nancial concerns of New York have un
til recent years turned the dividends
which should go to Southern farmers
into Northern pocket books. Imagine
what it would mean today t? North
j Carolina and the South if trained Men
I were immediately to emerge who, with
out futile recourse to the Federal Re
serve Board, could conserve, through or=
iganizatioH, through manufacture,
i through export, through financial stabil
ization, our two record crops of cotton
and tobacco to the financial enrich
ment of the men who produced them.
The second observation is this. Today
North Carolina is at the beginning of
what should be a tremendous road-build
ing program, one that calls for the ex
penditure of millions and millions of
dollars. Opinions vary as to the amount
required. It has been placed at $50,000,-
000, at $100,000,000, at $160,000,000.
The significant fact is that no one seems
really to know what the figure should
be or what sort of roads we should
build. And in the face of this stupend
ous undertaking and this woful lack of
clear understanding, only two institu
tions in the State announce in their cata
logues departments of highway engi
neering for the training of town and
country and state road engineers. And
the headship of one of these has been
vacant for 18 months because a man
who knows asphalt and concrete and
cement and sand and clay and culverts
and bridges and costs and sinking funds
and road taxes, — who knows them from
A to Z, and can teach them — cannot
be secured to fill the vacant position at
the salary of $3600 which represents the
maximum of the regular salary scale of
the institution concerned.
The Call is for Millions
I understand, gentlemen, that as mem
bers of the Current Topics Club, you
meet here to discuss matters and not to
promote particular causes. Consequent
ly, I am not going to ask you what you
are going to do to improve this situation.
But I am going to say that if you have
a son or daughter or a brother or sister
who will be seeking admission in the
colleges of North Carolina next fall or
the next, you, or someone, must do
something about it. I grant you that
only last year the Moravians, therPres-
byterians, the Friends, the Baptists,
and other denominations put on endow
ment campaigns for the benefit of their
educational institutions. I know that the
Methodists propose a similar campaign
in the coming spring. But if this matter
is handled adequately, if our boys and
girls who are knocking at the doors of
our colleges are to be given an equal
chance with those in other states to the
North and 'West, if they are to be pro
perly housed, if they are to sit at the
feet of the best instructors, if their in
struction is to be supplemented by lab
oratories and libraries, if their lives are
to be given depth and breadth and com
pleteness through contact with the mas
ter minds in the fields of scholarship,
the arts, the industries, the world of
affairs, somebody must make it possible.
If these things are to be done not only
must the churches and the alumni con
cerned put on campaigns for their par
ticular institutions, but dividends, and
stocks, and bonds, and estates, and pub
lic revenues, running into the millions,
must be devoted to this cause.
The old adage runs that you cannot
make brick without straw. Your ex
perience as business men is that you
cannot move tobacco and cotton success
fully without money. And I am sure
that your logical minds have already
reached the conclusion with me that
this crop that is capable of being turned
into the finest of all finished products—
these boys and girls of yours who are
knocking at the doors of North Caro
lina’s technical schools and colleges—
cannot be moved into the fields of use
fulness and service which they should
occupy, unless the fathers and mothers
and public spirited citizens and the Gen
eral Assembly of the State come to
their instant aid.