University of North Carolina Chapel Hill - Yackety Yack Yearbook (Chapel Hill, NC)

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DEAN DF STUDENTF TO THE CLASS OF 1939: Your graduation year comes just 150 years after your Alma Mater was chartered by the new-formed legislature of North Carolina. When the legislature of 1789 projected for this State a democratic provision for higher education, all of Europe could have laughed at such presumption. Government was then the pre- rogative of royal families. Without such divinely ordained guidance, the belief was, men could have no government. However, those patriots of a century and a half ago wagered their lives and the destiny of their chil- dren on the assumption that freedom and enlighten- ment could develop in men the leadership of conscien- tious intelligence. Then North Carolina, with less than 400,000 citi- zens scattered throughout her forests was exceeded in population only by Pennsylvania and Virginia. That these and ten lesser commonwealths strung along the edge of a vast wilderness hove within the century and a half grown so in space, numbers, wealth, power, and significance, is surely one of the great dramatic facts of history. Now this yoLing colossus of 48 states with 60 per cent of the world ' s gold, with frontiers in Guam and on the Rhine, faces again t he issue of its birth. Can free men freely regulate their personal and collective FRANCIS FOSTER BRADSHAW DEAN OF STUDENTS action by intelligence and conscience? ' Con we build here a government of wisdom and justice ' ' May your graduation be but the beginning of a richer partnership between you and Chapel Hill, in which you shall fight for her liberty and she shall guarantee you and your children light.

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DEAN DF ADMINISTRATION MY DEAR FRIENDS OF THE CLASS OF 1939: You have been a part of the University during a dramatic and exciting period of its history. Inside the State and nation and outside in the whole world of affairs questions of the utmost moment have been impending during your en- tire college career. I think that you have dealt with these ques- tions intellectually and in terms of feeling and action with a fine self control and a splendid aptitude for genuine participation in the current world. You hove certainly, in addition, brought warmth, color, and exuberant vitality into the life of the University and the University com- munity while you have been here. You have not been without particular problems in campus life and government. I think you have handled them well. Nothing on the negative side has occurred here but what you have developed something on the positive side to balance the situation and carry it forward. You have developed fine leaders in all aspects of healthy student life, and I think permanent qualities of leadership are evident in your class. At the same time, I hove the utmost faith in the great body of the class — men and women who are not yet conspicuous and do not desire to be, but who in the quiet processes of study, work, play, and imaginative fellowship have been laying the basis for significant and beautiful living You graduate with the friendship and sincere good will of all of us who have been privileged to associate with you here.

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SCHOOL DF ARTS AND SCIENCES In point of time the oldest college of the University, the College of Arts and Sciences is concerned in guiding students, already possessed of the fundamentals of college training, so that they may get the most for their effort out of the last two years of their college work. The system now in force at the university is a gradual development from the older disciplines still used in some American schools, in which the entire course of study for the four years is prescribed. Such a system does not allow for individual differences and is too rigidly narrow for a liberal arts college. It was long ago abandoned here. Histori- cally there followed a period of more or less free choice of courses, with a minimum of fixed requirements; the inevitable result was that the student often chose courses for reasons other than their content or he chose all his work in a single field and thus could hardly be said to have had a liberal education. The College of Arts W. M. DEY HUMANITIES R. E. COKER NATURAL SCIENCES A. R. NEWSOM SOCIAL SCIENCES A. W. HOBBS DEAN and Sciences has attempted a compromise which keeps over- specialization at a minimum and allows as much election as is possible without depriving the curriculum of all s emblance of plan and purpose. In spite of the experimentation now going on in American colleges, nobody is yet sure just what an A.B. degree should be more than a block of courses on a transcript: it should be a discipline and at attitude of mind. We now try to insist that the student who earns a degree in the college must hove a body of organized knowledge about a recognized field of learning, a fund of more generalized information about fields ancillary to his own, and if possible, some knowledge of the world about him which will fit him to live as well as earn a living. At the heart of the college are the libraries and the laboratories. Professors are guides and counsellors: but in the last analysis students educate themselves. With an A.B. degree, the student should have a foundation upon which to build a career and a life.