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

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medes, Marx and Freud — if he, the graduate, the representative of Caro- Hna, has thus escaped exposure to the accumulated wisdom of man ' s brief, curious history, the Universit) ' is at fault for not supplying these gaps in his knowledge. And it is academic sprawl, bulbous bureaucratic mis- steps, and the misguided, well-inten- tioned loose requirements of this University that have reduced the whether by talent or diligence, or luck or cunning, a sufficient number of these courses. So, Carolina can — and unhappily often does short-change and disap- point the students. But one-sided wrongs are rare in this world of com- plex compromises and adjustment, and we students have failed the Uni- versity. Most of us realize at isolated moments that we could have drawn value of its degree to a tacitly de- valuized scrap of negotiable paper. It is negotiable, for apparently those who hire young graduates demand this degree. But it is devaluized, for it means no more than that its holder (whether by his honest sweat-flowing labour or by slothful slipping through or by careful, contained cheating) has sat through the prescribed num- ber and variety of courses, has passed Page 22

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more from this place ' s inexhaustible resources than we have done. The number of books we have not read dwarfs those that we have scanned, but it is not merely the unread vol- umes which bespeak our negligence; rather it is the casual way with which we have rejected the new, the unknown, the challenge, and have held fast to the familiar. We were either fearful of, or we yawned at, the challenges that were daily laid before us. The Southerners among us who recoiled from intelligence and compassionate discussion of the