THE SPIRIT OF EAST CAROLINA
This speech was delivered by Chancellor Richard R. Eakin on the occassion of Founders Day, March 9, 1998, the university's 91st anniversary.
This and other speeches may be found in the records of the Chancellor's Office, Record Group CH1050, Series 2, Subseries 5 in the University Archives.
THE SPIRIT OF EAST CAROLINA FOUNDERS DAY 1998
March 9, 1998
If this program were a church service, we would now have arrived at the sermon. You have probably noted several similarities to a worship service. We started at 11 a.m. We had beautiful music. We presented special awards. I want to assure you right now, however, that we will NOT be taking up a collection. Let me also assure you that I believe that no sermon can be too short.
The idea of a campus chapel service was familiar to the early citizens of this campus. While researching these remarks, I ran across dozens of chapel talks delivered by President Wright. He evidently gave such a talk once a week for at least two years.
We are here today to celebrate Founders Day. To look fondly at our roots and our heritage. To remind ourselves of the bedrock principles that this marvelous institution was built on. And to measure ourselves against where the founding mothers and fathers of East Carolina expected us to be ninety-one years later.
Many of you are familiar with the very earliest days of East Carolina. You know that Greenville and Pitt County outbid seven other cities to have the school located here. It was known as East Carolina Teachers Training School, and the price tag was $100,000 and 46 acres of land. In comparison, sixteen years earlier the town of Greensboro had obtained the North Carolina State Normal College (now UNC Greensboro) with $30,000 and a 10-acre site.
Former Governor Thomas Jordan Jarvis was in almost every way the father of this institution. He was chairman of the building committee. And he was tapped by the college trustees to head the search for the first president. That search resulted in the selection of Robert Herring Wright, who led the school from 1909 to 1924. It was also Governor Jarvis who hired the university's first three faculty members: Mamie Jenkins, Sallie Joyner Davis and Maria Graham. It was those faculty members who laid the foundations of teaching excellence that continue today at East Carolina.
Those early days and those early individuals were so very important to this institution. Not only did they lay the groundwork and the direction of this institution, but they also imbued it with its defining spirit. It is that spirit that more than anything else tells us who we are. I want to share some of the early thoughts, challenges and successes of the founders (as well as their spirit) with you today.
As University Historian Mary Jo Bratton noted in the commemorative program for last year's ninetieth anniversary observance, East Carolina was established during the progressive era in the United States. It was a time of virtually unbridled optimism in the U.S., and the chief engine of this optimism was education. Progressive reformers were convinced that public school education was the chief training ground for democracy.
President Wright echoed this sentiment in his inaugural address. He said, and I quote: "It is, as I see it, the duty of every loyal American to give of his time and substance to the betterment of our school systems. It is the duty of each community to make its public school the center of its local patriotic life."
In many ways, President Wright's admonition is more compelling today than when it was delivered in 1909.
Clearly the role of our public schools in our society is central and critical in 1998. We have always been inextricably linked to the public schools. We believe this and we are proud of our contributions to public education and determined to continue our leadership role.
It is instructive, I think, to look back at not only the very beginning of East Carolina, but also at its first decade. As I noted earlier, the story of our creation is familiar to many of you. I was delighted to find clear evidence in the writings of the founders that after 10 years of classes, their resolve was, if anything, stronger than ever. And they were fortified with the first success stories of our graduates.
President Wright, in an essay prepared for the tenth-anniversary issue of the Training School Quarterly, said, and I quote: "In our work we have realized that the student body of today is only a means of accomplishing the real purpose of the school. By this is meant we are working for the children of our state and our students are our means of reaching the children."
This is an elegant way to look at the importance of what we do. Our spirit was then and remains today aligned with the children of North Carolina, with their families, their dreams and their futures. We have never believed that our boundaries ended with the edge of our campus.
We must excel in our classrooms. We must teach the best way that we know how and we must welcome the advantages that the new technologies provide us. We must treat the students in our classrooms as partners in the learning process and do the very best we can by them every day.
And we must remember that it is, in fact, not just our own students, but the children of North Carolina, that we are teaching. As the mission of East Carolina has grown, so has our influence as faculty members expanded beyond the public school classrooms. We still teach teachers, of course, more than any other university in this state. And we also teach social workers and nurses and accountants and historians and physicians and nutritionists, artists, musicians, physical therapists and literally dozens of other professionals and specialists and generalists. It is, in turn, the work that they do, the lives that they touch and transform, that are our special opportunity and responsibility.
In his essay, President Wright noted another trademark of this institution. That is the spirit of cooperation that makes us much more than the sum of all our parts. East Carolina and its work must always be bigger than any individual connected with the school, he wrote.
None of us can succeed alone. But by pulling together, as East Carolina's faculty, staff, students and friends have done from the beginning, we can achieve beyond what many have imagined.
By the end of its first decade, the East Carolina Teachers Training School had established itself as an important institution in the region, and its graduates were widely admired.
Claude W. Wilson, the founding director of the Department of Pedagogy, was justifiably proud of the three hundred and ninety-nine young women who graduated from East Carolina in the first ten years. The majority of those graduates were teaching in the rural and village schools of the east. And Professor Wilson took special delight in recounting the experiences of one graduate who found herself in, and I quote, "the back corner of an eastern county."
This teacher, this East Carolina alumna, found there a dilapidated one-room school house, unpainted, unlighted and unfurnished. But she was excited more than discouraged. She and her students cleaned, organized, raised money and made things better. By Christmas, the schoolhouse was painted, equipped with window shades, benches with backs, and a spruced-up yard.
Word of efforts like this quickly got around. One superintendent wrote Professor Wilson to say: "We want twenty of your next graduating class. Those we have from your school have put such a fine spirit into the work that they have spoiled us."
With beginnings like that, it is no wonder that our School of Education carries such a vaunted reputation.
From the start, East Carolina has had great expectations for itself. It has wanted to do more and better and faster. Maria Graham, who established the East Carolina mathematics department and for whom the Graham Building is named, recorded the highlights of the first growth spurt in her appraisal of the first ten years.
Ground was broken on July 2, 1908 and the doors were opened for students on October 5, 1909, barely fifteen months later. It's probably not necessary for me to point out that a football stadium was not in the first building boom!
The original six buildings were, in fact, a girls' dormitory, a boys' dormitory that included an apartment for the president and his family, an administration building, a kitchen and dining room, a laundry and power plant, and an infirmary.
In the first decade, the number of pupils enrolled during the regular school year increased from 174 to 325. Two hundred and fifty students were turned away in the fall of 1919 because of a lack of room. And the staff was growing as well. The original work force was eighteen. Ten years later it had grown to thirty six, and, in Professor Graham's words, "Every department has expanded in the number of teachers and number of courses offered."
The name Herbert Austin serves as a unique link among the past, present and future of East Carolina. He was the first director of the Science Department here, and he was the first faculty member hired by President Wright. The first Austin Building, which stood on the site now occupied by the Jenkins Fine Arts Center, was named for him and was the primary classroom and administration building.
Although Old Austin deteriorated to the point that it had to be demolished, its cupola was the model for the cupola that is now a centerpiece on our campus mall. And the building that now carries his name is the home of our Computing and Information Systems Department. It is this department that is providing much of the expertise as we attempt to harness the benefits of the information technology revolution to the delivery of education in the future.
Professor Austin, in his contribution to the tenth anniversary activities, described a phenomenon that has served this campus exceptionally well. One of the significant things, he wrote, is that twelve of the eighteen teachers and officers who were at East Carolina during the first year were still here ten years later.
The importance of this stability ,which continues today,is hard to overestimate. East Carolina has been blessed with faculty members who brought decades-long loyalty and dedication to the campus. The first three faculty members hired by Governor Jarvis, Mamie Jenkins, Maria Graham and Sally Joyner Davis, all served three and a half decades.
This is a tradition that has been carried on by many, including the current chair of the faculty, Don Sexauer, who recently completed his thirty-fifth year at East Carolina.
As you know, many critics and scholars of higher education today decry what they see as a professoriate that is more loyal to discipline than to institution. East Carolina is indeed fortunate to have enjoyed the services of so many faculty members who were and are clearly loyal to this institution.
This is the spirit of East Carolina.
I would be at least a little remiss if I did not take this opportunity to remind you of some of the difficulties that our institutional ancestors had to overcome while they were laying the foundation of East Carolina.
Maria Graham, for instance, noted that there was great rejoicing the first year of the school when the board walks were laid and it was no longer necessary to pull up the hill on Fifth Street through sand nearly shoe deep. She said that there was even greater joy when the board walks were replaced with concrete.
She did not, so far as I have been able to tell, have anything to say about a scarcity of parking spaces.
Pattie Dowell, the first student to register, remembered that East Carolina in the beginning did not have all the amenities that might have been expected at more established colleges. There were enough beds and bath tubs, but no rugs or chairs or luxuries of any kind. She said that when meal time came, the students stood around tables and ate with their fingers.
The infirmary saw a different mix of ailments in those days. Students suffered from smallpox, typhoid fever and scarlet fever in addition to the measles, chicken pox and mumps. But during the first ten years, the school never recorded more than two cases of smallpox or scarlet fever at a time. And by the end of East Carolina's first decade, more than 70 percent of the students arrived on campus having been vaccinated against both smallpox and typhoid fever.
The founders of this university indeed had their work cut out for them. But they approached it with an enthusiasm and vision that clearly set us on the path to sustained excellence. As I have tried to share with you today, the first decade on this campus was truly an incredible time. By the end of those first ten years, it was clear to the founders that they were going to succeed, that they were in the process of building an institution that was important to the region, the state, the nation and the world. I am proud to say that we are continuing that process today, and I think the founders would be proud of us as well.
These celebrations of our history and achievements are doubly valuable. The knowledge and insights that we gain from the study and analysis of our past help us to sharpen and refine our goals and ambitions for ourselves and for this university.
As we move toward East Carolina's second century, there are five key themes that I think should especially command our attention and energy. None of these is most important, but all are critical to our future.
First is the campaign for student scholarships. We are in the silent phase of this effort, which is designed to increase efforts to recruit future generations of North Carolina's and the nation's brightest young leaders to East Carolina.
Second is the continuing physical development of the campus. Not since the initial building boom in 1908 has the campus seen such transforming projects as we are in the midst of now. Joyner Library is almost finished. The Life Sciences Building at the Medical School will be dedicated this year. The Science and Technology Building is on the drawing boards. We plan to move Nursing and Allied Health to the medical campus. The west end dining hall will add to the unrivaled student service facilities that we have already provided with Todd Dining Hall and the Student Recreation Center. And Jarvis Residence Hall, one of the original campus buildings, is undergoing a complete renovation.
Third is the continued development of our strengths and capabilities in research and graduate education. We have crossed the threshold to Doctoral Two status in the classification of the Carnegie Commission. We anticipate in April the approval of two new doctoral degrees by the UNC Board of Governors. We will continue to develop doctoral programs where our experiences and abilities offer opportunities.
Fourth is enhanced efforts to improve diversity on the East Carolina campus. All elements of our community, from students to faculty to staff to administration, benefit from diversity. Our differences make us stronger, more complete. As President Wright noted, our strength is indeed in our cooperation and our melding of our many talents, but nothing can weaken us more quickly than a failure to respect and defend the rights and opinions of others. We are, in fact, all in this together.
Fifth is assuming the role of technological leadership in this region. We are well-positioned for this move and it is a natural extension of our leadership in other areas in eastern North Carolina.
These five themes all reflect our university's proud history and its growth and development in its first ninety one years. Equally important, they will continue to provide elements of excellence and distinction to our future.
Let me close with a few more words from President Wright. Like so many of his observations, these seem especially appropriate.
"The one thing that makes for success in this school more than any other one thing is the spirit of the school. That indefinable, indescribable something that we call the atmosphere of the school. This is the very essence of the inner life, and it is rooted in love. Love for the cause, love for the children of North Carolina, love for the work we have to do, and faith in our undertakings. It is that love born of the higher impulses for the good of humanity. It is an unselfish love. It is the spirit of the man reaching out and yearning to be of service to his fellow man. Its greatest significance is found embodied in our motto 'To Serve'."
Thank you for joining us here today. I invite you to join in the singing of our alma mater, led by Professor Perry Smith from the School of Music. A reception will follow in the Multi Purpose Room next door.
