A Perspective on the Class of '83

Posted on April 26, 1983

In this guest commentary, John Drescher ’83, former editor of The Daily Tar Heel, eloquently affirms that the Class of ’83 has exemplified that fierce “independence of thought” prevalent in earlier Carolina classes. We welcome John Drescher and his classmates to the alumni family. — Douglas S. Dibbert, Director of Alumni Affairs

Few men, if any, understood the Southern mind as did novelist William Faulkner. Shortly before his death in 1962, Faulkner answered a friend’s request for information on the civil rights movement in the South by directing his friend to the students at The Daily Tar Heel. Faulkner remarked that the DTH editors displayed a rare understanding of the issues involved in that sensitive and emotional movement.

That was quite a compliment to the quality and nature of students at UNC. Yet it should not have come as a surprise. Faulkner, though generous, was only stating what many in the South already knew: UNC provided an atmosphere that lent itself to a kind of questioning and probing uncommon on other campuses. While students come and go, something greater — a tradition of individual thought and concern — remains the same. Fulfilling that tradition, both in and out of the classroom, has been a challenge to Carolina students for decades.

Traditions like that do not come from nowhere. Students, administrators and faculty members make them happen. It takes leadership from all three of those groups to create an environment that encourages innovative thinking and refuses to stifle opinion, even when that opinion may be painful for those in power — administrators and faculty members — to bear.

No one in the history of UNC did more for creating that type of environment than former President Frank Porter Graham. We see his name on the student union building, yet few of us realize his importance in shaping life as we know it at UNC.

Graham, who was UNC president in the 1930s and ’40s, never shunned any conflict that threatened academic freedom. Graham’s idea was that without the freedom of professors and students to openly speak their minds, University education would remain incomplete. “Without freedom there can be neither culture nor real democracy,” Graham said in 1931 as he was beginning his presidency. “Without freedom there can be no University.”

Graham didn’t just talk, he fought against legislative bills restricting professors from teaching theories of evolution. When 300 prominent North Carolina citizens pressured Graham to restrict “radical” guest speakers on campus, Graham refused to bend. In another dispute he defended the right of a socialist faculty member to express his political and economic views. In the case of a cheating ring involving 48 students, Graham strongly supported the student-run honor system when it would have been easy for him not to do so. In these actions and others Graham fostered an environment of academic freedom that few schools across the country could match.

With leadership like Graham’s, it is no surprise that the University produced students like Faulkner described. Graham left the University in 1949 but his commitment to freedom endured. From President Graham’s years to Chancellor Fordham’s, students at UNC have freely questioned established ways of thinking and continued to search for new answers.

The inevitable question, then, is how the Class of 1983 measures up to its predecessors. Today’s UNC student cannot help hearing how tame he is compared to the UNC student of the 1960s and early 1970s. It is true that there has been no mass movement to draw a crowd of 20,000 onto the lawn between South Building and Wilson Library, as there was 10 to 15 years ago.

Yet I humbly believe — with a great deal of bias — that the Class of ’83 compares favorably with its predecessors in its desire to think independently. The repeaters of modern campus history fail to tell us how many of those ‘Nam protesters were thinking for themselves, how many were opposed to a draft for purely selfish reasons and how many were there to smoke dope and join the crowd. That was a unique time in U.S. and UNC history. But the desire to change campus life for the better and the effort to think freely and challenge old ideas are still here.

The causes are smaller than a war but they still exist. Students march regularly to protest the University’s percentage of minority and women professors. Enough students cared to get a referendum on a campus-wide ballot supporting divestment of University funds that indirectly aid the apartheid policies of South Africa. It passed. A group of sorority women showed its concern with racism in rush and formed Sorority Women Against Discrimination. The Association for Women Students protested loudly when the DTH published recruiting ads from Playboy magazine. A group of conservtive students cared enough to get themselves elected to the Campus Governing Council and actively push their points of view.

In the most publicized but least understood display of campus activism, a candidate ran for student body president on the platform that he would abolish the executive branch of Student Government. His slogan: “I don’t care.” Yet anybody who took Hugh G. Reckshun seriously and listened closely enough discovered that Reckshun really did care about how student funds were spent. He lost, which is really what he wanted, but he made a point, which is also what he wanted.

A tame campus? I don’t think so. That is not to say it’s the model of academia. As always, there is a bloc of students who care little about anything inside or outside the classroom. Overall, however, it is a campus where academic freedom is still valued and put to good use.

Not far from the campus over which he once presided, Frank Graham is buried in a local cemetery next to his wife. Their tombstone reads: “They had faith in youth and youth responded with their best.” Frank Graham would have had faith in the Class of 1983. I think he would have been proud of the way the class responded.

John Drescher ’83, former editor of The Daily Tar Heel, is a journalism and history major from Raleigh.