Morehead-Cain Honors Carson With New Scholarship

Posted on June 10, 2010

The Morehead-Cain Foundation is endowing a new merit scholarship at Carolina in honor of Eve Carson ’08.

The Chapel Hill-based foundation has given $400,000 to UNC to establish the Eve Marie Carson Carolina Way Scholarship, which will cover tuition, fees, and room and board for an undergraduate beginning as soon as 2011-12. A new recipient will enroll every four years.

The scholarship also will provide the student with special programming, including research grants, summer enrichment opportunities and study abroad. Preference will be given to out-of-state applicants.

Carson, UNC’s former student body president who was killed in March 2008, was a Morehead-Cain Scholar from Athens, Ga.

Recipients will be chosen for academic excellence, observable optimism and enthusiasm, and a proclivity to connect and engage diverse people. “Eve was extraordinary in many ways, but these qualities made her particularly special to the Morehead-Cain program and the University,” said Chuck Lovelace ’77, executive director of the Morehead-Cain Foundation.

The name of the Eve Marie Carson Carolina Way Scholarship was inspired by Carson’s habit of referring to the “Carolina Way.” She and James Moeser, UNC’s chancellor during Carson’s student days, defined it as “excellence with a heart.”

“We are extremely pleased to include the ‘Carolina Way’ in the name of the scholarship, because Eve so perfectly embodied the passion, generosity and commitment that it represents,” said Megan Mazzocchi ’82, associate director of the Morehead-Cain Foundation. “Eve believed fully in the unique character of the Carolina community and tried in everything she did to live up to the Carolina Way and inspire those around her to do the same.”

Along with being student body president at Carolina, Carson was co-president of the Honors Program student executive board, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a member of the North Carolina Fellows leadership development program. She also tutored science in the local public schools and captained several intramural sports teams.

Carson studied abroad in Cuba and, through the Morehead-Cain summer enrichment program, spent her college summers in Wyoming, Ecuador and Egypt.

She was posthumously awarded the Chancellor’s Award for most outstanding woman in the senior class and the UNC General Alumni Association’s Distinguished Young Alumni Award.

This is the second UNC scholarship to honor Carson. The first, the Eve Marie Carson Memorial Junior-Year Merit Scholarship, funds a summer experience for students after their junior year and financial aid for their senior year.

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More online…

• Atwater Pleads to State Charges in Murder of Eve Carson
  News report from May 2010
• Atwater Pleads Guilty in Carson Slaying
  News report from April 2010
• Carolina Dedicates Garden to Memory of Eve Carson
  News report from March 2010
• GAA Honors Three With Distinguished Young Alumni Awards
  News report from October 2009
• Ceremony Remembers, Celebrates Eve Carson
  News report from March 2009
• ‘Eve’s Mantle has Been Passed to Us’
  An In Memoriam department feature from the Carolina Alumni Review that appeared in the May/June 2008 issue. It is available online to Carolina Alumni members.
• Eve Carson’s biography
• First Eve Marie Carson Scholarship Awarded
  News report from February 2009
• Two Charged In Eve Carson’s Death;  Second Charged Also in Duke Killing
  News report from April 1, 2008
• Videos of “A Celebration of the Life of Eve Carson 1985-2008”

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