On Friday, we unveiled the portrait of Chancellor James Moeser that will hang in the lobby of Wilson Library along with portraits of his eight predecessors. The portrait is a wonderful likeness of Chancellor Moeser and the spectacular Carolina blue robe that he, Michael Hooker, Paul Hardin, Bill McCoy and I have worn since it was designed in for our bicentennial in 1993.
James gives his remarks at the unveiling of his portrait in this photo by Will Owens.
Roger Perry and I talked about James’ legacy on this campus, which extends to its every corner. People always compliment me on the way the campus looks, and James and the Board of Trustees deserve most of the credit for the way that the implemented the construction program that came from the Higher Education Bond program.
James gave a great talk on Friday about the importance of a liberal arts university. Here are his remarks:
Chancellor Thorp, Friends and Guests,
This is a special moment for Susan and for me, and we deeply appreciate that so many of our friends and colleagues could be here this afternoon to share this event with us. As I look out over this crowd,
I am ever so conscious of the fact that everyone in this room is part of the Carolina story of the first decade of the 21st Century.
Roger, thank you so much for your kind words. Your leadership of the Board of Trustees is one of the high points of that story. Holden, your rapid rise through the ranks is another part of that story. I appreciate that you brought Susan up to the podium to share in this moment, because she was as thrilled as I was when we first came to UNC in the late summer of 2000. She has walked with me every step of the way.
When this portrait is hung in Wilson Library, it will join a great procession of my predecessors – Robert House, William Aycock,
Paul Sharp, Carlyle Sitterson, Ferebee Taylor, Chris Fordham, Paul Hardin, and Michael Hooker. I am so pleased that Paul and Barbara Hardin could be present today.
I am pleased that John Howard Sanden, the portrait artist, painted me in front of Daniel Chester French’s Spirit of Life sculpture, which stands at the center inside the entrance to Wilson Library, just to the right of the row of portraits. He chose this setting, he said, in order to depict my love of music, my first love and first professional calling, and this university’s commitment to the arts and humanities.
I like to think of this sculpture as representing the spirit of Carolina, a university with a proud, if imperfect history, rising from the same springs as the American Revolution; defending Constitutional liberties; leading the South into the modern age; becoming one of the great research universities of the world in the late 20th century with the audacious vision of being America’s leading university–all this while maintaining the essential humility and grace of its more modest creation by the people of a state whose motto is esse quam videre – to be rather than to seem. This is a proudly public university – the university of the people as coined by Charles Kuralt, yet a university with such a devoutly spiritual core that Gerrard Hall, the 1822 chapel right next door, has the words of Micah inscribed on it: “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.”
Thus, it was innate to our culture for the Carolina Covenant, which led the way for almost a hundred other institutions to create programs that guarantee a debt-free education to low income students, to spring forth here. It was a innate to our culture for Carolina to make a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion, to focus on the critical social issues of the times, racism, poverty, sexual orientation and identity. It was innate to our culture that Carolina was the first major institution to end binding early decision admissions, recognizing that students from the least affluent backgrounds were disadvantaged by this practice. Many followed us at the time, and sadly, many have also quietly reverted to their old practices while few were watching. It was innate to our culture that in the wake of Nine-Eleven, we should ask our students to read a book about the Q’uran, and it was equally innate that we should defend that choice against all attacks, just as Bill Aycock and Bill Friday had defended free speech against the Speaker Ban Law.
I appreciate that we are in my favorite space on this campus – Memorial Hall, which symbolizes this university’s great commitment to the arts, recognizing that a truly great university must have excellence in science and medicine, but also in the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts. I think this is the secret to Carolina’s greatness—that with all our investments and our success with big science, including a promising new investment in applied science, we continue to value and support the arts and humanities. This is why the Mellon Foundation, which just awarded $750,000 to Carolina Performing Arts for a signature celebration of the 100th anniversary of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, told us that UNC is the one public university that still celebrates the humanities.
When Susan and I were in South Carolina, we had the privilege of getting to know the late great poet, James Dickey. We invited Dickey to give the commencement address one year at South Carolina, and I still have that speech in my library, it was so memorable. In it he recounted the story of the famous debate in the Oxford Union over a century and a half ago between Thomas Henry Huxley, the biologist and public defender of Darwin and Matthew Arnold, the poet and Professor of Poetry at Oxford. These are Dickey’s words:
“Huxley contended that the future of education lay in confining the curriculum to technological subjects. These exclusively were to be taught, for the wave of the future was to be science, and education should recognize this and mold people to take their places within a culture not only dominated by science but created by it. . . . His opponent in the debate, Matthew Arnold, took the opposite view: the purpose of education, he said, is not to condition people to interrelate with machines . . . but to aid the student in becoming a certain kind of person, an individual with his own needs and potentialities, perhaps including scientific preoccupations but not limited to them.” Dickey continued, “it seems to me that Huxley was partially right, but that Arnold was entirely right. Arnold believed, with the poet John Keats, that life is a vale of soul making. He thought that life was given to him to find the right use of it, that it was a kind of continuous magical confrontation . . . derived from intuition, courage, and the accumulation of experience. It was not a formula of any kind, not a piece of rationality, but rather a way of being and of acting.” i
That is as good a description of a liberal arts education as you will ever find. It describes this place – a vale of soul making.
So when you look at this portrait, do not fail to see Daniel Chester French’s Spirit of Life in the background. That is the spirit of this place, this university that we love, this Carolina.
i Quoted in James Dickey, “The Weather of the Valley: Reflections on the Soul and Its Making, an Address,” [commencement speech at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C., typescript, no date], pp. 7-8, James Moeser’s personal collection.
