Chancellor of Change - The Legacy of J. Carlyle Sitterson `31
by F. Weston Fenhagen `46 and Alice A. Joyce `71
Lyle Sitterson '31 knew the inside of South Building quite well, of course, but he never was sure what he'd find outside of it. In the tumultuous late 1960s, "administration building" was the proper term for the place where scholastic executives ran the school; it was a common term for the place students went to tell those administrators what they didn't like.
On one occasion when Sitterson ventured downstairs to meet with 300 angry students, a female student in the back of the crowd interrupted his response to a male student's question with one of her own.
"Young lady, if you'd just be patient," Sitterson said.
"Don't you dare call me a lady," she replied. "I'm a woman."
"Yes, I know you are," the chancellor replied. "But as I'm certain that this young man is a gentleman, I'm certain you are a lady."
"That drew a few sympathetic snickers," Sitterson recalled some time later, "and was one of the few times I was alert enough to take advantage of the situation."
Times were changing at dizzying speed. Sitterson's modesty aside, this was one of many times between 1966 and 1972 that the poise and grace of this chancellor--and gentleman--removed the fuse from a volatile situation.
The University's trustees later would point out: "He effectively defused situations that could have literally blown this campus apart. Probably no chancellor faced as many potentially paralyzing situations as did Lyle Sitterson. Thankfully for all of us, he prevailed."
Striking in '68
In 1968 a rising awareness of social equality found a focus in the plight of black University workers, who were told they were underpaid. Urged by the Black Student Movement to strike, 90 percent of the employees didn't show up for work, closing down all but one campus cafeteria. Meanwhile, strike supporters deliberately slowed service in Lenoir Dining Hall. Fights broke out.
Gov. Robert Scott called in the N.C. Highway Patrol to keep Lenoir open and, more ominously, he put members of the National Guard on standby in Durham.
"The University cafeteria staff had been repeatedly employing workers as temporary workers, depriving them of state benefits, in an effort to keep the cafeteria economically sound," recalled Douglass Hunt '46, who recently retired as adviser to the chancellor for governmental affairs. "So the students quit patronizing the cafeteria. The result was that when this ploy was discovered, it was also discovered that most of the workers were black, and the whole matter took on a racial aspect."
Throughout the campus could be heard, "Power to the workers! Black, black power to the African workers," a chant raised by striking workers and sympathetic students alike. Tempers flared. The uproar of those times--in the midst of the civil rights era, the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, and the ascent of the Vietnam anti-war movement--contributed to a disturbing atmosphere on campus.
No sooner had passions cooled from the cafeteria strike turmoil than the pot almost boiled over again. Students at Kent State were shot and killed as they protested the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and President Nixon's plan to expand the draft by 150,000 Americans. At Carolina, students by the hundreds marched, and banner headlines in The Daily Tar Heel urged students to join a general strike to shut down the institution as part of the protest.
On the heels of the cafeteria strike, it was almost too much for some North Carolinians to bear, Hunt recalled, and many began to demand that "these obstreperous students be reined in." The task fell to Sitterson "to guide this University into hearing the voices of people who opposed the Vietnam War, to allow discussion of the issues of the day on this campus in a way that brought us through a very tough national crisis on this campus without the kinds of rage and riots that occurred on other campuses."
Sitterson told the larger community: "The University will vigorously oppose any efforts to compromise and inhibit freedom outside and inside the institution." But, he said, "everyone on this campus has a responsibility to recognize the rights of others."
An Era of Growth
The feverish embodiment of the new social consciousness casts a shadow over other highlights of the Sitterson era. These were years of explosive growth in enrollment and building, and expansion of the curriculum.
In Sitterson's six short years enrollment soared from 13,300 to more than 19,000. The faculty increased from 1,149 to 1,660, with 25 new William Rand Kenan Jr. professorships. The Morehead Scholarship Program expanded and the Johnston Scholarships began. Research and contract grants grew 150 percent to $45 million. The number of departments rated "good" or "distinguished and strong" rose from 15 to 24. New academic programs sprang up in population studies, reproductive biology, environmental research and medical care. The number of entering black undergraduates increased tenfold. The number of women students almost doubled.
In the greatest spurt of physical growth in its history until that time, the University added the Robert B. House Undergraduate Library, the Frank Porter Graham Student Union, a new law school building, the Student Stores building, the Health Sciences Library, the Carrington Nursing School, the 10-story Kenan chemistry lab building, Davie Hall, Greenlaw Hall, Morrison Dorm, Hinton James Dorm, and numerous additions to the School of Medicine and UNC Hospitals.
A Place in the Classroom
Joseph Carlyle Sitterson, son of the Kinston, N.C., postmaster, came to Chapel Hill as a freshman in the fall of 1927. In 1930 he won a fellowship from the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta for study in the social sciences. In 1931, '32 and '37 he earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees, all at Chapel Hill. By the mid-1930s he was a full-time history professor, and in 1954 he won the University Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.
Along the way Sitterson became nationally known as a scholar of American history, the author of The Secession Movement in North Carolina and of a major history of the sugar cane industry in the South.
In 1955 Sitterson began a 17-year stint in administration as dean of the General College, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, vice chancellor and eventually chancellor. During that time he was absent from the classroom only one year, so abiding was his love of teaching.
The helmsman who took over in 1966 would need a steady hand and an open mind. Sitterson understood the tenor of the times. His speech at his installation ceremony reads today as prescient:
"The modern American university--and The University of North Carolina is no exception--is part and parcel of the world about it. Its functions are so inseparably intertwined with society that it is sometimes difficult to know precisely where the campus ends and the remainder of the state begins."
UNC students, he said, "have a more active interest in social and political issues. Part of this interest, unquestionably, stems from the civil rights movements of the last decade and the impact of the Vietnam War. But, beneath it all, and for this we should all be grateful, there is that inclination of youth to detest hypocrisy wherever it exists.
"American college students, idealists in many instances, are shocked at the difference between human aspiration and human behavior as they observe it. Understandably they desire change for the better, and, as has always been true of youth, they are impatient to get on with the job of setting things right.
"The years ahead will, assuredly, be years of change. The University must be attuned to the opportunities to explore new frontiers of knowledge. As it enters entirely new fields, it must necessarily place more emphasis upon one school or department than another. But this is no more than an inevitable consequence of change."
Setting Standards
Sitterson is given credit for breaking down many long-standing institutional barriers at Chapel Hill. He involved students at high levels of decision-making and opened faculty meetings previously closed to students and the public. He was instrumental in reorganizing many of the University's administrative systems, such as the Graduate School, the personnel function, the health sciences division, the office of institutional research, the residence college system and the office of student affairs.
He retired from active faculty work in 1981. When he learned that he was to receive the 1995 North Caroliniana Society Award, he requested that a favorite former student, past GAA President and N.C. Supreme Court Justice Willis P. Whichard '62, write and deliver the citation, to be awarded the evening of May 19, 1995. Earlier that day, Sitterson died. His wife, Nancy, asked that the event go on as planned, as a celebration of the life of the University's beloved former chancellor and professor.
Top Photo: Sitterson enjoys his view of the Old Well outside his South Building office shortly after becoming chancellor in 1966. (Photo: GAA Archives)
Bottom Photo: Sitterson stands in front of Joseph Carlyle Sitterson Hall on May 1, 1986, after the announcement was made that the building--then still under construction--would be renamed in his honor. Photo: Bob Donnan
Excerpted from an article by F. Weston Fenhagen `46, former editor of Alumni Publications, and Alice A. Joyce `71, former contributing editor of Alumni Publications. The full article appears in the March/April 1996 issue of the Carolina Alumni Review. This excerpt is reproduced here with permission from the General Alumni Association.