NEWS

Photo note: See below for a URL of a photo from today’s ceremony.

CHAPEL HILL -- The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill today (March 29) honored one of its own for her work in the present and vowed to examine another woman's role in its past. Dr. Madeline Levine, Kenan professor of Slavic literatures, received the 2004 Cornelia Phillips Spencer Bell Award, which recognizes a woman who has made outstanding recent contributions to the university.

Now in its 11^th year, the Bell award is named for Cornelia Phillips Spencer, who spearheaded the effort to reopen the university after the Civil War. Her motives for doing so will be the subject of campuswide discussions in light of a doctoral student’s research that he says shows her campaign stemmed from racist, pro-slavery views.

Chancellor James Moeser made that announcement before presenting the Bell award to Levine during a ceremony at the George Watts Hill Alumni Center.

He called Levine a "person admired for her wisdom, fair-mindedness, kindness, and warmth as a mentor, leader, advocate and friend."

"This year’s recipient is a distinguished scholar, who somehow, over a 30-year career at Carolina, has managed to do it all -- all at the same time and with grace: to teach well, to win national prizes for her scholarship, and to serve both the university and her profession in every conceivable way," Moeser said.

He also said that the campus Levine came to was quite different than the one it is today. She "belongs to a generation of women who joined the UNC faculty when women on the tenure track were exceedingly scarce and when life as the only woman in a department, or as one of the tiny minority, was not always easy," he said.

Levine's academic interests focus on post-war writers and the literary representation of the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations. She is the prose translator for the 1980 Nobel laureate, Czeslaw Milozs, whom she helped bring to the university as a visiting professor. Levine also has spent 15 years on six different occasions serving as her department's chair or acting chair, a tenure that Moeser said "speaks volumes about who she is and how she is regarded by her peers."

Levine, who earned her doctorate at Harvard University, has been credited with mentoring an entire generation of east European scholars through her participation in the Woodrow Wilson junior faculty seminar in East Europe. She served on the national boards of the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. At Carolina, she has been on numerous search committees as well as the Jewish studies faculty advisory board and panels reviewing the curriculum and its international focus. She is a member of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee and chairs the UNC Press Board of Governors.

The Bell award’s namesake is generally remembered in UNC history for climbing to the top of South Building on March 20, 1875, after hearing the campus would reopen, to ring the building’s bell.

The move to examine Spencer's role in reopening UNC stems from research conducted by Yonni Chapman, a doctoral student in the history department. He wrote Moeser objecting to Spencer being the award’s namesake, requesting a moratorium in giving the award and calling for dialogue within the campus community about the issue. Several dozen faculty, staff and students joined Chapman in making the request.

Chapman says Spencer lobbied to close the university after administrators and faculty were installed by Republican leaders, who at that time tended to be more supportive of the rights of newly emancipated blacks and therefore would have been seen as installing people with similar views. Chapman also says that Spencer pushed for Carolina's 1875 reopening because that happened under Democrats, preserving the pre-Civil War social order at the university.

At the award ceremony, which Chapman attended as an invited guest, Moeser said the question is if Spencer was "simply like any other person of her day" or someone with significant political influence who helped end Reconstruction, setting the stage for the racial divisions that followed in the South. Those questions are worth discussing, he said.

Getting to the bottom of the issues raised in Chapman’s research will be the goal of a campuswide effort organized by Drs. Harry Watson, director of the Center for the Study of the American South, and Bill Ferris, Joel Williamson professor and the center's senior associate director, Moeser said. They have offered the center’s resources to organize an academic and community discussion of university history and Spencer. The library's Southern Historical Collection also has offered to help. The university also hopes to draw upon the insights of Dr. Spencie Love, a relative of Spencer’s, and Chapman, who supports celebrating the contributions of women at Carolina. The university’s current plans involve an academic symposium to anchor a program of discussions.

"If we value knowledge and understanding, we should always be willing to look at documentary evidence of our past, whether we think it may be painful or not," Moeser said. "Carolina is a 200-year-old Southern university. We cherish the times in our past when this university acted as a force for enlightenment and progress. But the shameful institution of human bondage is part of our past, too – along with its lingering effects for many years after the Emancipation Proclamation."

Moeser also has invited suggestions about the campus dialogue as well as for how the university should honor exceptional women in the Carolina community.

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Photo URL: A photo of Levine from today’s event will be posted at http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/event/award/levine.jpg

News Services contact: Mike McFarland, (919) 962-8593, mike_mcfarland@unc.edu