SPEECH TRANSCRIPT

Following are the prepared remarks delivered today (Oct. 12) by University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's annual University Day convocation. Coleman, who received a Distinguished Alumna Award from UNC, discussed how her time in Chapel Hill helped prepare her to become one of America's foremost leaders in American higher education. She also reflected upon last summer's U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Michigan's controversial affirmative action cases.  Coleman titled her remarks "Carolina on My Mind."

Professor Wegner, thank you so much for that introduction. It is an honor to be invited back to campus to address you on University Day, which I remember so well from my years as a student and administrator here.

Chancellor Moeser and President Molly Broad are leading the University to new levels of national prominence, and every year, I am more proud to say that I am a Carolinian.

I am also delighted to see that President Emeritus Friday has joined us today – he was an inspiring leader during some of the most difficult days of the history of this University. As I have grappled with large public issues, I have remembered his forthrightness when the positions he staked out were very controversial.

Today is the 210th anniversary of this great University, and these 210 years have been proud and productive.

It is a delight to return to this beautiful campus, the place my husband and I began our married life and immersed ourselves in the intellectual challenges of graduate education – I in Biochemistry, and he in Political Science.

I titled this address "Carolina on my Mind," and it has several layers of meaning for me. Obviously, it is a play on words from one of my favorite songs, James Taylor’s "Carolina in my Mind." James Taylor’s roots are very deep in this town, and his music is immensely evocative for Carolina graduates of our generation.

But today I am referring to this song because indeed, Carolina has been on my mind in the past year, while I wrestled with important social issues during my first year as president of the University of Michigan. My education here went far beyond science seminars, and my research laboratory grew to include the living laboratory of the streets of Chapel Hill.

For me, there are several episodes from our days as graduate students that profoundly influenced my view of the world, and I want to talk about some of those today.

It is hard to believe that it has been almost forty years since my husband Ken and I traveled the eleven hundred miles from Iowa to North Carolina to start our life together. In August 1965, we drove through the Smokey Mountains, pulling our meager belongings in a trailer attached to our car.

All of our worldly possessions fit in a 4-by-7-foot van, and we did not even have enough to furnish our first apartment on Davie Circle.

We had graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa that spring, married in late summer, and were off to begin the adventure of graduate school in Chapel Hill.

As we entered the state, the first voice we recall hearing on our car radio in North Carolina was unforgettable.

It was a radio announcer from Raleigh, who was railing against the Communist-infested University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – depicted as one of the roots of evil in the nation, if not the primary root.

We looked at each other and asked:

"Was this a terrible mistake to come to North Carolina?"

We learned that the State Legislature had recently passed the Speaker Ban Law, which prohibited any Communist from speaking on state-supported University campuses, no matter what the speaker’s topic, so the ban theoretically could prohibit mathematicians, biologists, and musicians from speaking on campus.

However, Ken and I soon discovered a deep commitment to principle at UNC, and, just as important, remarkable political creativity. In one famous incident, students managed to circumvent the ban on Communist speakers in a very imaginative way.

In February of our first year, our fellow students decided to invite one of the leaders of the American Communist Party, Dr. Herbert Aptheker, to speak in Chapel Hill.

Student leaders knew that Aptheker would be prohibited from speaking on campus. But they planned for that.

Instead on speaking on campus, Dr. Aptheker spoke from a public sidewalk off-campus on Franklin Street. Two thousand students stood across the street, on the campus, on McCorkle Place. And they heard him speak.

The intention of the student leaders was not to convert anyone to Communism, but to assert their constitutional right to hear that speech.

On that day, Ken and I knew that we had, indeed, chosen the right place to study. During those days of the Speaker Ban Law, we also watched with admiration as President Friday took a strong public position against that ban. Thirty-eight years later, we retain our pride in the response of UNC.

And during the past few decades, we have been so reassured to see that the University of North Carolina has maintained its commitment to fundamental principles such as free speech, even in the face of fierce criticism.

All of you are familiar with the most recent manifestations of this proud tradition, the public debates that resulted from the current choices of books for the Carolina Summer Reading Program.

Sometimes, universities find themselves in the position of taking a risky stand on a controversial issue that transcends the campus, and can affect all of society. The University of North Carolina, and the University of Michigan, both have been in this position in the past year.

I was full of admiration last year as you defended the right of incoming UNC students to read and discuss "Approaching The Qur'an." Your stand on free speech and the right to discuss all points of view is a critical element of our society, and I was proud that the University of North Carolina did not waver in its defense of this principle.

Your stand was important to your own university, to all universities, and to our entire country.

I was intrigued by this year’s suggested book, so I read "Nickel and Dimed" over the summer, and I found it quite compelling. I am looking forward to next year’s choice!

These books, and much more significantly, the freedom to debate the choice of books, have a profound impact on us, providing points of view and slices of life that we would otherwise never imagine.

The strength that UNC displayed on these major social issues provided me with insight regarding my biggest presidential challenge to date – defending the use of affirmative action in admissions, all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.

The University of Michigan had been sued about its use of affirmative action long before I arrived as president, but the final phase of the two lawsuits occurred soon after I arrived on the Michigan campus.

A year ago in Ann Arbor, I was a relatively unknown quantity, and our Regents, faculty, staff, students, and alumni all were very concerned about the level of my commitment to diversity. They wondered: would I be willing to fight as hard as my predecessor?

Again, my experiences at Carolina shaped my ability to respond to the challenge of defending a principle that would affect not only Michigan, but all of higher education – and all of our nation.

After receiving my degree in 1969 and serving as a faculty member elsewhere for many years, I returned to UNC in 1990, to take up a position as Associate Provost and Dean of Research.

I returned to a transformed university. In the 1960s, the campus had included few minority students, even fewer minority faculty, and indeed, very few women faculty in the sciences.

In 1990, I found a very different University of North Carolina. Two decades of commitment to diversity had wrought considerable change! UNC now had a highly diverse and vibrant student body, and also had created specific programs to identify and hire talented minority and women faculty.

What struck me immediately upon my return was how much more alive and interesting the Chapel Hill campus had become because of this diversity.

During the early 1990s, Ken and I learned a great deal from this more diverse community. As Associate Provost, I was responsible for administering the Carolina Minority Postdoctoral Program – which was intended to assist young scholars in launching faculty careers either at UNC or elsewhere.

One Monday each month, we hosted a meeting of the Fellows in our living room. Nominally, the purpose of the meeting was to share our academic experiences with these junior minority scholars and to help them with career planning.

In fact, we learned a great deal from those young scholars, because they had experienced situations we had never faced. It was the best kind of educational experience, when the supposed teacher becomes the student. We all taught each other the value of the life of the mind – but our conversations were enhanced by all the real-life experiences that we related.

My memory of the profound impact of affirmative action at Chapel Hill in the 1990s sustained me through this past year at Michigan, and I frequently talked about my Carolina experience in public.

Some days it is hard for me to imagine that just a year ago, we still did not know whether the Supreme Court would hear the Michigan cases.

But six months ago, on the first day of April, the Supreme Court heard the oral arguments in our cases.

That was an extraordinary day. Students from around the country, including North Carolina, camped out the night before the oral arguments, hoping to get one of very few tickets available. The temperature was in the ‘30s, so it was an adventure to camp out on the steps of the Court.

The students who did gain entry saw a remarkable event. Even seasoned Court watchers agreed that the level of dialogue and confrontation among the justices was unusual.

When we emerged from the Court, to our delight, thousands of supporters were waiting and cheering on the street in front of the steps of the Court.

Among those thousands, I saw students from Chapel Hill, holding up a sign that said.

"UNC-CH: be Affirmative, take Action"!

We actually managed to get cited for unseemly conduct, because our own students started to sing the Michigan fight song, and to my amazement, the Michigan administrators, and our Regents, gathered to sing along with them – unfortunately, the Court staff almost immediately instructed us that such outbursts were inappropriate, and encouraged us to move along.

As we left the steps of the Court, we took time to read the four words inscribed on the front of the building: "Equal justice under law."

Those are four simple words, but they express a profound truth that we were determined to sustain.

Our next challenge was waiting. During the next few months we alternately enjoyed or endured over 200 substantive articles and essays about the cases.

During this period, George Will wrote a column with a title that provided a vivid picture of the significance of these cases. The title of his essay was: "High Noon for Diversity."^[i] It was a "high noon" that lasted for over three months.

The biggest unknown factor (aside from the decisions themselves) was the precise date on which the decisions would be announced. All we knew was that we probably could expect a decision in June.

Sometimes, fate provides us with great opportunities, and I enjoyed a wonderful coincidence of timing regarding the day the decisions were announced.

Several months earlier, I had agreed to present a keynote address on June 23^rd to a bioengineering symposium at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, not far from the Supreme Court.

As the date for my address at the NIH approached, we learned it was a day that we might get the decisions. The NIH graciously agreed to move my speech earlier in the morning, so that I could be at the Court by 10 A.M., when that day’s decisions would be announced. So, I made plans to get a ride to the Supreme Court after my speech, "just in case."

Although I delivered the bioengineering presentation in record time, I found myself trapped in transit in a construction zone outside the NIH, so I did not arrive at the Supreme Court in time to be admitted to the courtroom.

I sat in the cafeteria of the Court while a member of my staff tried to find out what was happening upstairs. I found myself explaining to the sociable cafeteria employees that this could be a very important day – and then realized that of course, every decision day is important at the Court.

But this was going to be our day. I finally learned, standing in the cafeteria, that the Court had supported the process that allowed us to pursue affirmative action in admissions.

As I stepped outside the Court to face the media, we began a new phase of the history of commitment to equality at the University of Michigan, and our nation began the next phase in its history of civil rights.

These decisions of the Supreme Court have a value for universities that goes far beyond the affirmation of our right to use race as one of many factors in admissions.

Justice O’Connor also wrote about the right and the responsibility of universities to make their own decisions, because universities have the expertise to make informed decisions about their policies.

I think this affirmation of the authority of universities is going to be critically important as we face new challenges from Congress and others about the value of universities to our nation.

You probably have noticed that there have been a number of recent articles and essays at the national level about the costs of higher education. By and large, many of the attacks on the academy are not well grounded in the realities of higher education.

The discussion of "cost" often does not take into account the reductions that virtually every public college and university has faced in regard to state appropriations.

There is one aspect of this discussion of "cost" that seems to elude our critics. And that aspect is the benefit acquired as a result of obtaining any degree, especially a degree from a distinguished institution such as this one. Because so many of the benefits of higher education are intangible, they are discounted – but that does not make them any less real.

Here is the real question we should be discussing: What is the cost of NOT having high-quality public universities?

My answer is that we simply cannot afford to abandon our commitment to providing broad access to excellent public universities. The University of Michigan, and peers from the early nineteenth century, such as the University of Virginia, and the University of North Carolina, were founded the premise that a well-educated citizenry should be an integral part of our democracy. Is it democratic to put the adulteration of our universities on a legislative agenda?

What will we lose if our public universities become second-rate institutions, no longer on a par with the best private universities?

We begin to lose the scale of opportunity we can provide to so many aspiring students. We begin to move toward a society with a class structure that we have dedicated so many resources to eliminating over the centuries.

But all of us are being put on the defensive by the current dialogue at the national level about "costs" – and we must find a way to engage in this dialogue in a manner that will be productive not just to universities, but to the future of our country.

If our country wants to maintain its commitment to providing broad access to high-quality public education – a commitment that has made this country strong – we all must work together to find a way to realize that commitment.

This means that the burden will not fall disproportionately on students, that universities will not make cuts that constantly erode the quality of education, and that the public work with us to determine the best way to deal with these complex challenges. The answers will come from within the academy, and outside the academy.

And there is no question that universities providing broad access will continue to be a core element in the future of our country.

The majority opinion of the Supreme Court in our Law School case states this eloquently, linking the concept of diversity and democracy.

Justice O’Connor wrote:

"Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civic life of our Nation is essential if the dream of one Nation, indivisible, is to be realized."

That is a principle we are determined to uphold as we move forward.

I now have spoken about the cases to a number of very different audiences. But one that was most meaningful to me was a presentation and dialogue at a leading African-American church in Ann Arbor, the Second Baptist Church.

I had always said that whatever the outcome of the cases, we would still have much work to do – and that evening at Second Baptist Church was a vivid illustration of that reality. There were life-long residents of Ann Arbor who said: "You have won the cases, but I’m yet to be convinced that the University of Michigan cares about people of color".

Our institution does care, but we have to keep reminding ourselves that we still have so much work to do and so many miles to go on these issues.

These cases have brought me great joy, but they have also underscored some deep regrets that I have for our society at large.

I regret that our colleges and universities are so often the first place that students of different races and ethnic backgrounds begin truly to encounter each other.

And I regret that our K-12 educational system prepares too few minority students for success in higher education.

These regrets cannot be overcome by the University of Michigan alone. We need the help of the University of North Carolina, of all universities, of the K-12 system, of public officials, and of the public at large to solve these problems.

In the one of our Supreme Court decisions, Justice O’Connor expressed the hope that in 25 years, affirmative action would no longer be necessary.

This is a line in the sands of time, and it will take all of our concerted effort to make her hope come true.

I want to remind you of those words on the edifice of the Supreme Court: "Equal justice under law."

We have not yet achieved equal justice, but we are working to make it happen. It will take a remarkable effort from many quarters.

I know that as you go forward into year two hundred and eleven, you will remember the responsibility this university has to the world beyond this campus – and I will see you out there!

Thank you, and Happy Birthday!

____

[1][i] George F. Will, “High Noon for Diversity,” Newsweek, May 26, 2003, p. 76.

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Contact: Mike McFarland, (919)962-8593