Four questions with University Day speaker Stephen Farmer

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is turning 223.

On Oct. 11, Carolina will be honoring its founding with the annual University Day celebration. (While the University’s official birthday falls on Oct. 12, this year’s celebration was moved to Oct. 11 in observance of Yom Kippur and also to host the inauguration ceremony of UNC System President Margaret Spellings on Oct. 13.)

University Day marks the 1793 laying of the cornerstone of Old East, the nation’s first state university building, and the beginning of public higher education in the United States.

Carolina will host the celebration on Oct. 11 at 11 a.m. in Memorial Hall. Stephen Farmer, vice provost for enrollment and undergraduate admissions, will serve as the event’s keynote speaker.

Ahead of the celebration, we sat down with Farmer to talk about University Day and the importance of looking not just in the past, but also into the future.

Why is University Day important to you?

I think the University was a brilliant idea. It was an idea about how to help the people of our state thrive both as individuals and as something more than that. When you think about it, it was a pretty bold thing to think that you could start a university, first of all in North Carolina, second of all in this particular place in North Carolina, which wasn’t a city or a town or even much of a village—really just a little crossroads. It took a lot of guts to say “Sure, let’s create a university and let’s put it here.”

The leaders of the state did that because they knew if this state was going to thrive and flourish it would need what a public university could provide. I just think we take that idea for granted now, that the people should provide for one another in this way, but it was a brilliant idea and a bold one.

The other thing that University Day means to me: I think it’s really hard not to remember that as brilliant and bold as the idea was, the great people who founded this place were limited in their vision. They couldn’t imagine how our notion of who the people were would expand and change over time.

One of the reasons that University Day means something to me is because it reminds me of the ways the University has moved beyond its birth to become something more and really something better than its founders imagined.

What is the message you hope to send during your University Day speech?

I hope to say something that reminds people why this place is worth our time and our hearts. I want to talk a little about how far we’ve come and about how far we need to go. And also about the great people we have around us who remind us every day who we are, and what we can do together.

Why is it important to not just look back on the history of the University during this celebration, but also look ahead?

Honoring our birth, honoring the vision of people who sacrificed to make it possible for us to be here, is really important – just as it’s important to look back with respect and gratitude.

At the same time, the way to respect the people who founded this place and the way to express our gratitude to them is to commit ourselves to keep moving. If our founders had been limited out of respect or gratitude to doing only what had been done before, then they wouldn’t have placed a public university at the foot of the Davie Poplar. We’d be something else now, or we wouldn’t be here at all. So I think we honor those who came before us by reminding ourselves that we have work to do and committing ourselves to build on the foundation that they gave us, so that 223 years from now, if anybody ever looks back on us, they’ll say with gratitude and respect that we did what we could and inspired them to do more in turn.

You are an advocate for making a college education more accessible and affordable for everybody, and as the nation’s first public university, Carolina has famously been called “the University of the people.” Do you think 223 years since its founding we are meeting the goals set by the University’s founders?

That’s a compelling idea that the University is here for the people, that it exists for the people, for the many, not the few. I think we’re truer to the mission today than we were at our birth. The great people who founded this place were people of their time, and there were things that we can see now that they could not see. We have a broader vision now of who our people are and who our people must be.

That’s not to take anything away from those who came before us. It’s just to say, we’ve had the benefit now of time to reflect and time to learn and we know now something that they could not know. We’re the better for it.

What we know about who we are and who we should be didn’t come easy. People sacrificed, they gave their lives to help us become truer to the ideals that are inscribed in our founding. It wasn’t easy for the first woman to come to the University, it wasn’t easy for the first American Indian, it wasn’t easy for the first black students to come to UNC. But they did it, and by doing it they led us to become truer to who we always were from the beginning.

That notion of time passing and people loving the University enough to do the hard work to help us be true to who we are, that’s very inspiring to me. It’s not as though the founders rolled up here under the Davie Polar and laid the cornerstone of Old East and the rest of it was a walk in the park on a Sunday afternoon. People labored, people worked and people sacrificed — and sometimes at great cost to themselves— to help us become a truer version of who we were from the beginning.