A message from the chancellor: Randall Kenan

Dear Carolina Community,

At its best, Carolina can create moments of almost magical connection. I hear stories like that all the time from our students — about a late-night conversation that cemented a friendship, shifted their thinking, or changed the direction of their lives. You learn that sharing your deepest thoughts — your questions, longings, ideas and anxieties — and listening to others can be the path to lifelong friendship and a sense of belonging. Carolina is made for those moments.

Nobody knew that better than Randall Kenan, the beloved creative writing professor and award-winning author who passed away in 2020.

“I met Richard Elias Wimberly III the first day I arrived at Chapel Hill as a freshman,” Kenan writes in Black Folk Could Fly, a collection of essays published last week. “I remember one night in particular, one which seems too good to be true, though it is true nonetheless. Richard and I had started talking after studying late; somewhere around ten or eleven, we were in the hall, on the landing, talking. At one point, we looked up, and the sun was peeking up. Neither of us was tired. We talked about many things that night: personhood, faith, history, economics, Hegel, Martin Luther King, sex, death, manifest destiny.”

Those magical conversations continued over a lifetime for Kenan, who went from being a wide-eyed freshman from Duplin County to a widely admired teacher, mentor and friend to generations of students and scholars at Carolina. I joined a celebration of Kenan’s life and work at Hill Hall on Sunday, an event to mark the publication of his brilliant essay collection and allow an auditorium full of admirers to share their memories of a singular voice in American letters.

Flanked by the inspirational Voices of Praise Gospel Choir, people spoke about Kenan’s warmth and easy smile, about a roving curiosity that ranged from comic books to historical archives, about his love of Southern food and folkways, and above all about his capacity to listen and encourage. I came away with the impression of a man who put love, friendship and a passion for teaching at the center of his life, a man we lost long before his time.

“I remember most fondly how fervently Richard Wimberly applied his mind to the conundrum of being,” Kenan wrote in that essay about his early years at Carolina and his search for identity. “The issue of being Black was no singular, isolatable question for him. He saw it always within the context of faith, of humanity…. He stubbornly examined each and every particle of his life; he questioned it, not on the basis of what he was supposed to think about it, but on the basis of what he actually thought of it.”

That was equally true of Kenan himself. Applying his mind to the conundrum of being, and helping so many others — students, readers, friends, and colleagues — do the same. Let’s continue learning from his writings to create more magical moments of connection at Carolina.

Kevin M. Guskiewicz
Chancellor