UNC professor emeritus John L. Sanders (not to be confused with UNC’s nemesis Jon Sanders) wrote in the News & Observer last weekend (“A 19th century lesson in harming UNC”) that the Pope Center’s recommendation of a UNC Board of Governors appointed by the NC governor and answerable to him has already been tried, with gratifyingly disastrous results:

Gov. William W. Holden and his Board of Trustees took control of the university in mid-1868 and dismissed President David L. Swain and all of the faculty. It installed in their places a president and faculty stronger in their political loyalty to the governor than in their fitness to staff a university. Under the misleadership of the new Board of Trustees and of its president and faculty, the fortunes of the university collapsed and the board closed the university early in 1871 for lack of public support.

But another professor at UNC, James Leloudis, has described the collapse as the result of a liberalization effort:

This move was designed to wrest control of the campus from its ex-Confederate alumni and, in the words of Governor Holden, to broaden and democratize the University?to remake it, he declared, as a ?people?s university,? open to all and no longer reserved ?for the few.? The executive committee of the University?s new Board of Trustees declared their support for the coeducation of men and women and endorsed plans for establishing in Raleigh a college for the freedmen, which was to be operated as a branch of the University. ?Education,? Governor Holden proclaimed, ?knows no color or condition of mankind.? What might have come of such commitments remains an open question. The trustees? educational experiment came under fierce attack as soon as it was announced, and within two years collapsed completely.

There were a few other things going on in North Carolina at the time — for example, the Federal imposition of military government as well as societal changes following a war which killed 18% of the South’s population and made many potential students into breadwinners when fathers didn’t return.

Long and short of it is, this isn’t 1868.?