Dr. Frank

One sunny morning, at a North Carolina crossroads marked by a ruined chapel on a hill, a traveler climbed wearily from his horse. There, in the shade of a big poplar tree, William Richardson Davie, the future governor of the state, took a long, cool draught from the jug beside him, and gazed about. "Here," he said to himself, "we will put our new university."

Last week, more than 150 years later, the ivy-covered Davie Poplar still stood on the campus at Chapel Hill as a clutch of topflight U.S. educators (among them 14 college presidents, including Harvard's James Bryant Conant) gathered to hold the annual meeting of the Association of American Universities and to help the University of North Carolina celebrate its 150th birthday. (North Carolina's party had been in progress since 1939: celebrating first the 150th anniversary of its charter grant, then of its cornerstone laying, etc.) Proud old University of Georgia says it got its charter first, but North Carolina has an undisputed claim to the event it celebrates this week: it was the first U.S. state university to open its doors.

Except for the five years it was closed by carpetbaggers, North Carolina has been a leading U.S. school, is now generally regarded as the outstanding state university in the South. The fact that its prestige is at its highest today is largely the result of one man: its tiny (5 ft. 5 in.), jut-jawed, 59-year-old eleventh president, Frank Porter Graham.

Reformer. Dr. Frank, as his students call him, inherited from his hardy Scottish ancestors a scrappy spirit, a canny business head, and a set of literal Presbyterian morals. A bachelor until he was 45, Dr. Frank neither smokes nor drinks. As an undergraduate at Chapel Hill he was a rugged little St. George, who led pious forays against the roughnecks whose doxies plied their trade in Chapel Hill graveyard. He was nonetheless twice elected president of his class. In 1917, after taking an M.A. at Columbia, Frank Graham became one of the runtiest marines on record.

He returned to Chapel Hill in 1921, as a full professor of history. The university was down-at-heel; young Graham was assigned to beg money. Traveling by bus and train, he went into every one of North Carolina's 100 counties, returned with $5,500,000 to present to his boss, President Harry Chase (now chancellor of N.Y.U.). The opinions he formed on that trip, on what his state needed, have made him a hair shirt to reactionary Tar Heel industrialists ever since. Many of the state's progressive labor laws were incubated by him.

In 1930 the university's 100-man board of trustees elected him president, but Frank Graham, happy in his professorship, said no. How he changed his mind is a story that is as unworldly as most stories about Graham: he met a marine buddy on the street who challenged him into accepting by appealing to the old Corps tie: "Frank, marines don't run away from tough going."

During the 1936 campaign, Negro James W. Ford, Communist candidate for vice president, visited Durham, ate dinner in a restaurant with English Professor Franklin Carl Erickson. A committee of angry trustees descended on Graham, demanded that he fire Erickson. He answered: "If Professor Erickson has to go on a charge of eating with another human being, then I will have to go first."

Greater University. Largely because he has fought so ardently for his conception of freedom, Frank Graham has attracted to Chapel Hill one of the sprightliest, ablest faculties in the U.S., men of the caliber of Sociologist Howard Odum, Mathematician and Biographer Archibald Henderson, Playwright Paul Green. And Dr. Frank has nourished such educational plants as Albert Coates's Institute of Government (which each year trains scores of North Carolina sheriffs, tax collectors, and small fry officials); the Playmakers and the Department of Dramatic Art; a drama school rivaling Yale's and Carnegie Tech's; an outstanding university press; and Howard Odum's famed Institute for Research in Social Science. Not all his battles have been victories, A conspicuous defeat: his fight to make U.S. college football a simon-pure amateur game.

The university, which now has an endowment of about $4,000,000 and annual $1,000,000 state appropriation, has an even wealthier neighbor down the street: Duke. It is characteristic of Frank Graham that he has worked hard at sharing facilities and instruction with his rival. During the war he was criticized for spending too much time away from the campus as a member of the War Labor Board. When trustees complained, the student paper polled the campus, reported 95% of the students and faculty behind Dr. Frank.

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