Erika Lindemann
Contemporary readers of the documents included in this project may
find it difficult to explain the troubles that plagued the
University during the first twenty-four years of its
existence. Political battles and party spirit certainly were one factor.
North
Carolina was a new state in a new nation, and its influential leaders,
trustees, and faculty could scarcely avoid defining the
University without reference to then-current discussions of
the relationship between state and federal governments, the responsibility of
individual citizens to one another and the state, the
United
States' relationship to other countries, especially
France and
England, and the
role of religion in
American
society. Though the
University was a public institution, it was nevertheless
permeated with religion. Its faculty were
Protestant clergymen. Its students attended prayers
daily, and profanity was not tolerated.
Atheists
and those who held unorthodox religious views sooner or later were dismissed
from the campus.
Students were not immune from these debates.
Battle
claims, "The followers of
Jefferson were charged with seeking to introduce mob-rule
and
French
Red-Republicanism, while they alleged that their opponents were seeking to
change our government into a virtual monarchy.
Republican students thought it highly patriotic to insult
and worry instructors, who, as they thought, were enemies of the rule of the
people, seeking to introduce an aristocracy, if not a king" (
Battle 1:158). In
their relations with faculty, students often felt constrained by regulations
they had no hand in framing. Many came to the
University academically unprepared and with no intention of
graduating. A few years of advanced schooling was sufficient, the value of a
college education consisting in the social contacts formed with like-minded
students from the same social class.
In the early years of the
University, faculty minutes record numerous disciplinary
hearings and the sanctions imposed. Students came before the faculty for
disorderly conduct, stealing money from fellow students, drawing pistols,
"Disorders committed with powder," drunkenness, insulting professors
or townspeople, gaming, hitting a student with a stick, putting a calf in the
chapel (Person
Hall), writing an indecent composition, stealing a beehive, barring
doors to prevent students or faculty members from leaving class or going to
prayers, and overturning outhouses. Penalties ranged from private admonishment
in front of the faculty to public reprimands in front of the student body to
suspension for three to six months to expulsion. Expulsion, the severest
penalty, often resulted in a student's impeachment in his debating society as
well as the president's sending a report of the student's crime and punishment
to every college in the
United
States.
A sincere letter of apology, however, could ameliorate or reverse a
student's punishment.
Atlas
Jones
, for example, was suspended on November 2, 1802, for throwing
stones at a house in the village, threatening its owner, and failing to respond
to repeated admonitions concerning lesser offenses. He was reinstated ten days
later after submitting a letter of apology.
Apart from individual cases of student misconduct, the early history
of the
University was punctuated by several student rebellions. The
week-long student revolt in Spring 1799 against Principal
James
Smiley Gillaspie
left only about seventy students at the college and led
the faculty to tender their resignations. On September 29, 1799,
John London
reported to
Ebenezer
Pettigrew
, then living at home, that "Our President has got a
horsewiping from a boy which he and the Teachers had expelled unjustly and we
have been in great confusion in taking his part for he was liked by all the
boys but every thing is put to rights again only our president relished the
wiping so badly as to retire" (
Pettigrew Family Papers, SHC;
Connor
2:436). In 1805 students rejected a
trustees' ordinance "empowering [student] monitors to
preserve order, limiting freedom of speech, and organizing military discipline
at meals" (
Snider 43). Angry and determined not to submit to the authority
of the
trustees, students created a series of disturbances, and
forty-five of them, a majority, left the
University in what came to be called "the great
secession." Though the ordinance was repealed in December 1805, the
students did not return. The
University graduated only four students in 1806.
Despite these rebellions, the faculty and
trustees were determined to keep order and to assert the
values implied by the curriculum. Quick to forgive misconduct, faculty members
nevertheless did not tolerate threats, persistent refusals to submit to
authority, or "combinations," students acting in concert to disrupt
the institution. They often lamented the students' upbringing and appear
genuinely to have believed themselves superior to their students and their
parents. And when troubles at the
University spilled over into the public, highly partisan
press, the institution's reputation was significantly damaged.
The
trustees especially might be faulted for micro-managing the
institution. Genuinely committed to an educated citizenry, these dedicated
influential leaders nevertheless were not especially skilled at building
coalitions. As vacancies opened on the largely
Federalist
board, the trustees nominated like-minded replacements, even though most of the
state had become
Republican. They created enemies in suing their neighbors
to recover revenues from escheated lands. They saw to every detail of
University life, from ordering bricks to purchasing books.
On reflection, even
Davie
seemed to recognize a better way to regulate student
conduct: "I am now perfectly convinced that the best governed Colleges are
those which have the most respectable Faculties, and the fewest written laws,
and that we have committed a serious error in making an ordinance for
everything, in other words legislating too much. It is now my opinion that
after describing the kind of punishment to be used in the Establishment, and
reserving in all cases the punishment of Expulsion to be confirmed by the
board, the rest should be left to the discretion of the
Faculty" (
Battle 1:212-13).
Although student unrest persisted throughout the antebellum period,
over time faculty gained greater confidence in managing dissent. They enlisted
the cooperation of students, especially the leadership of the debating
societies, to promote order and, when necessary, issued their own accounts of
student rebellions in newspapers and circulars sent to parents to win support
for faculty attempts to maintain discipline.