Changes in North Carolina

Dr. A.F. Greaves-Walker, an NC State College Professor in Ceramic Engineering, wrote this letter to Dr. Frank Graham.  Greaves-Walker expresses his desire that the school's athletic coaches should be gentlemen who elevate and educate their players culturally.

After World War I North Carolina became known as “one of the South’s leading centers of intellectual and cultural life,” and North Carolina State College contributed to this reputation with its devotion to developing students’ intellect and creating productive, upstanding citizens.  In the years after the Civil War, southern colleges—including NC State College—expanded curricula to enable students to keep pace with the region’s increasingly competitive industrialized economy.  Textile mills, furniture plants, and tobacco processing dominated North Carolina’s burgeoning industrial economy at the turn of the twentieth-century, and these industries were increasingly mechanized and professionalized, and began to make use of college-educated management.  During the 1920s state universities saw increased enrollment as their programs expanded into fields such as the social sciences, although in the 1930s only 12 percent of Americans attended college.  Through their education, students at North Carolina’s colleges “sought to shape their character to meet the challenges they expected to confront” in the new, highly-competitive marketplace.

North Carolina students expected their college and others to build “America’s future leaders” and train useful citizenry, expanding the purpose of higher education past intellectual training.  In addition to technical knowledge, in these early decades, NC State College strove to provide students “the education of a ‘gentleman’ and a Christian,” reinforcing the importance of Christian morality and socially-acceptable manners and behavior.  NC State College Professor A.F. Greaves-Walker wrote in 1936 that “a teacher’s duty was not only to teach assigned subjects, but to make ‘straight shooting’, clean living, upright men out of the students,” and many professors and students at State College in the 1930s likewise felt that colleges existed to serve this dual educational purpose.  Thus education at this time was not solely intellectual, but encompassed the mind, body, and soul.