Carolina Alumni Review - July/August 2007

Only two buildings are named for students based solely on their status as students. One is Hinton James. The other is Bynum Hall, originally Bynum Gymnasium. William Preston Bynum Jr. (class of 1894) was a football player who died at the end of his sophomore year of typhoid fever. His grandfather, Judge William Preston Bynum, wrote to the University that the dean of the faculty had told him young William was “an exceptionally brilliant student of fine manly qualities and lovely character.” Bynum funded the entire $25,000 cost of the building in his grandson’s honor.

The FedEx Global Education Center opened in the spring and should get a sign in the fall.

It’s an incredible time to be a public health scholar at UNC, too. And it’s an even better-than-usual time to be a Morehead Scholar. The University joined America’s higher education fundraising elite last winter when a Texas couple, whose primary connection to Carolina was having spent summers around UNC alumni in the North Carolina mountains, gave $100 million and added the name of the Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation to that of John Motley Morehead III (class of 1891). The Morehead-Cain Foundation will be able to accommodate more scholars and do more for them.

Then, Dennis and Joan Gillings gave $50 million to make the School of Public Health only the second UNC “name” professional school (after the Kenan-Flagler Business School). Dennis Gillings was successful in the pharmaceutical services industry after having taught in the school for 17 years.

The Gillings gift put the $2 billion Carolina First capital campaign over its goal. Independent of that, it also was a milestone in a 15-year period in which UNC attached the names of individuals, graduating classes, groups of friends and companies to more than 650 buildings, labs, plazas and porticos, classrooms and closets.

else had to be built, and bought, and it never was easy. The state stooped to a lottery to raise money for South Building, which sat half finished for years.

The state built Old East, but the second building came out of Thomas Person’s purse — $2,836, a thousand of it in silver dollars. Charles Gerrard’s estate came to the rescue in the last years of the 18th century after a political sea change in the N.C. General Assembly took away the University’s other funding. Their names are immortalized.

The big building campaigns of the first half of the 20th century are commemorated mostly in the names of teachers, legislators, military leaders and other public servants, and some industrialists. Private money sufficient to earn naming rights figured in just 21 of the roughly 125 buildings constructed on campus through 1980.

Just fewer than half of those built since then are graced with donors’ names.

Now, when the University embarks on a $200 million science complex or an $18.6 million renovation of Memorial Hall, it is seeking amenities beyond what the state would provide. The approximately $500 million that came to Chapel Hill from the 2000 bond referendum went a long way, but still, private money is growing in importance. For UNC’s full participation in the athletics facilities “arms race,” donors are indispensable because the state contributes almost nothing.

Four African-Americans

The names of four African-Americans are on UNC buildings. Blyden and Roberta Jackson helped integrate the faculty, he as the first tenured black professor (English), she as a professor of education. Their names are on the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, formerly Navy Hall and later the Monogram Club. In February, a four-year-old dorm previously known as Hinton James North was named for George Moses Horton, the Chatham County slave poet who spent time on campus. Having worked tirelessly for the establishment of a freestanding black cultural center before her death in 1991, Sonja Haynes Stone did not live to see her name grace the Center for Black Culture and History, in honor of the associate professor and director of the African and Afro-American studies curriculum from 1974 to 1979. John Turner was dean of the School of Social Work during the time its new building was being planned and funds raised, and his name, along with those of John Tate ’ 38 and Charles Kuralt ’ 55, is on that building.