Nearly two years
would be spent
haggling over the
details of the
open-door rule.
‘The big
argument was
whether the door
had to be closed
or could you
prop it open.
Could you leave
a book in it?
How thick or
thin would the
book have to be?
We could have
solved the
problems of the
world with all
the time we
spent measuring
books.’
Mary Turner Lane
’ 53
actions rather than adhere blindly to the
rules imposed on them. But not everyone
was happy about the results. An anonymous
commentator wrote at the time: “With the
introduction of visitation and self-limiting
hours, there seems to be a callous indifference to any form of discipline.”
Both women and men also increasingly
resisted the notion of separate men’s and
women’s honor courts with their separate
standards of punishment. The disparate
impact of that system had become glaringly
evident in 1965, when the student body
president and his girlfriend were discovered
to have spent the night together in a fraternity house. The man got a notation on his
permanent record; the woman was expelled.
Students, faculty and administrators alike
objected both to the offense and the unequal
consequences. Again, change took time, but
by 1974, the honor courts had merged and
both men and women were expected to
meet a single standard of conduct; they also
had a unified student government.
Embracing new ideals
During these years, feminist consciousness emerged slowly on campus. By 1969,
the Association for Women Students was
recommending Betty Friedan’s The Femi-
Students seeking privacy or perhaps a little romance often
turned to the
Arboretum in the
days when male visitation in women’s
dorms was severely
restricted. The 1970
Yack picture below
shows things had
changed not long
after a mob of students shouted to a
visitation rules committee, “The Arb is
cold!”
nine Mystique to incoming women. Marjorie Spruill recalled attending the first
women’s history course offered at UNC —
Peter Filene taught it, with Sara Evans ’ 76
(PhD) as TA — and thinking “it was so
wonderful to be living in a brand-new
movement.”
The National Women’s Political Caucus
started a campus chapter in 1971 or 1972,
and Spruill painted a notice for the organization on the cube outside the Campus Y.
“My boyfriend at the time was 6-foot- 5,
