favorite professors. Don Matthews’ first
question was, ‘What’s a girl like you doing
in a place like this?’And I replied, ‘I was
going to ask you the same thing!’”
To this day, said Spruill, now a member
of the GAA Board of Directors, she feels
conflicted about having participated in the
homecoming court and about having
joined a sorority. “The sorority I was in
had a lot of really smart women who were
accomplishing a lot then as students and
have accomplished a lot since. But the
exclusivity of it bothered me.”
The barriers fall
In their struggle for equal status on campus, female students weren’t alone. Black
students had been admitted as undergraduates only since 1955, and their numbers still
were small. There were few women on the
faculty, making it tougher for them to
address the sexism they faced around issues
like tenure, family leave, academic credibility
and such basics as the lack of women’s
locker rooms at the swimming pool.
Lane, who began teaching at Carolina
in 1954, says she wasn’t that aware of dis-
crimination against women when she was
in graduate school here in the early 1950s.
But The Feminine Mystique, which she
read in Chapel Hill, was “an eye-opener”
that reflected her own experience.
Lane’s feminist views were rooted in
tragedy. Her husband’s sudden death in a
car crash when she was 29, her daughter
only 2, taught her that the myths of her
upbringing wouldn’t hold. “I’d been raised
to believe a husband would provide for
me.” The accident proved otherwise, and
she picked herself up and moved to Chapel
Hill with the intention of learning to provide for herself.
She served on committees that weighed
dorm visitation and self-limiting hours for
female students, and that experience led to
activism on behalf of women faculty. “Once
I began working on committees and saw
the structure of this University, I recognized
it was really a patriarchal system. I had never
in my growing-up years seen things as patriarchal systems. I realized that my beloved
institution, The University of North Carolina, did not have a fair gender-based structure, and I wanted it to be better.”
‘A noteworthy
phenomenon is the cult
of the ugly, accompanied
by the dirty, the meanly
dressed, the foul word.
Whereas in 1960
it was fashionable to be
well-dressed and beautiful
in body, speech and clothes,
it is now fashionable
to wear patched denim
and all manner of attire
which reflects another
epoch or culture.’
Katherine Carmichael
in a 1970 memo
LEADING TEACHING CARING
HIS NOBEL PRIZE
IS NOT ONLY ABOUT
HIS BRILLIANT WORK,
IT’S ABOUT
A BRILLIANT FUTURE
HE’S HELPED CREATE.
Dr. Oliver Smithies
Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2007
The Nobel Prize awarded to Dr. Smithies recognizes, of course, the more than
20 years of groundbreaking
work he’s done in gene targeting. As the Nobel Assembly noted, gene targeting “… is now being applied to
all areas of biomedicine—from basic research to the development of new therapies.”
