LET TERS

Four Years Defined
By the Remarkable

I really enjoyed the article, “Four Years, Forty Years Ago” (January/February Review). I arrived at UNC in the fall of 1967, a member of the second class of women admitted as freshmen other than nursing students. Your article captured many of the changes we underwent from our freshman year until graduation. I’m sure that most graduates think of their years at college as remarkable, but I’ve always thought my years must have been more remarkable than others. Your article reinforced that belief.

I’ve told many people about the incredible changes that happened in those four years. As freshmen, we had to wear skirts to class, but we were also allowed to smoke in class, and there were little silvered cardboard ashtrays all over the classrooms. We arrived there to live in dorms with urinals, newly converted from men’s dorms. We decorated the urinals as Thanksgiving turkeys. We had the infamous closed study and curfews, but we violated them like crazy, not acting like the perfect young educated Southern women we were supposed to be.

By the time I graduated, women were wearing jeans and no bras, living in coed dorms, protesting the war in Vietnam, smoking marijuana and having lots of sex. The Arboretum went from the steamy, make-out locale full of over-stimulated, hormonal young people grasping at each other to being a lovely garden.

Politics and social revolt dominated our lives. I was in love with an ROTC student who had an obligation to join the Navy after graduation. I juggled this with my dislike of the Vietnam War. I never protested, but many did. The war dominated our lives in the late ’60s. I remember sitting in the TV room on the sixth floor of James watching the draft lottery, the infamous night when birthdays were chosen in a lottery for young men getting drafted. One of my best friends brought a giant bottle of Chianti to the TV room. He was going to take a swig of Chianti

for every birthday that was not his. He took six swigs of wine and then he was gone. I think he went to Canada.

We protested lots of things in my four
years, but our first protest was against
women’s rules. We chose an unfortunate
icy and cold winter night in 1968 for our
protest, but a good number of coeds
marched in solidarity against women’s
rules. After the heady feeling of protesting
women’s rules, UNC women and men
began protesting other things. The cafete-
ria workers presented a good case, and
about the time the cafeteria workers got
our attention, we started in on the Viet-
nam War. In my freshman year,

Four Years That Changed Carolina / Student Photographers Exposed

CAR OLINA we had the assassinations of

^{January/February2008}^A^L^U^MN^I^R^EVI^EWMartin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. By my junior year, we were boycotting exams in solidarity with Kent State. The vast changes in women’s conditions paralleled the incred- Keep This Line Open

Collleege Is Not thhe Gettaway It Oncee Was ible things going on in politics
and in the country as a whole.
As a university professor the past 25
years, I have watched men and women
come of age. Today’s young people have
their own issues and problems with grow-
ing up so fast in an era when anything
goes and where technology and instant
communication have dramatically affected
the way people relate to each other and
learn. I’m glad I experienced college
when I did, during a time of so much
change and excitement. Every time I
teach a young female student with a blue
streak of hair and a stud in her tongue, I
think of how women of my generation
pushed back and did our own thing.
Sharon “Shay” McKinnon Bruns ’ 71
Wellesley, Mass.

■ ■ ■

I enjoyed the article “Forty Years Ago”

— now for “Sixty Years Ago”!

I was a senior at UNC in 1946-47 when Dean Carmichael became the second dean of women, following Dean Spencer.

Since I was president of the Interdormitory Council, I had occasion to spend many hours with the dean “updating” the Coed Rules. Only junior and senior women were admitted to UNC at that time, and the male students were returning from World War II, thus an unusually mature student body.

There was a curfew, but I don’t remember a dress code. Skirts, sweaters, “Peter Pan collars” and saddle shoes were the fashion, and to top it, we even smoked in the classrooms.

I admired Dean Carmichael for her dedication to the coeds and enjoyed working with her. Of course! We were both from Alabama!

Constance Morris Haltom ’ 47

Florence, Ala.

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Soccer Alumnae Speak Out
In Support of Dorrance

In the summer of 1998, the women’s soccer players at UNC stood firmly in support of coach Anson Dorrance ’ 74 after former Tar Heels Debbie Keller ’ 98 and Melissa Jennings ’00 brought a sexual harassment lawsuit against him. Now it is almost 10 years later, and the support for Anson from his players has not wavered. While the lawsuit was settled in January, we would have loved to see it go to court so the truth could finally be told. Given the opportunity to testify, this is what we would have said: “Everything associated with the sexual harassment claims was completely fabricated. The environment in which we played was nothing but a positive and rewarding one.”

Anson Dorrance has coached more than 200 players since the UNC program was formed and, despite statements by the accusers that many more Tar Heel players would support their allegations, not a single player came forward during the last 10 years to substantiate their claims.