First in Family: A Front Office Who’s Who
He grew up on a dead-end dirt
road just south of Lynchburg,Va.,
surrounded by aunts, uncles and
cousins who farmed or worked in factories or took care of home and family. His
father was a machinist in a factory, and his
mother, one of a truck farmer’s 18 children, was an office worker. The rural high
school he attended sent only about a fifth
of each graduating class to college, but —
maybe because of the impressive vocabulary he had acquired from reading comic
books — some of his teachers thought he
should be among them.
experience can be more complex than
they appear. Though his parents were farm
kids with high school educations, his
mother was valedictorian of her class and
really wanted to be a teacher — she just
didn’t think it was possible. And while his
father was Class Grumbler in his own
high school and thought it frivolous to
study something unconnected with what
you might do in a factory, he also cared
about education. Expected to do well in
school, Farmer and his older sister, who
blazed the trail to college by going to
Wake Forest, did just that.
Between his junior and senior years of
high school, he went to Governor’s
School and for the first time in his life
found himself
among college-bound students with
high aspirations. He
came back home
and was out working in a tobacco
field one day — all
dirty, with bits of
tobacco plants cling- Farmer
ing to his clothes —
when he told his cousin Ray he wanted
to go to college.
His parents supported his college
career and were gracious about the sacrifices they made, but Farmer believes they
Gray-Little
Jablonski
‘I try to interact with students
“Where?” Ray asked.
in regular settings, whether
“Harvard,” he said. One of his Governor’s School counselors was a student
there.
in the Pit or at a basketball game,
just try to get to know them
“I was clueless about what it meant to
say you wanted to go to Harvard,” he
recalled recently. “It must have come
across as incredibly arrogant. I got quite
the reaction from him. What people say in
a rural area is that I was getting ahead of
my raising.”
for who they are.’
Peggy Jablonski
vice chancellor for student affairs
Though he dropped the Harvard idea
when his father said he never could afford
it, Steve Farmer did make it to college. As
a recipient of an A.B. Duke Scholarship —
Duke’s premier merit scholarship program
— he studied English there; later he
earned a master’s in English from the University of Virginia. As director of undergraduate admissions at UNC, he hasn’t
forgotten what it felt like to be offered
opportunities his parents never had.
also probably were scared for him, wary
about what they didn’t know and worried
about whether he and his sister would
come back home.
Among other things, he knows that the
particulars of a first-generation student’s
Farmer is far from the only senior
UNC administrator to bring firsthand
knowledge to bear on programs that affect
access to the University and students’
experience once they’re here. Executive
Vice Chancellor and Provost Bernadette
Gray-Little and Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Peggy Jablonski also were
raised by parents with limited educations;
they, too, followed older siblings to college. Associate Provost Shirley Ort didn’t
plan to go to college — her own parents
hadn’t graduated from high school —
until her former principal stepped in.
All these officials, plus former Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Robert
Shelton, another first-generation college
student, found themselves around a table
in South Building at one point going over
the details of C-STEP, a recently imple-
mented program that helps low-income,
high-achieving students transfer to Car-
olina. Ort also drew on her experience
working her way through college when
she initiated the Carolina Covenant pro-
gram, which enables low-income students
to graduate from Carolina debt-free.
Jablonski helped re-establish a student
emergency fund and
works to create and
support small environments — including theme housing
and student organizations — that give
students a sense of
belonging.
Ort “First-generation
students can find
campus overwhelming and unfamiliar,”
she said.
Other University programs, including
the Carolina College Advising Corps,
Summer Bridge and Project Uplift, bear
the imprint of administrators who keep
their own experience in the back of their
minds. Farmer, Jablonski, Ort, Gray-Little
and other UNC administrators make special efforts to reach out to students, connect them with mentors and encourage
them to help those less fortunate than
themselves.
“I try to interact with students in regular settings, whether in the Pit or at a basketball game, just try to get to know them
for who they are,” Jablonski said. Like several of the others, she vividly remembers
an early adviser who believed in her and
encouraged her.
“He was just an amazingly charismatic,
inspirational person,” she said of the dean
of students at Amherst. “He helped me see
that anything was possible, no matter what
your background was.”
