December ■ Moeser decides to abolish the
Cornelia Phillips Spencer Bell Award.
2005
March ■ UNC expands its existing merit-based scholarship program.
April ■ Men’s basketball team wins national
championship.
June ■ Moeser takes a campus delegation to
Singapore. Discussions with the National University of Singapore later lead to a joint
undergraduate degree program.
September ■ Memorial Hall reopens.
October ■ Erskine Bowles ’ 67 is named president of the UNC System.
2006
February ■ Moeser names Bernadette Gray-Little provost 12 days after Robert Shelton
resigns to become president of the University
of Arizona.
March ■ The first University Awards for the
Advancement of Women are presented as a
successor to the Bell Award.
October ■ Football Coach John Bunting ’ 72 is
forced to resign.
November ■ Butch Davis is hired to replace
Bunting.
■ Dennis and Joan Gillings commit $50 million — the largest pledge in UNC history — to
the School of Public Health, pushing the Carolina First Campaign over its $2 billion goal
nine months ahead of schedule.
July ■ A bill is signed that creates North Carolina’s first University Cancer Research
Fund.
UNC NEWS SERVICES
December ■ A new Kenan Charitable Trust
gift of $8 million creates 16 full music scholarships for undergraduates and completes
funding for a new music building. It is the
largest gift ever received by an academic
department in the College of Arts and Sciences. ■ Women’s soccer team wins national
championship.
2007
February ■ The American Council
on Education honors Moeser with
the Reginald Wilson Diversity
Leadership Award for contributions
to the advancement of diversity
in American higher education.
■ The Morehead program receives
a $100 million gift from the
Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation
of Houston, the largest contribution ever given in support of UNC.
September ■ Moeser announces he will step
down June 30, 2008.
October ■ UNC geneticist Oliver Smithies
wins the Nobel Prize in medicine.
December ■ UNC announces that the final
Commencement speaker of the Moeser
administration is, like Moeser, a musical
artist — soprano Jessye Norman. ■ Field
hockey team wins
national champi-
onship. ■ Carolina
First Campaign offi-
cially ends with a total
of $2.38 billion.
2008
March ■ Student
Body President Eve
Carson ’08 is killed.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Qatar, paid for by the emir of the Middle
Eastern country. The emir thought UNC
ought to establish an undergraduate business degree program there that would offer
Chapel Hill students and faculty an international experience and let UNC hang a
shingle in Qatar while boosting higher
education there. Moeser was excited about
the possibilities, though noncommittal. By
March 2002, negotiations over money and
logistics had broken down, and Moeser
called them off. Some on and off the campus wondered if he had mishandled an
opportunity (other universities are building
programs in Qatar now). Recently Moeser
said it was mainly a case of the faculty not
buying in. “There were major issues that
we never resolved with the people of
Qatar in terms of their expectations of
Chapel Hill faculty spending large chunks
of their professional time.”
■ In a debate that started when a grad-
uate student focused attention on the
Reconstruction-era writings of Cornelia
Phillips Spencer — who had had a sterling
reputation as the woman who rang the
bell to reopen UNC after the Civil War —
Moeser stirred controversy in December
2004 by abolishing a campus award for
women that bore her name. Editorialists
cried “revisionist history,” and members of
Spencer’s family at one point asked for her
name to be removed from Spencer dorm.
Some previous winners of the award
acknowledged that Spencer’s newspaper
criticisms of the University’s Republican
leadership revealed racist tendencies.
■ Tuition was an annual source of
angst. It has gone up almost every year,
essentially doubling for state residents since
2000, slightly less so for non-North Carolinians. Moeser generally held to the idea
that Carolina was a little too much of a
bargain for its ambitions, particularly with
regard to attracting and keeping the best
faculty. There usually were a couple of
weeks of protest at decision time, but the
50 silent ones that followed may be telling.
The situation with the Carolina North
satellite campus remains up in the air as
Moeser leaves office. The University says it
badly needs a place to attract entrepreneurs
who can partner with researchers to bring
their work to the marketplace. UNC
already has decided to move the law
school to the 1,000-acre campus, and
other professional schools could follow.
But the town has taken a hard line with
the University over necessary rezoning —
it is concerned about the impact on the
quality of life for nearby residents.
Moeser was criticized early in his
administration for appearing to town officials as if he thought the University could
dictate to the town — at one point he was
called a “bully.”
