Carolina Alumni Review - November/December 2008

is to identify
graduate schools

that are

primarily

stand-alone and

decamp them to

Carolina North.

We obviously

want to keep our

undergraduate

education on the

main campus.’

where you have to dissect a cat.”

In the admissions game, Steve Farmer said UNC must get more faculty and students involved in telling UNC’s story. Reputation is vital — students network so much better these days: If prospects see their best classmates going to UNC, he said, it sends a message; if they see them going elsewhere, it sends another message.

Also, Farmer said, Carolina must be a better player in merit scholarships. Often a modest merit scholarship, say $2,500, can bring back a prospect who has been offered a full ride by a school that doesn’t measure up to Carolina.

With few exceptions, the top N.C. students who don’t choose Carolina go to school out of state. It means they’re much less likely to bring their knowledge and talents back to the Tar Heel economy. “They [the N.C. General Assembly] know that’s a risk we can’t come close to accepting,” Farmer said. (The 2008 legislative session gave the 16 campuses all of the $35 million they wanted to cover enrollment growth.)

Anna Wu
director of facilities
planning

Scenarios

Each of the following maybes — most are in the talking stage, but something of this scale will be needed — promise significant changes to the landscape from Cameron Avenue on the north to Mason Farm Road on the south.

Administrators are talking about the possibility other professional schools besides law — perhaps government and parts of public health — could relocate to Carolina North.

The law school building is being eyed as an undergraduate social sciences complex. But will that space be adequately configured to take in those programs? That’s one reason law is moving out. Undergraduates now go to class in contiguous buildings on McCorkle Place, Polk Place and the science complex; at best, this kind of solution would require extensive pedestrian traffic rearrangement.

“I think the general strategy is to identify graduate schools that are primarily stand-alone and decamp them to Carolina North,” Anna Wu said. “We obviously want to keep our undergraduate education on the main campus.” College of Arts and Sciences officials already have been walking through the law school to assess the possibilities.

The top-ranked School of Information

and Library Science probably will move to a new building on one of the few remaining open sites, just west of the business school on the southern edge of the campus (perhaps freeing Manning Hall to house the College of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School).

Davie Hall has outlived its usefulness and likely will be replaced.

Still-standing parts of Odum Village, formerly married student housing, have been coveted for a park-like green space in the area where most on-campus students live. But the explosive growth of health-related research could demand more of that acreage.

How the Mason Farm site, now home to the Friday Continuing Education Center roughly a mile east of the main campus, would fit in is undetermined at this time.

Carolyn Elfland has been thinking that moving more classrooms to South Campus would help even the load on dining halls. But she’s also studying expanding Lenoir Hall and building more, smaller venues.

Marty Pomerantz knows the main campus is used up for recreation fields, and he’s looking at some “away games” — building four to six fields at Carolina North.

“I think about not just the types of buildings people need to live in and go to class and eat their meals in, but how people navigate the campus and find smaller groups they can be comfortable with in a large setting,” Peggy Jablonski said. She pointed to a vintage painting of McCorkle Place on her wall, with open space as the dominate feature. “They need spaces just to sit on the grass and play on the playing fields.”

This is fairly gradual growth, but we didn’t find anybody on the faculty or staff familiar with the issue who wasn’t concerned about how the University was going to build fast enough to keep up.

“You want to think carefully about what happens when you add 100 students,” Joe Templeton said. “One hundred doesn’t sound like much on top of thousands, but …”

DAVID E. BROWN ’ 75 is the Review’s senior associate editor. The Review plans to continue coverage of enrollment expansion in the magazine’s next annual in-depth look at the subject of admissions, in the March/April 2009 issue.