IN CLASS
When the Summer’s Through:
2,424 Students Saw Unks’ London
Gerald Unks is surprised he isn’t more emotional about the end of UNC’s London Summer School
Abroad program, which he founded in
1975 and ran until 2010. But, he says, after
36 years of traveling with college students,
a man can grow a little weary.
“Every damn year, somebody — at
least one student — lost the passport.”
And: “Getting a group of 60 kids into
the theater in London, in the right seats?
No, thank you, I don’t need that anymore.”
Plus: “Listening to the guide’s descrip-
tion of the gold ceiling in Blenheim Palace
for the 40th time? I was tired of all that.”
But Unks, who is professor of social
foundations of education and has taught at
UNC since 1967, shares something
remarkable in between his harrumphs,
something that would make any reasonable
person wonder if he doth protest too
much. He pushes a four-pound file box
across the table, packed with more than
three decades worth of correspondence
from students thanking him for “the best
experience” of their lives.
Inside the box, a salute to how things
changed through the years, and how they
did not: A 1983 letter, birthed from an IBM
Selectric and co-written with Wite-Out,
talks of its author’s expanded worldview,
thanks to Unks’ London. A handwritten
note on personalized stationery from 1994
admits that, “before I went, my parents
chuckled at the statement that I was going
‘to study’ in London. Now I think it’s obvi-
ous how much I really did learn.” A laser-
printed letter from 2005 tells Unks, “I
learned more about the world and my own
capabilities than any other time in my life. I
traveled, I met soul mates, and most impor-
tantly, I changed … into a person who has
a better understanding of her world.”
The London program, one of the elder
statesmen of Carolina’s foreign study expe-
riences, boasted almost four weeks of the-
ater-going, museum-visiting, yacht-riding
and culture-discussion each summer, as
well as six credit hours and a serious match-
making ability: Eight future marriages
sparked on the trip, the latest in September
2011, between Ashley Corra ’05 and Seth
Lamkin ’06, who participated in 2004.
It grew more popular than Unks could
have imagined the day he conceived the
idea while sitting in a pub in Cambridge
Circus in 1974, waiting to see Jesus Christ
Superstar. By the mid-1980s, “the kids
began to line up at 10 p.m. the previous
evening to register for it the next morn-
ing,” recalls Unks, who taught the program
each summer with just one assistant. “We
used to joke that the only things that UNC
students will line up for is an important
basketball game, a good rock concert or the
London program.”
The idea for London sprang from con-
versations with students about their travels.
“You asked them what they did in the
summer, and they replied, ‘The beach,’ ”
Unks said, pulling a dullard’s voice from
his rather dynamic collection of imitative
speech. “They were very, very insular. It
just surprised me.”
For Unks, who felt deeply the romanti-
cism of travel as a boy growing up near
Peoria, Ill., that insularity was a travesty. In
his 1950s childhood, just traveling by car
through North America was still a hard-
ship. The interstate and its progeny, a
robust tourism industry, did not yet exist.
But his parents persisted in the adventure,
and he found magic in the two-lane jour-
neys of his youth, those summer expedi-
tions with his family to California or
Canada or, his favorite, Washington, D.C.
In London, Unks tried to re-create that
magic for his students and often was
rewarded with lovely moments. Once, he
watched as the enormous sights and sounds
of the Church of England service at the historic Coventry Cathedral poured through a
student who had attended only small, eastern
North Carolina Baptist churches in the past.
“Dr. Unks,” she told him, “I think this
is the first time I’ve ever felt like I’ve been
to church.”
Russell Ranson ’ 91 saw 13 plays in
‘I noticed something happened
to the kids when they were abroad.
They seemed to broaden
themselves, and deepen themselves,
and do a lot of the things that I
thought of a college education doing.’
Gerald Unks
professor and founder
of London Summer School Abroad program
just two weeks on his 1990 London trip,
and all that drama must have entered his
bloodstream. While shopping with other
students on posh Bond Street one day,
Unks and Ranson posed as a wealthy
Southern-fried father-son duo at the Rolls
Royce dealership and got to spend a few
moments sitting inside a convertible.
Ranson still exchanges Christmas cards
with Unks.
