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Page 1


Title	Page 1
Digital collection	The Carolina Story: A Virtual Museum of University History
Host	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Carolina Digital Library and Archives.
Transcript	[MORE CONCERNING THE PROPOSED APPROPRIATION] Raleigh, April 2, 1869. Mr. Turner:--I have read your correspondent "&c., &c." on the University, and take leave to differ with him decidedly. I have just returned from a few weeks visit to the Hill. No North Carolinian with any manhood in him can go there now, and see what it has come to with mingled rage and mortification. The President is a little formal arrogant prig, without two clear ideas in his brains beyond his own selfish aggrandizement, and his own two penny schemes. Mr. Pool is not even a grateful man, as Gov. Holden will one day find out. He is without respectable capacity either as a scholar or as a man of business, nor even as a disciplinarian of old field school. The adventurers who make up the Professional corps are quite worthy of their head. There is not a man among them of any reputation or any ability to make a reputation as a man of learning or as a teacher. They are however busy settling themselves for life--cutting down shade trees in their new abodes right and left, as if oaks grew every year like pea-vines. Between whiles they exercise themselves in teaching Long Division and the Rule of Three and the Latin and Greek Grammar's to six or eight village boys. Mr. Pool has two little nephews "in College" also, who are not quite as large as he. These are the "students"; this is the University. Superintendant Ashley's brother in law had all the College servants this week busy hewing away at the great oaks in old Dr. Phillips' late yard. He is very nearly as shabby and and poor looking a specimen of a man as President Pool. Not quite. He tucks his pantaloons into his boots and the boots being tolerably coarse and in need of blacking, the arrangement gives him on the whole a rather manly air. I understand Mr. Ashley compliments his brother in law highly, and says there never has been such a Faculty there before. I agree with him. There never has been. Is the General Assembly to appropriate one sixpence to the support of these needy adventurers? I trust not for the honor of the State. And I trust besides that the Land-Scrip fund will be so taken care of that not one cent shall find its way into their empty pockets. Let them be made to understand unequivocally that North Carolina scorns them and their pretensions to be a University. The whole troop ought to be led to the extreme eastern verge of the State and dismissed into the Atlantic with a harmless but ceremonious kick. Did the ex-Committee of the Board of Trustees mean to insult the intelligence of North Carolina when they placed such men in the shoes of Gov. Swain, Dr. Phillips, Dr. Hubbard, and Profs. Chas. Phillips, Hepburn and Martin? I feel a sensation of unmitigated disgust when I contemplate the whole affair, and the only allevation is the fact that not a single respectable North Carolina family has yet sent one student to this mockery of a University. Ought the General Assembly to appropriate a larger sum of money to support these five men in idleness, while the people of Chapel Hill proper are without means of livelihood? The College has been the life of the village. If that is dead, the village must starve. I hope if $12,000, or as the remarkable wisdom of "H. H." suggests, if ever the $7,000 appropriation be made, there will be also a good round sum voted to support the citizens of the place, till "something shall turn up." How is Col. Guthrie to live if no students arrive there for him to examine as to their political creed. If the Legislature is to be liberal at all, I want it to "go the whole hog" and provide for Chapel Hill in general. There are plenty of respectable people up there with quite as much claim on the State for support as the new Faculty. Y. Y.

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