Fire and Stone: The Making of the University of North Carolina under Presidents Edward Kidder Graham and Harry Woodburn Chase by Howard E. Covington Jr. (review)

Fire and Stone: The Making of the University of North Carolina under Presidents Edward Kidder Graham and Harry Woodburn Chase recounts the story of both a likely and an unlikely leader of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) between 1913 and 1930. Edward Kidder Graham, the likely leader, graduated from UNC and, after studying at Columbia University and Harvard University, returned to lead the institution from 1913 to 1918. Early in his term, Graham fortuitously proclaimed that the university should be “co-extensive with the boundaries of the state” and announced his intention to put the university, as head of the state’s educational system, “in warm sensitive touch with every problem in North Carolina life, small and great” (p. xi). During his five years as president, Graham, with a mix of pragmatism and charisma, sought to ally the university with a host of constituencies ranging from public educators and farmers to churches and alumni. To each of these groups, he maintained that universities should play a role in identifying and remedying the state’s social and economic problems. Under Graham’s leadership, students and faculty alike began to view public service as part of their obligation to the state. Graham’s plans, however, were interrupted, first by World War I and then by his own untimely death in 1918 during the postwar flu epidemic.

Graham’s successor, Harry Woodburn Chase, the unlikely leader, was a native of Massachusetts and had joined the UNC faculty in 1910. Though an outsider to UNC, Chase shared Graham’s sense of mission and carried forth Graham’s vision of a university as a societal beacon to the state. Chase’s and Graham’s success was, perhaps, most apparent in the grassroots campaign that eventually led to massive increases in funding during the early 1920s. Covington notes that “[t]he state had never seen such an uprising of average citizens” toward a common cause (p. 235). The roaring 1920s, Covington observes, was also a reactionary decade, and Chase became a vocal member of an eventually successful opposition to an effort to compel the state legislature to outlaw the teaching of evolution in North Carolina’s public schools. Chase’s defense of freedom of speech was often eloquently combined with a reminder that Christianity had been and remained at the core of the university’s mission. Furthermore, he often reminded his detractors that schoolteachers were not somehow excluded from the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Over the course of his twelve-year tenure, Chase both recruited the talented faculty and secured the funding to strengthen the public-service-oriented graduate programs, which his friend and predecessor Graham had once envisioned.

Together, the author argues, Graham’s “fire” and Chase’s “stone” paved the way for UNC to eventually emerge as a leader in not merely southern but also American higher education during the twentieth century. During their tenures, the school started as a small liberal arts institution and became one prepared to lead the state into becoming a leader in the New South. Fire and Stone is a worthy contribution to the history of American higher education and, in particular, to understanding the history of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the years between its near collapse during the era of Reconstruction and the activist presidency of Frank Porter Graham during the Great Depression.