This fall, UNC-Chapel Hill launched a new initiative entitled “Reckoning: Race, Memory and Reimagining the Public University.” Conceived as a response to recent campus events concerning the politics, justice, and legacy of monuments, donors, and policies in UNC’s history, this program builds on previously offered courses and has led to the creation of new ones. All of the courses involve interdisciplinary or new methodological approaches, and three History Department professors are helping lead the way.
Jim Leloudis’s course, “Slavery and the University,” takes students directly into the archives for every class. This undergraduate research seminar immerses students, who had to apply to Leloudis for entrance into the course and come from a range of majors, in University archives to break new ground. During its first century of existence, UNC had to fund its operations through the acquisition and sale of escheated property—property left behind by North Carolinians whom the state declared had no rightful heir (often including antebellum-era slaves). Yet historians have not systematically combed the archives to locate slavery’s role in building and maintaining the University. Until now. Leloudis and Graduate Teaching Assistant Laurie Medford—who offer this class largely thanks to the generous funds provided by alumnus Gordon Golding—work with two five-student teams to read nineteenth-century script and encounter emotionally charged stories. Leloudis recalls one such instance, in which a slave died after purchasing his own freedom but failing to emancipate his own daughter. The UNC lawyer who requested clarification on how to proceed with this “escheated property” was told pointedly to “take possession and sell.” Leloudis lauds his students, whom he calls “remarkable detectives,” who will present their findings in case write-ups and posters that will eventually be made accessible to the public.
William Sturkey’s “Race and Memory at UNC” course also brings academic discussion and student engagement directly into the public eye. In Sturkey’s class, more than 100 students consider race and memory at UNC from the era before white colonizers arrived in the Chapel Hill area until the 1980s, with many references to the more recent past. Sturkey collaborated with Professor and Executive Vice Provost Ron Strauss, instructor of the wildly popular “AIDS Course,” to infuse his class with new pedagogical methods suited to the topic. The result is a series of weekly lectures delivered by speakers from across the Research Triangle, including scholars at other university campuses and UNC graduate students doing research for the Historical Task Force. Students’ final projects, a collection of commemorative and documentary materials, may even be donated to Wilson Library to “inspire future students” about how to commemorate campus history. Sturkey has also noted that while the generous funding identified by the department and University made the course feasible this fall, its availability in the future hinges largely on more consistent sources of income to fund the speakers and digital components that make the course so innovative and effective.
Malinda Lowery is offering a course she has taught before, “Introduction to the Cultures and Histories of Native North America,” but to a newly engaged audience of students. Lowery, an interdisciplinary and innovative scholar who has a longstanding commitment to public engagement, incorporates archaeology, anthropology, art, film, and fiction into her course to “consider questions ranging from the evolution of ideas about race, nation, and sovereignty, the nature and results of cross-cultural contacts to the concept of history itself.” Her students have found that Native American histories are indeed “essential to understanding the society we live in, and essential to our cultural competency as residents of the United States.”
As these three scholars look toward the future of the “Race and Reckoning” program at UNC, their common concern is funding. At the moment, efforts are underway to pursue grants supported from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. However, making the research and teaching associated with the program sustainable requires consistent, long-term contributions and lasting sources of funds. However they are able to secure those financial resources, Leloudis, Sturkey, and Lowery are optimistic that their pedagogy and research will continue to break ground in deepening the connections between research and teaching at UNC and the university’s mission to engage in public engagement and outreach.
– Luke Jeske