Founding The University of North Carolina
As a member of the North Carolina General Assembly, Davie sponsored the bill that chartered the University of North Carolina. Davie laid the cornerstone of the university in October 1793 in a full Masonic ceremony as he was the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of North Carolina at the time. He is recognized as the university's founder and served on its board of trustees from 1789 to 1807. Davie also received the institution's first honorary degree in 1811, an LL.D., and was given the title "Father of the University." The "Davie Poplar" tree on the campus is, as legend has it, where Davie tied his horse in the late 1790s to pick out the site for the state's first university. A portrait of Davie hangs in the chambers of the Dialectic Society, the oldest student organization at the university.
Read more about this topic: William Richardson Davie
Famous quotes containing the words founding, university, north and/or carolina:
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“Ah! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West,
From North and from South, come the pilgrim and guest,
When the gray-haired New Englander sees round his board
The old broken links of affection restored,
When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more,
And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before.
What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye?
What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie?”
—John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)
“I hear ... foreigners, who would boycott an employer if he hired a colored workman, complain of wrong and oppression, of low wages and long hours, clamoring for eight-hour systems ... ah, come with me, I feel like saying, I can show you workingmen’s wrong and workingmen’s toil which, could it speak, would send up a wail that might be heard from the Potomac to the Rio Grande; and should it unite and act, would shake this country from Carolina to California.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)