Editor's note: In celebration of The Daily Tar Heel's 125th birthday, we are running excerpts from "Print News and Raise Hell" by Kenneth Joel Zogry. Books can be purchased via UNC Press.
At first glance, the campus of the University of North Carolina in the early months of 1893 seemed an unlikely place for the birth of a newspaper. Especially one that would become an important voice for the school throughout the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first, and would help launch the careers of dozens of noted journalists and graduates in a wide range of professions. Despite the fact that the university was to celebrate its centennial that October—the 100th anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone of the first building, Old East—the campus retained a small, bucolic atmosphere. The student body was tiny, with 317 students and 23 members of the faculty. Year-round Chapel Hill residents could be counted in the hundreds, and the nearby cities of Raleigh and Durham had populations of about 13,000 and 5,800, respectively. The largest city in North Carolina at the time was Wilmington, with a population of just over 20,000 residents.
Physically the campus looked little different in 1893 than it had on the eve of the Civil War. An alumnus of the class of 1860 returning more than three decades later would have found virtually everything familiar. There were ten principal buildings on campus, all of which, except the newer Memorial and Commons Halls (both now demolished), were antebellum structures. None of the buildings served a single school or department, as none were large enough at the time to require one. The school of medicine was less than 15 years old and offered only two years of instruction, no formal school of law yet existed, and the creation of a department of journalism was three decades in the future. The antebellum buildings had no central heating, electricity, or telephones. Plumbing was primitive at best: there were five “shower baths” in the basement of Smith Hall for the entire student body. The Old Well was not the iconic, symbolic structure it would later become; it was a rough-hewn wooden hut with a bucket that served as a source of water for students and horses. The small library was located in Smith Hall, and the majority of books were not owned by the university but by the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, the oldest student organizations on campus. A rudimentary baseball field with rickety wooden bleachers had been erected in the late 1880s, but no football stadium yet existed.
It was an inauspicious setting for an independent, student-run weekly newspaper, published, as the editors announced in the first issue, “under the auspices of the University Athletic Association, devoted to the interests of the University at large.” The paper had a bold and broad mission to “contain a summary of all occurrences in the University and village of Chapel Hill,” and though primarily established to cover UNC athletics, “space will be assigned for the thorough discussion of all points pertaining to the advancement and growth of the University.” Thus, on Thursday, February 23, 1893, “the Tar Heel first placed its tender foot to the ground and made its first print” (as an article in the University Magazine cleverly punned on the occasion of the paper’s twentieth anniversary).
The creation of what is today the Daily Tar Heel was rooted in two events: the reopening of the University of North Carolina in 1875, and the school’s first intercollegiate football game in the fall of 1888. After struggling through both the Civil War and the political turmoil of Reconstruction, the university limped virtually lifeless into the 1870s. With the endowment spent and enrollment at a trickle, the trustees voted to close the school in February 1871. Over the next four years proponents wrangled over the possible new direction of the university, with Kemp Plummer Battle, an alumnus and trustee who had first proposed changes in the 1860s, leading the charge. The “Battle Plan,” as it was known, was based on the so-called German model of higher education then gaining popularity in Europe and the United States. This model emphasized research over oratory, required faculty with earned graduate degrees, and implemented theses and examinations with a standardized grading scale as a means of assessing individual student performance. Research, not rote memorization of the classics and traditional scientific models, was central to this pedagogical approach, and the result was a revolution in higher education. The introduction of these practices at the newly reopened university in 1875 brought entirely new curricula in applied and social sciences, marking a sharp break from the antebellum classical education based primarily on the concept of preparing middle- and upper-class young men to take their place in a rigidly ordered society. This new educational structure was far more effective in preparing students to meet the challenges of the industrializing postwar South, and would become the basis of the modern research university in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The introduction and immediate popularity of intercollegiate football at UNC also played a key role in the creation of the Tar Heel. The sport was seen from the time of its inception not only as an extracurricular activity that built school spirit, but also as a source of “manly” vigor for the university and its students. It was the physical embodiment of a new academic culture, one based on individual achievement that contributed to the team’s success. According to historian James Leloudis:
"Sports became a source of shared identity on a campus where students no longer studied a common curriculum or participated in campus-wide debating unions. Young men might view themselves as historians, chemists, economists, or philosophers during most of the week, but on game day, they were all united as 'Tar Heels.' Athletic competition also recapitulated the lessons of the classroom. On the gridiron, as in academic pursuits, success required the mastery of a specialized knowledge of plays and strategy, and the difference between winning and losing was measured by a cold numerical score. The victorious athlete, like the triumphant scholar, had to apply himself constantly to self-improvement, for at any moment he might confront a rival who had been more resolute in his preparation."
Significantly, football also quickly became the principal means of bringing alumni back to UNC on a regular basis — and their moral and financial support became increasingly important as the university pushed to modernize in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the fall of 1892, four years after Carolina’s first intercollegiate game (played against Wake Forest), the team won a much-celebrated victory over arch-rival the University of Virginia, giving the school an early regional title. After that victory the desire to follow training of the football team and chronicle its triumphs on the field became more widespread among both students and alumni, and resulted in the creation of the weekly Tar Heel.
From PRINT NEWS AND RAISE HELL: THE DAILY TAR HEEL AND THE EVOLUTION OF A MODERN UNIVERSITY. Copyright © 2018 by Kenneth Joel Zogry. Used by permission of the University of North Carolina Press. www.uncpress.org
