Outside my study window at the corner of Franklin and Columbia, Carolina’s campus appears much as it did on my 1972 graduation day. Sadly, that Carolina now seems a distant memory.
Carolina offered safe haven for academic freedom, an incubator for progressive New South voices venerating open debate, led by thoughtful, mannerly Bill Friday and others who could disagree in a decorous manner.
Smokey Robinson might say it’s just my imagination, running away with me.
The grim takeover of Carolina’s governing boards by state legislature clones imposed a mean-spirited bleakness, a landscape stalked by humorless attack dogs afraid to — as pastor and scholar Carlyle Marney put it, “plumb the darkness of the great dark room.”
What this place needs is a few leaders who know intellectual integrity at closer than second hand.
Dr. Mitchell Simpson
Pastor, University Baptist Church
