The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC Chapel Hill, UNC, North Carolina or Carolina) is a public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. Chartered in 1789, the university began enrolling students in 1795, making it one of the oldest public universities in the United States.
The university offers degrees in over 240-270 distinct academic programs, divided among 13 professional schools and a primary unit, the College of Arts & Sciences. It is classified as "R1: Doctoral Universities – very high research activity" and is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU). The National Science Foundation ranked UNC–Chapel Hill ninth among American universities for research and development expenditures in 2023 with $1.5 billion. Its endowment is $5.7 billion, making it the ninth-wealthiest public academic institution in the United States as of 2024.
The campus covers 760 acres (310 ha), encompassing the Morehead Planetarium and the many stores and shops located on Franklin Street. Students can participate in over 550 officially recognized student organizations. UNC-Chapel Hill is a charter member of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), which was founded on June 14, 1953. The university's athletic teams compete in 28 intercollegiate sports and are known as the Tar Heels. They have won 51 NCAA team championships in eight different sports which ranks eighth all time, and 52 individual national championships.
UNC-Chapel Hill is one of three corners of North Carolina's Research Triangle. The other two corners are North Carolina State University in Raleigh and Duke University in Durham.
History
The University of North Carolina was chartered by the North Carolina General Assembly on December 11, 1789; its cornerstone was laid on October 12, 1793, at Chapel Hill, chosen because of its central location within the state. It is one of three universities that claims to be the oldest public university in the United States, and the only such institution to confer degrees in the eighteenth century as a public institution.
During the Civil War, North Carolina governor David Lowry Swain persuaded Confederate president Jefferson Davis to exempt some students from the draft, so the university was one of the few in the Confederacy that managed to stay open. However, Chapel Hill suffered the loss of more of its population during the war than any village in the South, and when student numbers did not recover, the university was forced to close during Reconstruction from December 1, 1870, until September 6, 1875. Following the reopening, enrollment was slow to increase and university administrators offered free tuition for the sons of teachers and ministers, as well as loans for those who could not afford attendance.
Following the Civil War, the university began to modernize its programs and onboard faculty with prestigious degrees. The creation of a new gymnasium, funding for a new chemistry laboratory, and organization of the Graduate Department were accomplishments touted by UNC president Francis Venable at the 1905 "University Day" celebration.
Despite initial skepticism from university president Frank Porter Graham, on March 27, 1931, legislation was passed to group the University of North Carolina with the State College of Agriculture and Engineering and Woman's College of the University of North Carolina to form the Consolidated University of North Carolina. In 1963, the consolidated university was made fully coeducational, although most women still attended Woman's College for their first two years, transferring to Chapel Hill as juniors, since freshmen were required to live on campus and there was only one women's residence hall. As a result, Woman's College was renamed the "University of North Carolina at Greensboro", and the University of North Carolina became the "University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill".
During World War II, UNC was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission.
In 1951, a court ordered the university to admit the first Black students to the schools of law and medicine. The first students were Harvey Beech, James Lassiter, J. Kenneth Lee, Floyd McKissick, and James Robert Walker in law and Oscar Diggs in medicine. In 1955 after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed all forms of segregation in the public schools, federal courts ordered the admission of black undergraduates to the university. The first three Leroy Frasier, John Lewis Brandon and Ralph Frasier were from Hillside High School in Durham, North Carolina.
Black enrollment remained low for many years. There were four black freshmen in 1960 and only eighteen in 1963.
During the 1960s, the campus was the location of significant political protests. Prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, protests about local racial segregation which began quietly in Franklin Street restaurants led to mass demonstrations and disturbance. The climate of civil unrest prompted the 1963 Speaker Ban Law prohibiting speeches by communists on state campuses in North Carolina. This stand towards the racial segregation on campus led up to the Sit-in movement. The sit-in movement started a new era in North Carolina, which challenged colleges across the south against racial segregation of public facilities. The law was immediately criticized by university chancellor William Brantley Aycock and university president William Friday, but was not reviewed by the North Carolina General Assembly until 1965. Small amendments to allow "infrequent" visits failed to placate the student body, especially when the university's board of trustees overruled new Chancellor Paul Frederick Sharp's decision to allow speaking invitations to Marxist speaker Herbert Aptheker and civil liberties activist Frank Wilkinson; however, the two speakers came to Chapel Hill anyway. Wilkinson spoke off campus, while more than 1,500 students viewed Aptheker's speech across a low campus wall at the edge of campus, christened "Dan Moore's Wall" by The Daily Tar Heel for Governor Dan K. Moore. A group of UNC-Chapel Hill students, led by Student Body President Paul Dickson, filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court, and on February 20, 1968, the Speaker Ban Law was struck down. In 1969, campus food workers of Lenoir Hall went on strike protesting perceived racial injustices that impacted their employment, garnering the support of student groups and members of the university and Chapel Hill community and leading to state troopers in riot gear being deployed on campus and the state national guard being held on standby in Durham.
From the late 1990s and onward, UNC-Chapel Hill expanded rapidly with a 15% increase in total student population to more than 28,000 by 2007. This was accompanied by the construction of new facilities, funded in part by the "Carolina First" fundraising campaign and an endowment that increased fourfold to more than $2 billion within ten years. Professor Oliver Smithies was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2007 for his work in genetics. Additionally, Professor Aziz Sancar was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2015 for his work in understanding the molecular repair mechanisms of DNA.
In 2011, the first of several investigations found fraud and academic dishonesty at the university related to its athletic program. Following a lesser scandal that began in 2010 involving academic fraud and improper benefits with the university's football program, two hundred questionable classes offered by the university's African and Afro-American Studies department came to light. As a result, the university was placed on probation by its accrediting agency in 2015. It was removed from probation in 2016.
That same year, the public universities in North Carolina had to share a budget cut of $414 million, of which the Chapel Hill campus lost more than $100 million in 2011. This followed state budget cuts that trimmed university spending by $231 million since 2007; Provost Bruce Carney said more than 130 faculty members have left UNC since 2009., with poor staff retention. The Board of Trustees for UNC-CH recommended a 15.6 percent increase in tuition, a historically large increase. The budget cuts in 2011 greatly affected the university and set this increased tuition plan in motion and UNC students protested. On February 10, 2012, the UNC Board of Governors approved tuition and fee increases of 8.8 percent for in-state undergraduates across all 16 campuses.
In June 2018, the Department of Education found that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had violated Title IX in handling reports of sexual assault, five years after four students and an administrator filed complaints. The university was also featured in The Hunting Ground, a 2015 documentary about sexual assault on college campuses. Annie E. Clark and Andrea Pino, two students featured in the film, helped to establish the survivor advocacy organization End Rape on Campus.
In August 2018, the university came to national attention after the toppling of Silent Sam, a Confederate monument which had been erected on campus in 1913 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The statue had been dogged by controversy at various points since the 1960s, with critics claiming that the monument invokes memories of racism and slavery. Many critics cited the explicitly racist views espoused in the dedication speech that local industrialist and UNC Trustee Julian Carr gave at the statue's unveiling on June 2, 1913, and the approval with which they had been met by the crowd at the dedication. Shortly before the beginning of the 2018–2019 school year, the Silent Sam was toppled by protestors and damaged, and has been absent from campus ever since. In July 2020, the university's Carr Building, which was named after Julian Carr, was renamed the "Student Affairs Building". Carr had supported white supremacy and also the Ku Klux Klan.
After reopening its campus in August 2020, UNC-Chapel Hill reported 135 new COVID-19 cases and four infection clusters within a week of having started in-person classes for the Fall 2020 semester. On August 10, faculty and staff from several of UNC's constituent institutions filed a complaint against its board of governors, asking the system to default to online-only instruction for the fall. On August 17, UNC's management announced that the university would be moving all undergraduate classes online from August 19, becoming the first university to send students home after having reopened.
Notable leaders of the university include the 26th governor of North Carolina, David Lowry Swain (president 1835–1868); and Edwin Anderson Alderman (1896–1900), who was also president of Tulane University and the University of Virginia. On December 13, 2019, the UNC System Board of Governors unanimously voted to name Kevin Guskiewicz the university's 12th chancellor.
In the early afternoon on August 28, 2023, the second week of the fall semester, a PhD student shot and killed associate professor Zijie Yan in Caudill Labs, a laboratory building near the center of campus.
In April 2024, UNC students joined other campuses across the United States in protests and establishing encampments against the Gaza war and the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Students demanded transparency in investments and that UNC divest from Israel. With the administration coming down hard on the protesters, the students called for the protection of their first amendment rights. 36 arrests were made with police clearing out the encampment that was set up in Polk Place. Palestine Legal filed a federal civil rights complaint alleging that there was preferential treatment of Israeli students by UNC, and targeting of pro-Palestine students.
Campus
UNC-Chapel Hill's campus covers around 760 acres (310 ha), including about 125 acres (51 ha) of lawns and over 30 acres (12 ha) of shrub beds and other ground cover. In 1999, UNC-Chapel Hill was one of sixteen recipients of the American Society of Landscape Architects Medallion Awards and was identified (in the second tier) as one of 50 college or university "works of art" by T.A. Gaines in his book The Campus as a Work of Art.
The oldest buildings on the campus, including the Old East building (built 1793–1795), the South Building (built 1798–1814), and the Old West building (built 1822–1823), stand around a quadrangle that runs north to Chapel Hill. This is named McCorkle Place after Samuel Eusebius McCorkle, who campaigned for the foundation of the university and was the original author of the bill requesting the university's charter.
A second quadrangle, Polk Place, was built in the 1920s to the south of the original campus, with the South Building on its north side, and named after North Carolina native and university alumnus President James K. Polk. The Wilson Library is at the south end of Polk Place.