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Henry Farrell (1:28)
These books behind me are really old. Some of them go back to when Columbus was young, and of course, they're in the special collections here in Joyner library, and are revered for their age and their content. Educational institutions, however, oftentimes, are not revered for their age, but just what's next? Schools, colleges, universities, are rather unique. That is to say they usually last a long time. That's not to say that some have not failed. That's not to say that some of them haven't been able to make it for 200 years. But as you know, the colleges the universities in England and Europe are 1000 years old. And so it would appear that learning institutions are one of the most stable parts of our society, and that list of long lived institution East Carolina is But a, toddler coming together under the force of the General Assembly in 19 seven. The school was created there 100 years ago, and even then, it didn't throw open its doors and put chalk in the trays for eager young students. It took two years to build it, and of course, in building a campus in 19 seven it's a considerably different thing than it is today. Ended up with six buildings. The great Center building was what became known as Austin until that time it was called the administration building. The students came mostly from eastern North Carolina, but it would be a mistake to think that they didn't come from the Piedmont and the mountains as well. Indeed, the slopes of the Appalachians furnished a lot of young students, and they came to learn how to teach, or learn how to teach Well.

Chancellor Richard Eakin (3:27)
I was born and raised in New Castle, Pennsylvania. I was educated in the public schools there. I graduated from Chenango High School, which is a rural high school in that city, and then I went to college at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. Following that, I went to graduate school at Washington State University, where I received my Master's and PhD in mathematics.

Dr. Walter J. Pories (3:52)
I was born in Minnich, Germany, and raised much of my life, my early life in a very rural area of Bavaria. And then when, in 1939 when we were fleeing the Nazis, I came to Rio de Janeiro, where I repeated third grade and went through fourth and fifth grade, and we couldn't get a visa to stay in Brazil, so we came United States as a second choice. Actually, in United States, I repeated third grade, so I've been through 3/3 grade three times.

Dr. William Shelton (4:35)
Well, I was born in Mississippi, moved to Tennessee when I was six years old. So most of my education was in Memphis, Tennessee, in the K 12 system, and then later attended, then Memphis State, now the University of Memphis for two degrees, and then Ole Miss for my doctorate.

Joel K. Butler (4:56)
I was born in Topeka, Kansas. My father was a minister in. And would move from town to town in the Midwest. He went to school in Midwest at Union College in Lincoln Nebraska. My two older brothers were born in Lincoln Nebraska, and then we moved. He moved to Topeka, Kansas, which is where I was born. And we stayed in the central states, Kansas City and Wichita, Omaha, Lincoln, those those cities until I was 16 or 17 and moved to Nashville, Tennessee area. My dad was a chaplain in hospital and went to high school, finished high school at a private school in Nashville Tennessee Madison Academy, as a matter of fact, and then went to a HBCU down in Huntsville, Alabama, did four years down at Oakwood College.

Henry Farrell (5:44)
Now, when you look at these books, you think, well, at one time or another, they were young, they were bright, the backs were bound correctly and had not suffered the years of wear that things of this sort gather. My own wish would be to go back to about 1911 and listen to President Robert Wright's opening convocation in the fall. Usually that was about the middle of September, because that's when the students came back. The students always made the campus young, no matter how old the faculty or how grumbly the trustees, the students gave it a Step lively into the future.

Chancellor Richard Eakin (6:32)
I heard about East Carolina, I guess for the first time, from my then boss, the president at Bowling Green State University, who said that the position of Chancellor was open, that he thought it was a fine school. He thought that my preparation made me a good candidate, and wanted to know if he could, if I would let him put my name forward, which I did, and the rest is history, I guess.

Dr. Walter J. Pories (7:00)
I heard about East Carolina in 1977 when I had a call inviting me to help start the school. Actually found a surgical department of school, and I must admit one I hadn't heard of the school. I hadn't heard of East Carolina University, and I'd heard of North Carolina and South Carolina. And I really thought initially that this was a practical joke, so I responded to the phone call as if it were a joke. And the other chap, who was a very respected chairman at Syracuse, got upset and hung up the next day. I came back to my own job at Case Western Reserve, and my chairman called me and he said, you get this call from North Carolina. And I said, well, was that you? He said, No. He said, that's probably one of the finest jobs in surgery, because you'll have an opportunity to build a department, bring in your own faculty, build something new and very different.

William M.A. Greene (8:18)
I first heard about East Carolina, then teachers college through my football coach at Brevard Junior College. And that was the beginning. He wanted to get an offer for a position here as athletic coach all the sports, three sports that was football, basketball and baseball. So he was talking to some of the student athletes about following him down to East Carolina. I mentioned it to my mother, and she said, that's a girls school. Well, football team. That's how I heard about East Carolina.

Dr. Garrie Moore (8:55)
ECU became part of my vocabulary when I was in high school, and that was back in the 60s. And during that time, there were no minorities here at East Carolina University as students, but I recall the professor, especially my math teacher at the time, arranging for his math class to visit East Carolina University. And that made a profound impression on me to come to a large school like East Carolina University and interact with some of the professors who really inspired us to look towards higher ed, and that really made a difference for me.

Professor Betty Darden (9:44)
Actually, my daddy insisted that I go to East Carolina because his sister had been there. My mother wanted me to go to Longwood. Well, it was Farmville State Teachers College. When she went, I. Yeah, but he won out, so I went to East Carolina.

Henry Farrell (10:07)
Wright's own background was from North Carolina. He was a person whose family had favored and sponsored and worked in education in the latter part of the 19th hunt the 19th century. He went to Oak Ridge Academy, just outside of Greensboro, and there to the University of North Carolina at what we nowadays call at Chapel Hill. He played on the football team. He was an all southern tackle, six, four, and they say once he stuck his arm out and caught the runner. That was it. Now that's part of the age too, because the early 1900s there was a spirit of athleticism. Indeed, one historian has called it muscular progressivism. So that from the very first this this institute, this school that would be founded under his leadership had an interest, not only in the classroom, but the playing field as well. And from that, of course, grew a whole new story. I don't believe that we could really think anything else, but that East Carolina was intended to teach teachers. They scarcity of teachers at the beginning of the century was phenomenal. Some teachers were no more than two or three years older than the students they taught, and Wright brought them in and gave them their charge. Now, much of this was done in the aura of Christianity. The college was not at all disposed to having preachers and ministers and singing choirs come to campus that would eventually, of course, fade, leaving the individual student to pick its route to faith or not. Nonetheless, under this Christian ethos, there was a heavy, laden characteristic of service, work, hard, go forth. Now is your time. That sort of spirit has not faded from the university. We still hear that kind of rhetoric and that kind of intention in the classrooms, in the laboratories and out in the fields.

Steve Ballard (12:25)
I heard about ECU like many people across the country did really through football in the 1990s that's when it got on my radar screen. But then I didn't pay a lot of attention to it, in part because I had administrative positions in other universities, but when I decided to look for a chancellorship or a presidency. ECU came across my radar screen in the fall of 2003 I'm not quite sure what month, but I started to pay attention to it. And one of the things that really attracted me to ECU, before I knew much about the school, was the reputation of the North Carolina system. It is very exciting to think about working in a state that supports higher education as well as North Carolina does.

Dr. Walter J. Pories (13:09)
I'd grown up in a family of physicians, but I wanted to be different, and I wanted to be a artist and a musician, so I went to college at Wesleyan University as an art major and a music minor, and then in my junior year, I had this epiphany that I didn't have any talent, that decided I'd better go to medical school.

Dr. Austin Bunch (13:35)
I was the last of six children, and none of those others had college in their plans, but the Times had changed since they were had grown up, and my only inclination was to go to college so that I could do what I wanted to do with my life.

Professor Betty Darden (13:52)
When I was in school, there was no question about whether I'd go to college or not. I was an only child, and my mother and my father instilled in me that there was life beyond high school in college.

Henry Farrell (14:10)
Some of the things that you think about in eastern North Carolina's history, you find, of course, this insistence upon education. It came from the farmers, from the rural folk who knew full well that plowing cotton or picking tobacco or raising other commodities was not the great life that they would intend for their children. Although many people enjoyed that life, and many people succeeded in it. So it was that they saw the open gate the door for tomorrow was through education. It was then, and it is today. For most people, Robert Wright's vision was the sort of thing that you hunger for if you're looking for an answer to a deep and abiding problem. But. His commitment was outstanding, his insistence on excellence, his insistence upon contribution of the student body to what they were doing, his insistence on libraries and reading produced, of course, a leader that was needed for the times. Wright himself would rise to be one of the most significant educational leaders in the state during his 25 year tenure. Several outside events, of course, changed things. The Hill upon which North East Carolina was built was called Harrington Hill, and at that time, it was pretty good size. Later times it would be shaved down and turned by mules and later bulldozers, but it was still something of a hill. And on that hill, the plans were laid to produce a whole set of new teachers for an old school system. The superintendents were most important. They performed the valuable process of being the politicians in the matter, each state, each county, each city, for the most part, had a superintendent, and each one would make his political feelings felt in the legislature, and there comes the issue of where the money came from. There were other things too, local people in Pitt County in Greenville, which support totaled $50,000 in bonds to underwrite the original construction Pitt County contractors and Pitt County workers, brick layers carpenters would build the first towers of this school.

Chancellor John M Howell (16:49)
It's a job more than any other job I've ever had at a university that requires your attention just about 24 hours a day, you may be asleep, but you might get waked up over something, and the thing that bogs you down eventually is not that the work is that difficult, but that is just always there. You don't really get a vacation from it.

Chancellor Richard Eakin (17:29)
My favorite part of being Chancellor, I guess, is the opportunity to to influence the lives of a great number of people in a very positive way. I think the thing I took the most pride in in terms of my tenure as chancellor, was bringing the university to a point where it would be a doctoral university, because that opened the door to so many more opportunities for East Carolina, for its students, for its faculty, and it provided us with a lot better financial resource for us to continue the work we're doing still today. So I think that was the thing that I really enjoyed the most and took the most pride in.

Steve Ballard (18:08)
My favorite part of the job is just seeing what a difference people at ECU make to our community and to our state and to our nation. And if there's any way the administration can help that lots of times we hope there is that's the best part of the job is when we're doing things that really make a difference. And there are dozens and dozens and dozens of examples that we could talk about, but it's that. It's that aspect of the job that really gets you up in the morning, or gets me up in the morning, and makes it worthwhile.

William M.A. Greene (18:38)
Eventually, my career developed. I had command of four different ships, which is a responsibility, and have the opportunity of serving at the Naval Academy on two occasions, first time for two years as an instructor. I also coached the lightweight football team. This is called 150 pounders, and we had two undefeated seasons under my when I was coaching. We belong to the Eastern Athletic Association, which was the Ivy League schools and was Navy, got into it somehow, the arrangements from the administration. But then when I went there was a selected for flag rank, which was quite an achievement in the Navy, of course. And I was very excited. My family was excited, and my family was responsible for it, because they've been supporting me all the way through.

Henry Farrell (19:44)
And the main building was three and a half stories tall, capped by a couple of that shone in the daylight. The reason it shone was because the Trustee Chair, Thomas Jarvis, a former governor. And a man intent upon doing the best he could for Greenville in the East insisted that it be gilded, and so it was. But as a Confederate veteran, he was somewhat disinclined to put the American flag on top of that cupola, and said no North Carolina's flag is good enough, and it would stay that way until World War One. Jarvis would pass on. And World War One was a sort of stupefying event for most people. It broke old patterns. It created new paths. And out of World War One came the renaming of East Carolina Teachers Training School to East Carolina Teachers College in 1920 here, Wright played a very prominent role. His argument was that if we're going to be able to teach people, we've got to teach them more. And a four year school, a four year degree program, was the sort of thing that should be done, particularly with the insistence now in Raleigh, that we go and add to our public education with high schools. East Carolina had been using its own relatively good facilities for high school education. A person 16 years old, could come here and watch up Harrington Hill and join the prep school group. And these were both women and men graduating from the prep school would usually allow you to enter one of the four year schools in the Piedmont. I guess if one had to find a particular moment in which the trip was changed. You would have to wait until the 1930s but even in the 1920s as more faculty recruited more persons who had to be able to not only teach students, but to inform them of items and character of people and the nature of the nation and chemistry and geography. They also were in the discipline they would teach, and there was a moment among the faculty to go beyond the teacher's degree and move toward a four year liberal arts college. Wright resisted this. He said the intent of the college now was to teach teachers. Now there's another one that sometimes bothers later graduates, that somehow or another, this was a one sex school, that this was nothing but for women, of course, but for women is a big exception. Men were a part of the enrollments from the very first some of the first athletic events in the history of the school were baseball games, and they were played behind the big general administration building with local high schools and other groups, and they were pretty good. In addition to that, there were track meets, which brought in other local athletes, high schools and academies.

Chancellor John M Howell (23:14)
The thing that was most difficult for me was a debt in the athletic department. The athletic department was a half million dollars in debt when I came into the office and we needed to pay that off

Henry Farrell (23:38)
these books back here, they're old and rebound deal with voyages. This is voyages around the world. Delano's voyages, Cook's last voyage, and that's really what happened in 1920 the college set out on a new voyage. It began, increasingly to recruit students for four year degree programs. The two year program remained until the 19 late 1930s but by becoming a quote, four year college, the involvement of more and more people to a later and later age, you move from dealing with people who graduated 18 or 19, too people now who will graduate in 20-21, and they brought with them and earned here a new world's view. Some of the women, most of the women, prior to World War One, were outstanding argumenters For suffrages, the woman's suffrage, and the women gained the suffrage by constitutional amendment for the 1920 election. And from there, of course, things changed. The legislatures changed, and those legislatures changed with new representatives or others who changed their mind about public education. Now. The result was that in Raleigh, in Richmond and elsewhere in the southeast, a greater emphasis on education began to arrive throughout the 20s, prosperity was not necessarily the deal. In eastern North Carolina, the commodities always susceptible to world markets were fluttering again into recession, the Great Depression, which will come in the 1930s came to the east in North Carolina in the 1920s as the bushels and the measures gained less and less on the market, and many a farmer was forced to either go into tenant farming or move to the textile mill towns elsewhere in North Carolina. And that happened, the great moment, of course, for East Carolina was the time in which Wright does he dies in 1934 in the edge the depth of the Depression. A lot of people didn't think the depression was really a depression. They thought it was a recession. But he got deeper and deeper. Prices went down. Legislatures found less and less revenue, and the college was in dire straits,

Chancellor Richard Eakin (26:23)
I think, during the course of my tenure as chancellor, the faculty and the students and staff and everyone began to see that East Carolina indeed was a very powerful force in higher education, and that indeed it was a very good University, and we needed to apologize to no one. And I think that feeling of pride and that feeling of an appreciation for how good East Carolina is academically is something that I am very pleased with.

Dr. William Shelton (26:54)
We're still such a young institution in terms of even though we're approaching 100 years, really, when you talk about Higher Education universities, that's still young, and I think as we went through series of things last year or the previous year, when I served as the Interim Chancellor, we had a lot of discussions around campus about, you know, what's our challenges, and what are our opportunities? And and a member of the faculty, in fact, a leader in the faculty, I think, put it, put it best when, when he replied that, you know, it's deciding who we want to be when we grow up, in a sense, so we're in that time of looking at at what we can be

William M.A. Greene (27:37)
at This time, I'm convinced we have the right chancellor and his wife. I'm convinced we have the right leadership in our various schools. I'm convinced we have a strong alumni association. I We have lot more support now I would make this comment, Dr Leo Jenkins, who was the time was president. He was then the vice vice president for he is the reason his work was the reason the medical school came to East Carolina that made the difference in not only the integrity the national identity and the growth of East Carolina University and Greenville, one person, I think he should be remembered with more than just naming a building for him.

Chancellor Leo W. Jenkins (28:49)
I went down the beach one day and a man called me over. He introduced himself, he said he was a professor at the Medical School at Chapel Hill, and he said he'd understand what we're trying to do down here with a medical school and all that business. And I told him a simple thing. I said, don't you think that health care and the good things of life ought not to be dependent on geography? They ought to be for everyone. We all pay taxes. They pay taxes to Murphy and they pay taxes on the coast. We all ought to have the same opportunity. He said, Well, we have great opportunity. So I said, let me ask you a question, if the Lord gave you an opportunity to have a massive heart attack right now on the beach here, or on the streets of Durham or the streets of Chapel Hill, where would you want your heart attack to take place? You know, common sense tells you rather have it on the streets of Chapel Hill. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about geography and well, being of people, and it should not be dependent on geography. It ought to be for everyone. So I don't know whether answer what I'm trying to say or not, but we want to bring the good things of life, particularly in modern medical care, delivery, to everybody in his backyard, if it possibly can be done, and it's we're doing here.

Chancellor Richard Eakin (29:52)
I think East Carolina's future is very, very positive indeed. I see it's. Since we have achieved doctoral status, the number of doctoral degrees, for example, is ever increasing. The facilities on the campus are continuing to thrive and get better. I think that East Carolina will be a major player nationally in higher education, in many fields we are already but I think increasingly our role as a university will will be recognized across this country and and will be something that people will look to with a great deal of pride.

Dr. Garrie Moore (30:32)
I believe that East Carolina universities, limits are not there. I think that it can go wherever we decide to take it. East Carolina University is pause for growth, not only in terms of size, but in terms of statute, in terms of resources. It is the fastest growing university within the UNC system. I'm not sure that we want to be the size of a chapel hill or a NC State, but certainly, we have so much to offer eastern North Carolina and the state of North Carolina,

Professor Betty Darden (31:17)
well, East Carolina is up and running, especially since Terry Holland got there, I was really proud that he came. Of course, it's changed a lot. There were three girl dormitories when I was there, Jarvis and Fleming and Cotton. Now it's just when I go back, I just cannot believe what they have done in those those years. It's just has grown so tremendously.

Chancellor John M Howell (31:47)
Oh well, I think ECU is going to be more and more recognized for its accomplishments. It has grown both in numbers of students and in the quality of its faculty and its programs steadily from the very beginning, the first leader, President Wright, if you read Mary Jo Bratton's history of the university, you'll see that he did a lot to establish this institution as one of the leading teachers colleges in just a short time after he took office, and The university has always strained, I think, to expand and get new programs and bring in more students. And we reached a point that we are getting more students than we can handle because of the population growth. And as you read in the paper, you know what, how much it's going to grow in the next 10 years or so, and it's going to put quite a burden on the university, but it'll get through. It has done it before.

Henry Farrell (33:16)
By 1939 1940 federal funds had pretty well kept the campus in order. It had paved roads, it had been used for refurbishing many of the residence halls and administrative and teaching buildings, and also helped build Flanagan, which is still with us today, when World War Two came and it did not come suddenly in December 1941 not that the people who were thinking about it, at least, it came pretty slowly. But it was there since 1937 1938 events in Europe and elsewhere turned toward war on Harrington Hill, you were not in a sense of isolation. There were people. There were students who argued to help those who were fighting against the fascists and the authoritarians. So December 7, 1941 is a surprise, but many of them had already begun to enroll in the Army because there was a peacetime draft was taking them away. About 500 or 600 East Carolina college students would fight in the war. Some would not come home. But the war, World War Two, was just as insistent on changing things as World War One had. From these two descriptions, you can see that the outside world was always on the edge of the horizon, that this was no ivory tower. This was no retreat from reality, but indeed a place that thought about the world and thought about its mission to the rest of that world. One of the things that happened. At the end of World War Two is an influx of men, large numbers of men. Now you try to attract men in the 1930s particularly because you needed to uphold your enrollments President Wright and then President Meadows had fallen. Thought about it and thought that you needed a football team to attract those kind of people, and so it is that East Carolina Teachers College started playing football. They weren't very good at it. Now, baseball was another thing entirely. The teams were called the teachers that would eventually change to the pirates, and by the end of the decade, they would be known as the pirates. Football was difficult. It took a lot of people. You didn't give scholarships, you just wrote off expenses, and the question of whether they would stay here or transfer to somewhere else the next year was always one to be answered. Indeed, some of the first football players came from from North Carolina State, from Guilford, from Catawba, transferring to play the game. Success does come. The success comes in part because of a new coach, Christian Berry, who's also the athletic director, and in 1941 before the war starts, you have the great undefeated team, and nobody's done that since. I think that one of the things we forget is that college athletics, at least in those days, was a direct and specific item that changed social plans, changed economic plans, and touched the whole of The local area.

William M.A. Greene (36:57)
Our 1941 football team was undefeated. It's very interesting that, because of the World War Two, some of the teams with whom our coach had arranged games closed out the football and lost their people to induction into the, I mean drafting after the armed forces. So he had to shift around and get other games, and one of them was with the Portsmouth Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia, and we thought we would be run over. We sort of laughed about it. The local paper, data reflector. So they made a couple of comments about picking on these little fellows up at the hospital. It turned out there was a lot of professional football players. They were going through a period of examinations, health care, enabled preparing them for a military service or navy service. So they came down and walked on the field, and we said, also, this big bunch of fellows gonna crush us right away. But after the first half, we took, we took. We should be. We weathered the storm of being outweighed and we beat the good because we were better conditioned, better organized and certainly better coached. The season was by the highlight. Of course, the three years here,

Henry Farrell (38:34)
1946 could have really been a bad year, partly because the North Carolina legislature had added a 12th grade to all of the high schools in the state. That meant that there were no graduates. They were in the 11th grade and had state of the 12th from which to choose your new enrolled freshman. However, again, Uncle Sam plays a game to get involved, and that was the coming of the GI Bill. There were a lot of people who came to East Carolina who would not have been able to under the circumstances, under the government sponsored gi bills. And the result was that the college became increasingly male, and from 1946 until 1992 every student government association president would be a man.

William M.A. Greene (39:31)
I was the president of the men's Student Government my senior year, which would be graduating in 43 the election, but normally, eventually I lost to a fellow from Williamsburg, but then he went to the army because we were at war, everybody knows, starting in 1940 right after Pearl Harbor 41 and. And so I served out to what's his time as the president of the Mens Student Government. We have, of course, the women's and men's, for some reason,

Henry Farrell (40:11)
a rather interesting switch from that which went before. They also changed things. They were older, they had been through wars. They knew about the nature of difficulty, and they proved to be rather harsh on the faculty, there were complaints. What kind of complaints this guy doesn't teach very well. This guy is slow in returning his papers. This guy is always late to class. You can see in those kind of complaints, the determination on the part of these young veterans to get the job done and get on with it. The new president, President Messick, who had succeeded after some tumbling about, President meadows, was quite aware of this. He came to East Carolina in 1947 and one of the first things he wanted to do was to build a sufficient number of housing for these returning veterans and the young women now who were graduating and young men from high schools. It was a bad time, though inflation hit things, and you couldn't build anything. And so there was a postponement here that really didn't fade away into the early 1950s but under President Messick, a large number of buildings were built. The first dorms were built across by 10th Street. The tendency then was to move the front door of the college away from Harrington Hill and Fifth Street and towards 10th Street and the hill behind it. Property was bought with the help of local support, and the steps up College Hill began. There was already talk that we needed a new stadium, the stadium that present that served both football and baseball, is behind christianbury, and today, of course, it's about where Austin building stands. And that means, of course, that going up the hill would bring more people to see the games, and from that point on, you build a stadium, and you start with it until you have the 48,000 person stadium of today, there were no scholarships for athletes. The Veterans Club said there should be if you're just going to pay whoever shows up with free tuition, food and a room that's not good. You need to go out and find the best athletes. And so the veterans clubs, the Veterans Club, made one of the first contributions toward scholarships, athletic scholarships, and from then on, of course, that was the general practice

Chancellor John M Howell (42:58)
we had just begun to build up and be active in the area of institutional advancement and fundraising, or we'd raise some money, but we had not raised a good bit. And I told the person who was the Vice Chancellor for institutional advancement that I wanted to raise money for student scholarships and for endowed professorships, and he sort of kept that in mind when he was talking to people who might give us money, and we worked out an arrangement whereby people who gave money for a scholarship, which we called a University Scholar, they couldn't it could be named for the person who granted it. So the university scholars awards were named for a lot of different people who provided the money, and then, of course, the people who endowed a professorship could name that, and that would be an enticement, and I think that that did a lot to improve the faculty and the student body.

Henry Farrell (44:22)
President Messick was an aggressive North Carolinian who had had experience in higher education, as well as teaching in the high schools and academies. I think probably he was experienced as any president to that time. He also brought with him from New Jersey, where he was employed, a young man who had just returned from the Marine Corps by the name of Leo Jenkins. And Jenkins would come and become Dean of this college, basically the primary administrator when President Messick was away. What key points more bill. Students, insistence on more faculty with better degrees, in the sense that there would be final degrees, you move from having master's degrees to PhDs and doctorates. You also have an increasing variety of non teaching programs. That is to say that you can now be a history major or a math major or a business major without the necessity of taking teacher education. Now this may not be too important to a lot of people, but there comes the variety and the structure and the base that will eventually form into the university itself. Football, yeah, basketball, really good. Basketball, some success, some success in the other sports, but basketball was the sort of thing that people would jam Kristen berry just to see the games they were it was, it was a winter sport, and the coaches and the teams themselves playing in the north state league proved to be quite exciting. Parking not yet a problem. Most people didn't have cars, but it was beginning to show up as both affluence and the number of people now teaching and enrolled in the college, began to bring cars to school. Messick resigns in 1959 he argued basically that he was exhausted, that he had tried to get as much funding as he could for the young college, and he had not always been successful. He wrote Governor Hodges, who was governor at the time, I have been able to get not one cent for research for this college. All they want me to do is basically, he would surmise, teach.

Joel K. Butler (46:57)
I think it will that ECUs reputation will grow. I think the level of research and the new folks that are here that are promoting research, I think it will. It will, right now, it's been, in the past, great football school. It's been a great baseball school. It's been okay on basketball. I think basketball I think basketball is going to get there with our with our new coach. It's always been a growth school. It's been great because it has a Brody School of Medicine, and that's sort of a great storm in the crown. But I think in all those areas, I think even in the School of Medicine, I think we will move more and more toward being leading edge as far as our academics go, and as far as our as far as our research, I think it will be harder to get into in the future, because we will begin to be able to even recruit higher and higher levels of students will want to, want to come here. So I believe it is, I believe it's going to be even better than it is now. I think it's going to be a truly top notch school that that that will be attractive to a lot of young kids with abilities and desire to to be educated at a fine institution.

Henry Farrell (48:15)
In addition to that, there were two or three other things that had come into play. East Carolina was enrolling a lot of people, at least a lot of people. For 1950s North Carolina, its enrollments had passed 3000 students. That's just a few 1000 below the University of North Carolina, which is at Chapel Hill. And concern began to bubble. There's no doubt about this, that somehow or another East Carolina might outgrow the university itself. The new president, William Friday, encouraged his presidents. There were three of them, one in Greensboro, one in Raleigh, and one in Chapel Hill, to increase enrollments. Now part of that, of course, was need for the state. The population slump of the 1930s had withered away, and there were a large number of what you call the baby boomers showing up. These were the children born after World War Two, and they would make a sort of wave through the 50s and 60s and 70s, seeking places to become educated, as well as to educate and to work in professional undertakings. So us, then they begin to look at each other. East Carolina was certainly able to to stand on its own. Its new president, Leo Jenkins, had no intention of backing down at the same time, he was no fool. He didn't go screaming down the street and taking people head to head, arguing the needs for East Carolina in context with the needs for the state. However, 1962 a group of gentlemen from off campus. Us who belong to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, showed up for the 10 year review. This is something that's common in the southeast, and these 10 year reviews by what's called sacs, look at the nature of the college or the school or the university, make recommendations. Say these things are good, these things need improvement. And that was the start, really, of East Carolina's move toward university status. For in the SACS report of 1964 is a blueprint for a university. Up until this time, it had been a college, one of the things the report said was you need more administrative support here. You didn't have to tell Leo that he was going here, yonder and elsewhere. And so to find more people to do the work of administration was a necessity. The faculty needed upgrading. You needed more doctorates, more PhDs. You also needed more involvement by the faculty, and the report suggested a faculty council or faculty senate upon which faculty opinion could be focused. It talked also about the needs for residence halls and then or the normal expectation with residence halls, more teaching rooms, more learning places, using that report and probably putting it literally in his back pocket, he went off again to the legislature. He was not alone. He had an exceptional group of young administrators to boost his way. One was John Howell, a political scientist with a degree from Duke University, who was teaching there and was increasingly brought in to Leo's circle to add speeches, advice, interpretations of laws.

Chancellor John M Howell (51:49)
Well, Leo Jenkins was really my model, that he said he was a masterful administrator. He worked all the time. And when you were one of his lieutenants, you were on call all the time too. I bought a beach cottage and didn't put a phone in it, and one Sunday afternoon, he sent the Highway Patrol to get me to call him, but he had quite a vision for the University, and he knew how to get the people who worked with him to do a lot of work. He left them a lot of leeway once he got constants in him, and he knew what you were doing and wanted to know what you were doing, but he left you a lot of freedom as one of his subordinates to get things done, and that was a way of getting more work out of people. Of course,

Chancellor Leo W. Jenkins (53:00)
Ernest Ferguson was really the daddy of this thing in one way, he came to my house one afternoon, very angry. He had just returned from a trip to Duke University. They had a seminar on health care in eastern North Carolina, and he told me, among other things, that Eastern North Carolina had the worst record of any section of America. And he said, I'll be darn he said, You people ought to do something about it. It's your responsibility. And I said, Well, we're not in a medical business. Never have been. And he said, Well, you have a motto which is to serve, then why don't you live up to the motto instead of just having the motto? And I said, Well, I certainly will take seriously what you've told me, and I'll bring it to my board of trustees. But before I brought to the Board of Trustees, I did a little research to see that Dr Ferguson wasn't exaggerating a little bit, maybe. And I sent Dr Robert Williams out to do the research for me, and he came back he said, Dr Ferguson did not exaggerating. As a matter of fact, it's much worse than he even said it was. And he gave us all the statistics, and he could prove what he was saying, because he researched it very deeply. And finally, and then we knew that we had a problem.

Henry Farrell (54:14)
First moment, 1967 after some battles and some confusions, East Carolina becomes a university. Leo said, well, it is a university. Why not name it so? And it took a while, but the state legislature agreed. The next shoe was the School of Medicine, and that was another horse of a different color, medicine. What do you mean medicine? These people teach teachers in Greenville, they don't do medicine. And certainly, some of those who had invested much in the colleges and the Piedmont felt East Carolina was nothing but a usurper here bent upon robbing the treasury of North Carolina for specious reasons. The same time throughout eastern North Carolina, throughout Piedmont, North Carolina, throughout the southeast, there was a great, great lack of medical care. This came about in part because of population growth, but it came about also because of the problems of medical education in North Carolina. Basically they weren't producing enough doctors, enough MDS to take care of the population, and when you produced an MD he might go to Richmond or Norfolk or Washington City or somewhere else. So what Leo proposes is having a medical school in eastern North Carolina, private general practice that would recruit people with the idea that if you come here, you will stay in North Carolina and practice medicine.

Chancellor Leo W. Jenkins (55:54)
Sam Brody gave to this institution, a million and a half dollars to the medical school to get us started on a foundation. And the Brody family have always been, not only with us, they've been they've been good corporate citizens throughout the history of this region. They've helped many, many causes in eastern North Carolina. But they were particularly fond of our med school, and I'm happy that they felt that way about it.

Chancellor Richard Eakin (56:18)
I can't even count the number of friendships that my wife and I have established while at East Carolina. When you spend 14 years your life as Mr. And Mrs. Chancellor, essentially at a university, you develop a great number of friends and and they all have been entirely supportive and helpful to us in our work and in the succeeding several years now, since I've left the chancellorship, many of those friendships have persisted and continue to this day to be, to be something that's very important to us.

Chancellor John M Howell (56:56)
Oh, well, some of the best friends I've ever had in my life were people I work with here, and still, you know of those who are alive, I still maintain contact with them.

Henry Farrell (57:13)
Meanwhile, Jenkins was adding together those things that he needed, that the college needed now the university needed to build a school of medicine. He goes with Robert Williams to the American Medical Association in Chicago, and says, what do we need? And they come back and they say, you need allied health. You need support areas. Now, nursing had been a part of the curriculum since 1970 since 1964 so there was a base there. Finally, after much squabbling, and I must say, critical and untruthful comments from opponents, the state legislature passes the initial legislation to create the School of Medicine, which today, of course, is one of the great jewels of North Carolina. How about this? Well, after all, we're a democracy, and things have to go through the political screen, and certainly the medical school did. I don't think that we could list all the people, if we had more time, who participated in this move, but it must be said that Vice President Monroe, who later became vice chancellor for health affairs, would be one of The key ingredients of that team.

Dr. Garrie Moore (58:40)
East Carolina University is the school of choice, not just because of where it's located, but because of its rich heritage, because of what it offers to the region.

Dr. William Shelton (58:56)
ECU is the model of what the expectation for higher education in America was to be.

Professor Betty Darden (59:07)
East Carolina has always been my love and it gave me a wonderful education when I started teaching. This is more than one sentence. When I started teaching, I feel like that. I was ready, and I cope with all the changes that have been made since 1952

William M.A. Greene (59:41)
PCU is is historically progressive and will forever be progressive in its mission to serve.

Dr. Austin Bunch (59:58)
It's a school that has a great. Feel of affection for making that difference pretty quickly, and it doesn't have a lot of time to rest on its laurels, if you will. It gets on with things.

Chancellor Richard Eakin (1:00:12)
East Carolina University is a university that has, over the years, been a University of access, a University of opportunity. Added. Now to that equation is the notion of East Carolina University, a University of excellence. And it is a university that the people of North Carolina should take great pride in. And it's a university that I think is has an unbounded, positive future.

Chancellor John M Howell (1:00:41)
I think ECU is an institution that is always on the go to be better, only striving to be better.

Steve Ballard (1:00:52)
All of that means that we are in the top category of the 650 institutions that we have nationwide. We are a substantial institution. We started out as a very small regional institution, but not in the year 2006 we have progressed much beyond that. Now the

Henry Farrell (1:01:10)
University of North Carolina system was created in 1974 to put all the colleges and schools now all universities, with the exception of one school of art, School of Math, and one great big tent. And from that point on, the intention of the local college East Carolina had to be passed through a larger screen the Board of Governors as to whether you could teach this or whether you could teach that. Sometimes it proved difficult, but eventually, by 1997 the university was declared a doctoral institution, and it was on its way toward research advance. Not that it had not done research before then, but now it's specific. So here's that journey that boarding the ship, that making the sail, was part of this. Somebody, some wise guy, some smart fellow, said one time that we do not remember days. We remember moments and a high, complicated educational system, as is the case with East Carolina University, we remember moments it's impossible to recover the minute, the days themselves. And those of you who are graduates of the University can sit back and say, Well done, but there's more to be done, and you know about that too, whether it's football or basketball or women's volleyball or a million book library our young, eager teachers of students who come from everywhere, the minority folk of Eastern North Carolina, the African Americans are well served all of these folks at East Carolina University. And what will tomorrow bring? I don't know, and I surely wouldn't want to predict given the past. Thank you very much.

Chancellor Leo W. Jenkins (1:03:13)
It was a project of love, and it has to be one of dedication. It has to be one where people are looking for the truth, and we gave them the truth, and they acted upon the truth. And I think it's a victory, really, for the people of eastern North Carolina, because without their help, this stuff would never materialize.

Steve Ballard (1:03:42)
If in one sentence, ECU is the university for North Carolina.

Speaker 1 (1:03:47)
I cannot imagine one word describing ECU,

Professor Betty Darden (1:03:52)
Educational,

Speaker 2 (1:03:54)
caring,

William M.A. Greene (1:03:56)
exceptional,

Speaker 4 (1:03:58)
poised,

Speaker 5 (1:04:01)
pioneering.

Speaker 6 (1:04:03)
Ambitious,

Speaker 7 (1:04:05)
excellent.