POSTCARD FROM CHAPEL HILL: Town and Gown in Chapel Hill

CHAPEL HILL, N.C.—With most of the students gone home from “Carolina”—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—this quintessential college town, my home town, is usually pretty quiet in the summer. The lines in the grocery stores disappear, the waits for a table at the best restaurants dramatically decrease and the headache of finding a parking space downtown is temporarily relieved.

Yet this summer, the calm has been disrupted. Residents are up in arms, launching petition drives and filling town hall for the Town Council’s weekly meetings.

The object of all this activity and protest is Carolina’s plan to go on a major construction spree over the next decade. The school is currently seeking town approval of a development plan that would create 5.8 million square feet of building space over the next several decades, adding everything from undergraduate dormitories to science labs. To provide some perspective, Harvard’s entire campus in Cambridge has only 12.2 million square feet of building space.

The wave of construction is part of a general move both to modernize the state’s public universities and to enlarge them. As more and more children of the Baby Boomers reach college age, the state’s public schools will need to grow to accommodate them all; this past November, voters approved a $3.1 billion bond issue to expand higher education. Carolina alone will receive almost $500 million from the bonds and will raise its enrollment by about 20 percent.

Yet Carolina must seek town approval before embarking on the construction, because the current zoning agreement between the town and university sets a cap on the number of square feet that Carolina can build. The most vocal opponents to Carolina’s expansion are residents of neighborhoods adjacent to the campus, which would lose the undeveloped buffer that now separates them from the school. Other residents merely object on the basis of the impact the plans would have on the town’s traffic patterns or environment. They don’t want the development to destroy the small-town nature of Chapel Hill or bring the same kind of sprawl that private developers are stringently prohibited from creating. And finally, there’s an issue of money. As a branch of the state government, Carolina does not have to pay property taxes on the land and buildings it owns. While the town will not lose much property tax revenue from the plan, as Carolina already owns nearly all the land it will be developing, the expansion is sure to add to town expenditures, such as those for fire and police protection.

These arguments are bound to sound quite familiar to anyone acquainted with recent developments in the relationship between Harvard and its neighbors. Cambridge residents express almost identical concerns to Harvard’s plans to build an art museum on Memorial Drive or a new home for the Department of Government on Cambridge Street. Given the similarities, perhaps these arguments should just be dismissed as the natural opposition of residents to the expansion of any university—a NIMBY phenomenon present in many college towns.

Yet the argument most troubling to me is one unique to Chapel Hill and Carolina. Through this development push by Carolina, in the course of one year, town-gown relations between Carolina and Chapel Hill have gone from exemplary to abysmal. When I arrived in Cambridge, I marveled at how poorly Harvard and Cambridge got along. Today, Harvard-Cambridge relations seem quite normal (and Harvard’s relationship with Cambridge has remained as chilly as ever during the last two years).

To me it seems clear that Carolina is at fault for such the decline in relations and that the decline stems from its administrator’s lack of respect for the town.

Much of this lack of respect may come from the recent tendency of Carolina to look outward for its leaders. While for most of its history, the leaders of Carolina were nearly always North Carolinians and Carolina graduates, this pattern has recently shifted—neither Carolina’s current chancellor nor its provost had spent any substantial time in Chapel Hill before their selection. Such a change means that Carolina’s administrators never have gotten the chance to see the uniqueness of the town and may only see the town as a hindrance to their expansion plans.

For the past year this lack of respect has been made clear in various ways. Carolina has been confrontational with town leaders. Residents were given little input as to the shape of the final master plan. And Carolina has reversed itself on a number of promises, including one made not to develop certain portions of land. The ultimate manifestation of this lack of respect came in late May, when a provision was placed in the state’s budget to remove Chapel Hill’s right to regulate any of the university’s development within the town. The provision was included as a result of secret discussions between top Carolina administrators and the majority leader of the North Carolina Senate, who is also a prominent member of Carolina’s alumni association. Through the commendable work of the state legislators representing Chapel Hill, the provision was later removed—but it was a slap in the face to the town and its residents to suggest that they could not have any input in how our town is developed.

I am a great lover of both Chapel Hill and Carolina—as those who have ever been around me during a Carolina basketball game know. Such a lack of respect and marked decline in town-gown relations is particularly upsetting because of the degree to which the greatness of each depends on that of the other. Carolina is a great place to go to school in large part because Chapel Hill is a great place to live, and vice versa. More than a handful of today’s residents of Chapel Hill first came to the town as students and so fell in love with the town and Carolina that they never left or they came back in later life. People don’t call Chapel Hill the southern part of Heaven without reason.

In seeking to move its facilities into the next century, Carolina needs to remember its ties to its city. Carolina cannot forget what has made it special in the past centuries—something for which no number of buildings will ever substitute.

Daniel P. Mosteller ’03, a Crimson editor, is a history concentrator in Mather House. He went home to Chapel Hill, N.C., before returning to Cambridge to write for The Crimson’s summer editions.