The Daily Tar Heel
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The Daily Tar Heel

Letter: Campus needs more productive dialogues

TO THE EDITOR:

The Daily Tar Heel’s editorial impatience with the ongoing review of UNC campus history is misplaced. You seem to call for instant history, inevitably biased by the present agitation for the erasure of campus memories and eras now in political disfavor. It is symptomatic that correspondents who find Silent Sam objectionable resort to demeaning epithets in lieu of argument. UNC students and faculty of the past, including those who died for a cause they believed in, did not realize that they were out of date by 21st century standards — just as people of the so-called “Middle Ages” did not know that they were in the “middle” of anything.

The leaders of the anti-historical mania seem to be unaware of the fact that they are transitory figures in a stream that reaches back through many historical transitions to 1793. Likewise, they seemingly don’t realize that their privileged enrollment in an institution with a long and proud past might prompt a feeling of historical modesty.

The Alumni Review reports that the trustees’ misguided erasure of William Saunders’ name from Saunders Hall was overwhelmingly condemned by alumni who wrote letters to the review — a signal that the self-appointed monitors of historical correctness are in a minority and apparently do not pause to reflect that they, too, have limited horizons. That doesn’t make them mistaken. But in a place dedicated to learning and inquiry, intellectual modesty and courtesy are becoming virtues.

Edwin M. Yoder Jr. Editor, The Daily Tar Heel 1955-56

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