Lord knows I've asked myself this question more than once at 4 a.m.; my ungraded two-page column being finished, my most definitely graded 10-page paper remaining unfinished.
But why should you care about my personal crisis in time management? Well, you should care because my late-night questioning is indicative of other questions we should ask about our university.
Why are student elections a four-week-long carnival each year while lectures by certain visiting scholars are sparsely attended? And why do poetry recitations often seem less popular than Pit-sitting?
All these questions have the same answer: The typical UNC education, for better or worse, occurs just as much outside our classrooms as it does within them.
While the book-learning here isn't too shabby, it pales in comparison to the vigorous and dynamic student life in which you can participate. From a student newspaper with a readership of 39,000 to a student-managed judicial system to an unending number of opportunities for service at the Campus Y, this University is unsurpassed in its opportunities for hands-on education.
So, why are we like this? The answer is simple -- it's in our university's tradition as a public institution. Like a psychoanalyst would tell one of her clients, our forebears deserve the blame or praise for who we've become. In the 19th century, when Duke and Wake Forest were backwater Bible colleges encouraging future preachers to turn inward to examine the intricacies of scripture, UNC was essentially a leadership institute, preparing the children of the state's elite for lives of lawyering and legislating.
UNC has retained this character; our University today still isn't much of a place for pie-in-the-sky abstraction.
We have a strong practical bent and have always favored service and the application of knowledge more than learning for its own sake. A list of our strongest programs -- business, journalism and information and library sciences -- confirms this.
Beyond creating a climate conducive to a practical education, UNC's ties to the state also force our students to become more civically engaged than students at private universities. Our status as a public university made "Approaching the Qur'
