The South, the State University and the Regional Promise

THE SOUTH, THE STATE UNIVERSITY AND THE REGIONAL PROMISE Willard B. Gatewood, Jr. Fayetteville Dr. Bishop: Graduates of 1977; Faculty Colleagues; Members of the Board of Trustees; honored guests; ladies and gentlemen. It is extraordinarily rare for a member of the faculty to be invited to deliver the commencement address of his own institution. I, of course, consider it a great personal honor, but more than that, it is a signal recognition of the entire faculty and the centrality of its place within the university community, as this institution, enters with the rest of the country our third century as a nation. As a historian convinced that ignoring or misperceiving the past, or worse still, holding to one that never existed, vastly increases the chances of creating a future we never wanted, and as a Southerner, that breed of American, we are told, who likes nothing better than to talk about his region, it comes as natural for me and, hopefully, as appropriate for this occasion, to address my remarks to the topic, “The South, The State University and the Regional Promise.” Precisely the constituencies represented by this audience - that is, those of us within the University, those about to leave as graduates, and those friends and supporters from across the state and elsewhere - will largely determine the course of this institution and the adequacy of its performance in fulfilling the promises of our third century. For those of us in the South, who also confront another, in a long succession of “New Souths,” an informed per- spective of the topography over which we must travel is essential, if we are to take into the future the best, rather than the worst, of the regional past. To view higher education from a regional perspective is to invite a variety of objections. I am aware that good universities, like good ideas, ought not to be evaluated on the basis of geography, and that a university locates itself universally, not particularly or parochially, that its body may reside in Fayetteville, Ann Arbor or Berkeley, but its mind - its true life - is “transcendent, cosmopolitan, at home i