Making North Carolina Literate: The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, from Normal School to Metropolitan University.

Making North Carolina Literate: The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, from Normal School to Metropolitan University. By Allen W. Trelease. (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, c. 2004. Pp. xx, 659. $40.00, ISBN 0-89089-523-6.)

Making North Carolina Literate: The University' of North Carolina at Greensboro, from Normal School to Metropolitan University is a comprehensive history of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) that places the school in the wider context of southern and American politics, society, and culture. Allen W. Trelease is Emeritus Professor of History at UNCG, where he taught from 1967 until 1994, and is the author of numerous scholarly books on the South. His personal and professional knowledge of the university and the region has resulted in a volume that should appeal to historians of higher education, women, and the region as well as to UNCG insiders.

Founded in 1892 as the State Normal and Industrial School, the school became North Carolina College for Women in 1919, the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina in 1932, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1963. Trelease traces the evolution of the administration, faculty, student body, curriculum, campus life, and physical plant from the institution's inception, and he also discusses the effect these changes have had on institutional identity and mission, faculty qualifications and workload, town-gown relationships, student recruitment and retention, and funding sources and levels. He is not afraid to tackle issues such as grade inflation, student/faculty quality and morale, and racial conflicts. The reader learns, for instance, that although the Woman's College peacefully integrated its undergraduate programs in 1956, it concurrently reintroduced single-gender education in its graduate programs in order to keep black men off the campus. Nor does Trelease try to sugarcoat unpleasant personalities. Chancellor Edward Kidder Graham Jr., for instance, is described as "a brash young man who proceeded almost immediately to split the college down the middle and provoke animosities that survived for a generation" (p. 217). Mereb Mossman, an academic dean, may have been a talented teacher and administrator, but she was viewed by many female faculty as someone who "systematically discriminated against women in hiring, promotion, and salaries" (p. 227).

Throughout its history, the university was the "redheaded step-child" in comparison to the favored sons at Chapel Hill and Raleigh. As Chancellor Gordon Blackwell put it, "'we felt that we were usually sucking on the hind tit' at appropriations time" (p. 284). Despite getting its first master's program in 1920 and its first doctoral program in 1960, UNCG did not receive anywhere near the resources of the two research universities. Although its transformation to a coeducational university in 1963 and consolidation into the university system in 1972 led supporters to hope for improved treatment, the inequities remained. Nonetheless, Trelease is proud of the contributions UNCG has made to "making North Carolina literate" in the last century. Just as the Normal School met the pressing need for teachers in 1892, UNCG today provides the myriad of programs and degrees demanded by contemporary residents of the region. Trelease agrees with Jerome Ziegler that metropolitan universities such as UNCG are "the land-grant institutions of the twenty-first century" (p. 409).

Making North Carolina Literate is a meticulously researched and written history of UNCG, but its plethora of names and statistics can at times be overwhelming. The volume would have benefited from the inclusion of vignettes delineating the lives of selected faculty, students, and staff over the years, perhaps from the UNCG Centennial Oral History Interviews that Trelease cites in his bibliography. Similarly, the discussion of the various permutations of faculty, departments, and programs is often too short to provide a sense of the personalities and experiences involved but too long for the smooth flow of the narrative. Much of this information could be condensed in a list of who's who in the appendix. These are minor shortcomings, however, in a valuable study of the transformation of an institution from a normal school to a metropolitan university.

AMY THOMPSON MCCANDLESS

College of Charleston