Synopses & Reviews
Few North Carolinians are as well known or as widely respected as William Friday. Although he has never run for elected office, the former president of the University of North Carolina has been prominent in public affairs for decades and ranks as one of the most important American university presidents of the post-World War II era. In this comprehensive biography, William Link traces Friday's long and remarkable career.
Friday's thirty years as president of the university, from 1956 to 1986, spanned the greatest period of growth for higher education in American history, and he played a crucial role in shaping the sixteen-campus university during that time of tumultuous social change. In the 1960s and 1970s, he confronted a series of administrative challenges, including the expansion of the university system, the evolving role of the federal government in the affairs of a public university, an intercollegiate athletics scandal, the anticommunism crusade and the Speaker Ban, and racial integration.
Link also explores Friday's influential work outside the university in American higher education, on the Carnegie Commission on the Future of American Education and the White House Task Force on Education, and in the development of the National Humanities Center and the growth of Research Triangle Park. Now retired from the university, Friday heads the William R. Kenan, Jr., Fund and the Kenan Charitable Trust.
Review
A fascinating account of Friday's reign during a period of explosive growth and unusual challenges in education and in politics.
Charlotte Observer
Review
[I]nformative and even inspirational.
Journal of American History
Review
[R]equired reading for students of modern American history, civil rights policy, public law litigation, and the politics of higher education.
Journal of Southern History
Review
Link has written a good story of a great man. Bill Friday is the best North Carolinian of his time.
Charles Kuralt
About the Author
William A. Link, Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida, is author of The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 and A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction, xi
PART I. Drawn to Power
1. The Barefoot Son of the Mayor of Dallas, 3
2. The Winds of War, 39
3. Ascent to Power, 62
PART II. Defender of the Purpose
4. The Roaring Lions of Reaction, 95
5. The Wolf's Taking Over, 128
6. Restructuring the University System, 159
7. This Is Bill Friday Country, 186
8. The East Carolina Challenge, 221
PART III. The Dilemmas of Power
9. The _Adams_ Court, 249
10. Queen Elizabeth in the Baltimore Orioles Dugout, 277
11. The Chasm May Be Narrow, but It Also Runs Deep, 306
12. Walking Backwards into the Eighties, 338
Conclusion: The Second Education of William Friday, 367
Notes, 387
Bibliography, 459
Acknowledgments, 471
Index, 473
ILLUSTRATIONS
Mary Elizabeth Rowan Friday and David Latham Friday, 1919, 5
Dallas School, October 1927, 14
Dallas High School, May 1937, 21
Bill Friday and his father at the Southern Textile Exposition, April 4, 1941, 32
State College commencement, Frank Thompson Gymnasium, June 9, 1941, 35
Ensign William Friday, Spring 1942, 41
U.S. Naval Training School, Notre Dame, June 20, 1942, 47
Friday with Robert Burton House, 66
At Frank Porter Graham's U.S. Senate swearing-in ceremony, March 29, 1949, 72
Friday as Gordon Gray's assistant, 1951, 78
Friday with Luther Hodges, 90
Friday's inauguration as UNC president, May 8, 1957, 96
Ida Friday at Bill Friday's
inauguration, May 8, 1957, 97
Friday's UNC administration, 102
Friday and William Aycock, 1964, 113
The Friday family, 1964, 190
Bill and Ida Friday, UNC commencement, June 3, 1963, 192
Friday and John F. Kennedy, UNC Founders Day, Kenan Stadium, October 12, 1961, 201
Friday and Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House, 1968, 207
Carnegie Commission on the Future of Higher Education, Chapel Hill, November 1968, 209
A moment of relaxation, Lake Toxaway, N.C., 1975, 214
With Tom Wicker on _North Carolina People_, 219
Raymond H. Dawson, 279
At the inauguration of C. D. Spangler, 1986, 371
In 'retirement,' 383
Friday and Bill Clinton, UNC Founders Day, Kenan Stadium, October 12, 1993, 385