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Mitchell Hall

Mitchell Hall opened in 1964 to serve as the home for the Department of Geology and has remained so for more than fifty years. The building is named for Elisha Mitchell, a native of Connecticut and graduate of Yale who was hired in 1818 as chair of mathematics at UNC. Mitchell would remain at Carolina for nearly forty years, serving at various times as bursar, superintendent of property, and acting president. Despite coming from New England, Mitchell joined the practice of enslaving people and, in 1848, published a sermon he gave in defense of slavery, in which he referred to African Americans as a race "of inferior moral and mental endowment." Mitchell was influential in broadly expanding the curriculum in natural sciences at the university. He also made a lasting contribution to the landscape by ordering and supervising the construction of the low stone walls around campus. He is recognized statewide for his efforts to measure the elevation of the mountains in western North Carolina. On one of these visits in 1857, during an attempt to determine the highest peak in the state, Mitchell fell and died. The mountain he was measuring was named Mount Mitchell in his honor.

Date Established: 1964

Date Range: 1964 – Present

Medicine, School of

The university first established a School of Medicine in 1879. It was a two-year program, designed to provide students with the fundamentals of medical education, with the understanding that they would continue their education elsewhere. This first effort was short-lived, with the school closing in 1885 after the first dean resigned. It reopened in 1890 as a "special school of medicine and pharmacy."

The School of Medicine moved around campus, housed at different times in New East and Person Hall before moving into the university's first building constructed for medical education, Caldwell Hall, in 1912. The school also used a small wooden building south of campus as a "dissecting hall." Students were required to take a course in dissection as part of their study of anatomy. This introduced the problem common at nineteenth-century medical schools: finding bodies to operate on. The university, not unlike other medical schools at the time, was believed to have employed grave robbers to secure cadavers. The majority of bodies used by the students during that era were African Americans.

In 1902 UNC began a "University of North Carolina Medical Department at Raleigh," offering classes in the state capital. But this closed in 1909, as the university had difficulty funding both programs. As the university advocated to expand to a full four-year medical program, the university system and legislature explored other options, including a rumored proposal from Bowman Gray to fund the school, provided it move to Winston-Salem. In the late 1940s the legislature finally agreed to support a four-year medical program and the establishment of a teaching hospital in Chapel Hill. The North Carolina Memorial Hospital opened in 1952 and the first class of the four-year program graduated in 1954.

Since the establishment of the four-year program, the School of Medicine and related programs in health sciences have seen rapid growth. In 1971 the school significantly expanded its statewide reach with the establishment of Area Health Education Centers. These regional centers provide continuing education opportunities for health professionals across North Carolina.

The school grew throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, expanding throughout South Campus and establishing new programs and centers focused on genome sciences, maternal and infant health, infectious disease, cardiovascular biology, cancer research, and many others. By the 2010s the School of Medicine was consistently recognized as one of the nation's leading medical schools.

Media and Journalism, School of

The English department began courses in journalism in 1909, and UNC set up a separate Department of Journalism in 1924. Gerald W. Johnson, who went on to a distinguished journalism and writing career, served as the first department chair. The department became a School of Journalism in 1950, expanded to School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 1990, and adopted its current name in 2015. The school's first dean was Oscar J. Coffin, a Daily Tar Heel editor and Carolina alumnus, who led the department and the school for twenty-seven years.

When the department began in 1924, there were seventeen students, including five women. It had space on the second floor of New West, just above the Daily Tar Heel offices. Over the years the department and school have been in Bynum Hall, Howell Hall, and Carroll Hall. Today it has more than 900 students in bachelor's, master's, and doctoral programs, with areas of study in advertising and public relations, journalism, and business journalism. It also offers special programs in environment and science communication, health communication, Latino journalism and media, sports communication, and a joint M.A./J.D. degree with the School of Law.

The School of Media and Journalism has a number of distinguished alumni who have advanced the profession, including twenty-four alumni or faculty who have won or been part of twenty-eight Pulitzer Prizes. Graduates include Emily Steel of the New York Times, Brooke Baldwin of CNN, editorial cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, and Stuart Scott of ESPN, among many more.