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Dormitories

The university's first dorm was its first building. When Hinton James arrived on campus in 1795, Old East was the only building on campus. It was not long before the number of students outgrew the available space, even with six people in each room. Many of the earliest buildings have housed students at some point in their history, including South Building, Old West, New East, and New West. With the rapid growth of the university in the early twentieth century, there was a significant increase in the construction of dormitories. Vance, Battle, and Pettigrew Halls were completed in 1912 to house students. An additional ten residence halls were built in the 1920s, including Spencer Residence Hall, the first dorm built to house women students. The university continued to use land on the east side of campus for student housing through the 1940s. The post—World War II boom in enrollment saw the most serious housing crisis yet. With thousands of veterans returning to school, the dorms were filled to capacity and the university installed twenty-six Quonset huts as temporary housing. Even with the extra space, a few students were relegated to trailers and even tents on campus.

In the 1950s the university began to look toward South Campus as a growth area for student housing. In 1958 Avery, Parker, and Teague dorms were completed near Kenan Stadium. The most significant change in student housing came a few years later, in 1962, when the high-rise Ehringhaus and Craige dorms opened. The six-floor dorms were followed in 1965 and 1967 by Morrison and Hinton James dorms, both ten stories tall. Located far from north campus, the high-rises were an attempt to make the most economical and efficient use of the dwindling land available to the university. The push to build even bigger and higher dorms did not last long. There was discussion of building a twenty-one-story dorm on campus, but it was canceled. When the university built new dorms in early 2002, they were smaller and designed to bring more of a traditional campus feel to South Campus.

Dining

Campus dining halls have been a part of campus life —and students have complained about them —since the earliest days of the university. The second building built on campus, after Old East, was Steward's Hall, which opened in 1795. From the beginning students were unhappy with the food. In petitions to the faculty in 1809, students complained about the quality of food at Steward's Hall, citing "an insufficiency of butter," and beef that is "sometimes tainted, and impregnated with fly-blows." Steward's Hall was eventually leased to a local resident and run as a private business. Many UNC students in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries got their meals from local boarding houses.

In 1898 the university converted an old gymnasium building into a new dining hall known as Commons Hall. Built on the current site of Phillips Hall, Commons served student meals until 1914, when the much more modern Swain Hall opened. Swain was the main campus dining hall for the next twenty-five years. The opinion of the students about the food offered there can be inferred by the nickname then in regular use, "Swine Hall."

Students never warmed to Swain Hall, and the campus soon outgrew the facility. In 1939 the university opened Lenoir Hall, a large, modern space that could seat up to 1,300 students at a time. Following World War II, students began to have multiple options for eating on campus, including the Pine Room, a snack bar in Lenoir, and the Monogram Club. When campus housing expanded to South Campus in the 1960s, student dining followed. The immediately unpopular Chase Hall cafeteria opened in 1965, and some dorms housed dining facilities.

Campus dining facilities were operated by the university until 1969. Almost immediately following a strike of cafeteria workers who were protesting low pay and poor working conditions, the university outsourced campus dining to Saga Corporation, a company that managed campus dining operations at schools around the country. Saga was soon replaced by Servo-O-Mation, then by ARA, which later changed its named to Aramark and has managed dining at UNC for several decades.

One of the strangest periods in campus dining came in 1997, when privately operated food stands were placed around Polk Place to serve hungry students during a major renovation of Lenoir. The booths, which included one dedicated to corn on the cob, made the campus look like a county fair. When Lenoir reopened it was fully modernized and gave students a wide variety of dining options.

Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies

Commonly known as the "Di" and "Phi," the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies are the oldest student organizations at Carolina and were at the heart of student life throughout the university's early history. Students founded a debating society in 1795, less than a year after the university opened. A rival society was founded shortly after, and the groups soon changed their names to the Dialectic Society and Philanthropic Society. They competed for students for several years before agreeing to divide incoming students geographically: those from west of Raleigh would join the Dialectic Society, while those east of Raleigh would join the Philanthropic.

In an era before the university provided any support for student social and nonacademic life, the societies helped with entertainment (participating in and attending formal debates counted as entertainment) and enforced student discipline with a series of fines for bad behavior. They also purchased books, building libraries that, by 1850, would be three times the size of the university's own library. Realizing the importance of the societies in promoting student self-governance, the UNC Board of Trustees in 1885 passed a resolution requiring all students to join one of the two groups. The requirement was in place for only ten years, but the majority of students still joined one of the societies even after they were no longer required to. The popularity of the societies began to wane following World War I, as more student activities (including athletics) became available and the Campus Y emerged as the new center of student life.

In their debates, the societies often took on controversial issues. An 1834 debate on the topic, "Ought slavery to be abolished?" was in favor of abolition. However, when they debated in 1837 on whether "slavery was an evil morally or politically," the answer was no. In 1945 the Di Society resolved that the system of racial segregation known as Jim Crow should be abolished and that African Americans should be admitted to UNC.

As the campus changed in the twentieth century, so did the societies. In 1930 they began to admit women. In 1959 they voted to merge into a single organization, the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, or DiPhi. Membership dwindled, but never to the point of dissolution; there has always been a group of new UNC—Chapel Hill students interested in debate and in being part of the university's oldest tradition.

Date Established: 1795

Date Range: 1795 – Present