Basketball may be the undeclared religion at Carolina, but it by no means is its most protected sacred icon.

NOT YOUR AVERAGE JOE Retiring University librarian Joe Hewitt is flanked by many members of the University Library staff in Davis Library. (Photo by Andrew Ross)

That distinction belongs to the University Library. And for Robert Shelton, it was one of the first and hardest lessons he learned soon after becoming provost in spring of 2001 when he made the mistake of uttering "budget cut" and "library" in the same sentence.

The rebuke was both sharp and swift from ever-vigilant library supporters such as medieval history professor Richard Pfaff.

What Shelton discovered was that people at Carolina do not just care about the library here -- they make sure it is being cared for as well.

Shelton got the message and so, too, did the chancellor. In his first State of the University Address in fall of 2001, James Moeser said, "Never again should we put the library at risk when budget cuts threaten, no matter how severe the situation ... We cannot be a great university without a great library."

Out in the audience, taking note, was Joe Hewitt, who will step down as University librarian and retire at the end of the month.

At a May 21 retirement reception honoring Hewitt, Shelton recounted the budget-cutting episode from three years before as he reviewed Hewitt's distinguished years of service.

"Faculty members, members of the Friends [of the Library] Board of Directors and students were loud and clear that you don't mess with the Library's budget at Carolina."

And that is as it should be, Shelton said. "It's central to our mission of what we teach and what we learn here."

Hewitt, in a later interview, refused to take credit for this depth of support. It was there before he became librarian, he said, and will continue long after he leaves.

"It's not deeply rooted in all universities, but it is here," Hewitt said. "It really didn't start with me. I think I maybe helped to push it along a little bit, but this faculty has always been supportive of the library."

Learning curves
Hewitt, he will tell you, has always had a mind that roamed, not a bad quality for a librarian, but not so good when he first showed up here from Shelby to begin his freshman year in the fall of 1956.

He arrived as a Morehead scholar, with all the academic promise that distinction foretold, and then proceeded to show none of it.

It was not that he was not interested in learning, or incapable of it. He was interested in learning a great deal, Hewitt said. The problem was that his quixotic intellectual pursuits seldom intersected with any actual assignments from teachers, as his grades would inevitably reveal.

Hewitt found a home in the Humanities Reading Room of Wilson Library, whiling away the hours immersed in the worlds of Russian writers such as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.

GOODBYES Gary Marchionini (left), Boshamer professor in the School of Information and Library Science, greets University librarian Joe Hewitt at his retirement reception in May.

After only a year, his bad grades caught up with him and he quit school, then enlisted in the Army for no better reason than to avoid being drafted. He ended up at the U.S. Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., where he would spend six hours a day learning Russian. He would go on to serve as a radio intercept operator in the middle of a field of antennae along what was then the border of East and West Germany.

The one thing he had needed to learn more than anything was discipline, he later understood, and for that the Army proved to be a most exacting instructor. Within the span of a few months, he had been transformed from a callow student to a spy on the front line of the Cold War.

After completing his three-year enlistment, he returned to Carolina to complete his bachelor's degree in history, with thoughts of going to graduate school and one day becoming an historian.

Once again, his experiences in Wilson Library -- this time as a student assistant helping librarians build the Slavic collection -- steered him onto an unintended path.

With encouragement from librarians at Wilson, he entered the School of Information and Library Science.

After earned his MLS, the former head of acquisitions at Wilson lured Hewitt to the University of Colorado. Hewitt would end up staying nine years, earning his doctorate along the way.

In 1975, he returned to Carolina to become the associate University librarian for technical services. In 1993, then-Provost Dick Richardson named Hewitt as the associate provost for University libraries.

Hewitt was interested in the job, but not a title that seemed to run as long as the opening sentence of a Pasternak novel. Hence, Hewitt created a new title for his new job: "University librarian," the only two words that said it all.

A record of accomplishment
Much harder to whittle down than his title is the long list of milestones and achievements that rightfully belong under Hewitt's name.

In 1994, the library established its first homepage on the World Wide Web.

In 1995, by the close of the University's Bicentennial Campaign, the library had received $11.6 million from 7,000 donors.

In 1996, the library began all-night service in Robert B. House Undergraduate library and announced the creation of "Documenting the American South," now an award-winning web site, found at docsouth.unc.edu. The digital publishing initiative began as an experimental project to digitize a few oft-told slave narratives. Today, the project encompasses 1,250 full-text books, along with scanned manuscript items, images, artifacts and audio files.

In 2002, the Friends of the Library completed a fund-raising campaign to raise $2 million for the undergraduate library renovation that found itself caught in the tide of red ink wrought by a hurricane three years before.

"It was a long haul to get that building," Hewitt said. "Hurricane Floyd came along and we had to revert money that would have gone to build it. We then had to go back and justify it as part of the bond, which means we had to win approval twice."

The $2 million raised in private money allowed for the renovations that transformed the 1968 structure into the open, comfortable and elegant learning environment it is today.

No list of Hewitt's accomplishments would be complete without mention of the acquisitions made under his watch.

Editor's note: Jeffery Beam, a poet and technical assistant in the Biology Library, spoke at a May 21 retirement reception for Joe Hewitt, thanking him "for his unlimited and imaginative generosity, good will, and concern for support staff during his tenure as library director." "I have observed and benefited from it firsthand, but I know I speak on behalf of the support staff and wish to tell him how much we will miss him," Beam said. Beam then read "Library," a poem by Paul Engle and one of Hewitt's favorites. Beam also gave Hewitt a framed copy of the poem, which Engle wrote for the 50th anniversary of the Coe College Class of 1931. Library Fire burns the trembling hand. Cold freezes the five fingers. Rock breaks unbending bone. But books can grab you by the throat and kill. Go to a library, listen. You can hear Books inside their bindings breathing aloud. Hear phrases, reckless, howling from their type, Hear jokes tickling your ear with a fine feather, Hear screams of rage, delight, and agony. Some books have brutal teeth that snap and bite, Collared dogs on a tight leash. Passions of men and women cry Out of the silence from the printed page. Some books, soft as a hand, caress your hand. Beware the library, its books - Dangerous dynamite dropped by men. When they explode, governments disappear. Some covers hold ideas - live steam - Open them; they can shatter your face. The mind - a gun shooting at history. The brain - under pressure in a book Whose words - stronger than rocket fuel - The sky's the limit in their furious fire. Libraries live, walls tremble, books Bounce on their shelves. In terrible times Enter, your life comforted by theirs.

Among them are the papers of journalist Charles Kuralt, added in 1997, and the Aldo P. Magi Collection of Thomas Wolfe material, brought in two years later.

In 2000, the library acquired its five-millionth volume, William Butler Yeats' "Poems," part of a Yeats collection purchased by the John Wesley and Anna Hodgin Hanes Foundation.

2002 saw the addition of the Andre Savine Collection documenting the Russian Diaspora following the Bolshevik Revolution -- material, no doubt, that might well have caught the interest of a certain freshman from Shelby 48 years before.

Finally, in 2003, a Californian named Eugene Earl donated more than 60,000 78-rpm country records to the Southern Folklife Collection in Wilson Library, making it the largest collection of Southern folk music in the world aside from the Library of Congress.

Debt of gratitude
When Hewitt steps down as librarian June 30, he will not be walking away from the library, just getting there a little later and not staying as long.

As part of phased retirement, he will keep his faculty appointment with the School of Information and Library Science, where he will continue to focus on research trends. He will also stay on the editorial board of "Documenting the American South."

During the retirement reception for Hewitt, held in Walter Royal Davis Library, a handful of people spoke of Hewitt's attributes and contributions over the years.

Among them was Neil Fulghum, the keeper of the North Carolina Collection Gallery, who spoke on behalf of all the Academic Affairs Library.

Fulghum recalled his first encounter with Hewitt some 18 years before, when Fulghum was first hired to build the gallery. He arrived on his first day of work, at the age of 33, with what was supposed to be a children's disease, chicken pox, "looking like something the neighbor's cat had chewed up and deposited on the back porch."

When Hewitt first saw him, Fulghum added, "I expected him to gasp in horror or at least scoot me out of the library with a broom."

Instead, Hewitt was unflappable and gracious, two qualities that Fulghum came to understand were ingrained in Hewitt's nature.

Those qualities were once again on display one afternoon in 1993 when Fulghum noticed Hewitt escorting a group of visiting scholars through Wilson Library.

Hewitt had just been named the University librarian, and Fulghum remarked to him in passing, "`By the way, Dr. Hewitt, congratulations on your promotion.' He smiled and then politely corrected me: `It's not Dr. Hewitt. Just Joe.'"

This was not, Fulghum explained, a cosmetic rejection of formality. "It was indicative of Joe's basic priorities for the library itself: always substance -- results -- never appearance or title."

Shelton recalled last spring when Andrei Sigov, chancellor of the Mirea Technicla University in Moscow, visited campus with his wife for ceremonies tied to the Andre Savine Collection.

"We left South Building and strolled down to look at the undergrad and at Davis, and of course he saw Wilson that night at dinner," Shelton said. "In his remarks that evening he not only commented on the splendor of our buildings, collections and services, but on the wisdom of our University librarian."

Sigov had been a close friend of Savine's, and he spoke with great emotion as he talked about how happy he was that Hewitt had encouraged Nadia Zilper to pursue Savine's collection, even though the funding to acquire it was uncertain.

"It's not every University Librarian who would encourage such a pursuit," Shelton said. "I think it is typical, indeed emblematic, of Joe's leadership.

"He has led this library quietly but forcefully during a period of extraordinary change and growth."

Speaking on behalf of the faculty was Pfaff, who still has in his office the Sept. 8, 1975, Administration Board of the Library minutes that include the announcement of Hewitt's appointment.

Over the years, Pfaff said, the library has faced a host of challenges, from cancellation of series to occasional ordering freezes to the "extortionate practices" of publishers of journals, particularly those in electronic formats. Another emerging issue deals with the "shadow of surveillance" posed by the Patriot Act that could threaten the cherished right of free inquiry, Pfaff said.

"Despite all these crises -- and many more which could be detailed -- the sky has never fallen in," he said. "Indeed, as I've been thinking about Joe's stewardship here and our assessment of it, it seems to me that we can extrapolate an overall faculty reaction of a dawning unconsciousness, rather than a conscious awareness, that under his management all manner of things in the library were on the whole well and likely to be well; that we could go about our work, whether in its teaching or its research component, without what might be termed `library anxiety'; and beyond that, that our library was a source not only of enablement but of positive pride, one of the great strengths and great glories of this University."

Not that Pfaff was abandoning the call of eternal vigilance, mind you.

"I hope that Joe would be the first to agree that some faculty edginess is, as well as inevitable, occasionally useful -- even possibly a touch of faculty obnoxiousness. But today all edginess is blurred by our gratitude."