Editor’s note: Following is the text of the University Day keynote speech “Chance and Change,” given by Christopher Mead Armitage, an English professor who joined the faculty in 1967. He specializes in 17th- and 20th-century English and Canadian literature and was awarded the first UNC Professor of Distinguished Teaching in 1995, the Nicholas Salgo Outstanding Teacher Award, and two Bowman and Gordon Gray chairs for undergraduate teaching.

Professor of English Christopher Armitage delivers the keynote address “Chance and Change” at University Day on Oct. 12.

The first experience I shared with North Carolina came about by chance in October 1954. That date may resonate with older members of the audience as the time of Hurricane Hazel, the most devastating hurricane to afflict the state, costing almost $10 billion in today’s money. Hazel then careened north, reaching into Canada , before turning east into the Atlantic Ocean . In mid-Atlantic, it hit the Canadian passenger ship “The Empress of France,” on which I was emigrating from England with my Canadian fiancée. Being tossed up and down by an apparently endless gale and enormous waves is not good for the human system, especially the digestion. The experience demonstrated the truth of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s observation that “Being in a ship is [like] being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.”

In spring 1964, my wife Pauline and I drove from snowbound Ontario to blossoming North Carolina , to scrutinize Duke University , which had offered me a substantial graduate scholarship to pursue the Ph.D. degree. An added attraction was the charm of the area, including the nearby university at Chapel Hill . When the latter offered me a faculty position in 1967, acceptance was easy. I am thus able to point out to my students who are aged 18 or 19 that I have been a Tar Heel twice as long as they have and that I am here by choice, not simply because of having chanced to emerge from the womb in one of the hundred counties!

In the 38 years since I joined the faculty, many changes have occurred. Some have been welcome, such as the abolition of Saturday morning classes. This allowed students to move the end of their academic week from Friday to Thursday; but considering the increased cost of being a student, they might be expected to complain that they get less bang for their buck.

One doesn’t have to understand Einstein’s theories to recognize that time is relative. Recently, I found myself reading to my grandson’s pre-kindergarten class in Roanoke , Virginia . The teacher announced that I was from England . A delightful little girl asked, “Did you come over on the Mayflower?” I answered, “No, the Mayflower arrived nearly 400 years ago, and I am only 100.” Up piped another child: “I don’t think you are that old: I think you’re only 99.”

In Virginia , preparations are being made to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown Colony in 1607. We can boast that some 20 years before then, in North Carolina colonies had not only been founded but also been lost. Likewise, as the University of Virginia creeps towards its 200th anniversary in 2019, we can bask in the fact that we beat them by over two decades, so in the quest to become the nation’s No. 1 public university we’ll always precede them in that respect at least.

Molly Broad (right), UNC system president, leads the processional to Memorial Hall at the beginning of University Day. She is followed by Chancellor James Moeser, Christopher Armitage, professor of English and the event’s keynote speaker, and Joseph Ferrell, secretary of the faculty.

Meanwhile, we have entered the elite group of 47 universities which each have an endowment of over $1 billion. We rank 32nd, with over 1.3 billion. The only other North Carolina university on the list is Duke with 3.3 billion. But while tripling its wealth over the past decade, the average billionaire college has nearly doubled its price. Annual tuition and fees at the average private billionaire college hit $29,002 in 2004; at public universities in the group it cost $7,230 to attend the typical flagship campus.

Some alumni contemplating return to this campus may fear so much will have changed that, in Thomas Wolfe’s words, “You Can’t Go Home Again.” This sentiment had also been expressed in 1886 by the Canadian writer Charles Roberts in his poem “Tantramar Revisited.” After vividly describing the Tantramar marshes bordering Nova Scotia and New Brunswick where he roamed as a boy, he concludes:

"Yet will I stay my steps and not go down to the marshland —

Muse and recall far off, rather remember than see —

Lest, on too close sight, I miss the darling illusion,

Spy at their task even here the hands of chance and change."

Those who take the chance and do return will find many changes. Thanks to the opportunity provided when the bond referendum passed, the building boom is apparent all over UNC, the “ University of Never-Ending Construction .” Huge structures emerge from former parking lots, as if tectonic plates were on the move underground. One may turn a corner onto what yesterday was a campus thoroughfare and find an enormous machine waving a fearsome digging claw, like some image in a Japanese horror movie. In recent months, anyone attempting to drive along Cameron Avenue in front of South Building and this grandly refurbished Memorial Hall encountered “road closed” signs, as is depicted in an article in The Carolina Alumni Review for July-August 2005. The suspicion that this closing was a crafty stratagem to prevent access to Chancellor Moeser and Provost Shelton may be countered by the suggestion in the same article that Cameron Avenue could be converted into a “primarily pedestrian area.” This notion could gain credibility as recurrent gasoline crises force Americans to give up their SUVs and to walk.

In fact, a committee from the University and the town has worked out a plan to develop the area for the arts. Down the street to the east of where we are, Gerrard Hall and the Playmakers Theatre will be renovated, and air conditioning and handicap access introduced into both those venerable buildings. The plans also provide for a new music building and a fine arts library, which will house the University’s music and visual arts collections and for the enlargement of the Ackland Art Museum . These developments will allow a cornucopia of artistic events to be presented in the area between Cameron Avenue and Franklin Street .

Not far from Cameron Avenue is a new structure of a different kind, a monument in McCorkle Place . It consists of a dark stone round table inscribed, “The Class of 2002 honors the University’s Unsung Founders — people of color, bond and free, who helped build the Carolina that we cherish today.” The table is supported by numerous bronze figures. They represent those many anonymous but indispensable contributors to this place, which we have inherited, which we enjoy and for which we are responsible to preserve and enhance for the present and future generations. The table is surrounded by five marble blocks for sitting. The effect is reminiscent of the circles of prehistoric megaliths such as the one at Avebury in England . The monument was designed by a Korean artist, Do-Ho Suh, a choice of artist that reflects the University’s increasingly international outlook.

While we take pride in the microcosm of this campus, the presence of the macrocosm out there is inescapable. The tsunami in Asia last December, terrorist attacks on several continents, Hurricane Katrina on our Gulf Coast demonstrate that, in John Donne’s words, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main[land]. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind.”

Our license plates proclaim that North Carolina was “First in Flight,” an event the centenary of which we recently celebrated. Yet the fulfilling of that age-old human desire to fly was to be perverted, in the next decade, into a means of destruction, not only over the trenches of World War I but also in air raids on English cities. Then, as a result of the rapid acceleration with which war stimulates technology, much more destructive bombs devastated Guernica , Warsaw , Rotterdam , London , Berlin , Dresden , Hiroshima and Nagasaki . As the poet Randall Jarrell, later to teach at UNC-Greensboro, wrote about flying on U.S. Army Air Force raids on Nazi-occupied Europe: “In bombers named for girls, we burned/The cities we had read about in school.”

While the Wright brothers were working on their plane in 1903, George Bernard Shaw was writing in “Man and Superman” with both insight and foresight as follows:

"In the arts of death, man outdoes Nature. … When he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. … [To exceed Nature], something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed, and that something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, the electric chair; of sword and gun and poison gas; … of all isms by which even … the humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all the destroyers. "

In his poem “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats wrote, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” Subsequently we have witnessed the passionate intensity of terrorists in Madrid , Bali , New York , London and elsewhere. On July 7 last I was walking near Tavistock Square in London on my way to breakfast. I glanced up an adjacent street and saw a severely damaged double-decker bus, surrounded by police and emergency vehicles. That’s very unusual, I thought as I walked on, but soon heard that the bus had been blown apart by a bomb. I headed to the residence where the 23 UNC students on the Honors Summer Program in London and Oxford were housed. A brisk walk thither normally took me about 20 minutes. On this occasion it took me an hour because of detours caused by many streets being already cordoned off as part of the crime scene. Fortunately, I had given the students a writing assignment for that morning, so they were in their rooms, not on the Underground or on the street. The students had promptly notified their parents that they were safe. Few of the students continued to be pursued by the kind of parents described in a recent News and Observer article as “helicopter parents,” i.e. those who hover over their children who are away at college and are supposed to be developing mature independence. The students resolved to stick with our program, not rush to the airport for the next flight back to the United States (though some parents were urging that). Staying put and observing the stoical determination of Londoners as they carried on as normally as possible was, I believe, an unexpected but valuable lesson for our students.

A few days later some of us were among the many thousands who gathered in Trafalgar Square , so named to commemorate Admiral Nelson’s victory in 1805 that thwarted Napoleon’s attempt at conquest and domination. The square was packed with people who had assembled peacefully to express their refusal to be cowed by terrorists and their murderous attacks. Amid the crowd’s sympathetic and enthusiastic responses to the speakers on a platform in front of the National Gallery, I detected six or more languages being spoken. Here at least was conviction that the bomb and the bullet, employed in a perverse distortion of the religion of Islam, would not succeed.

Study abroad can enlarge one’s perspective in various ways. To illustrate, I will cite a personal example. While I was a schoolboy in England , history lessons about the Napoleonic era focused on the victories of Nelson at sea and of Wellington in Spain and, supremely, at Waterloo in 1815. After settling in Canada , I learnt more about the War of 1812-1814: how Americans invaded Ontario , burnt York (now called Toronto ), but were driven out along the Niagara peninsula and even surrendered Detroit .

Later, after we had become residents in Durham , N.C. , my sons reported that in their history lessons they were told how the wicked British burnt Washington , D.C. , (the previous burning of York was not mentioned). Apparently the Royal Navy was defeated on Lake Erie , though how the Royal Navy got there was a mystery to me, since I distinctly remember witnessing President Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth opening the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959, thereby finally allowing ocean-going ships to reach the Great Lakes . I was also exposed to Johnny Horton’s country music hit, “The Battle of New Orleans.” According to it, the British ran like rabbits through the brambles and briars until they fell into the Gulf of Mexico . On investigating this slander, I learnt that the battle occurred on January 8, 1815 , two weeks after Britain and the United States had signed a peace treaty in Belgium . (Today’s teenagers may be astonished that the telephone and e-mail did not exist in those days.) The moral of this account is, yes, history is written by the winners; and history is fashioned according to national myth. Thus, to become acquainted with other national myths allows one to attain a more objective understanding of events.

In a university as large and diversified in the range of subjects studied as UNC is, an employee can find him- or herself in a position like that of the foot soldier in a major battle, as far as not knowing what is happening in other sectors of the battle is concerned. If, for instance, one works in any of the buildings in or adjacent to Polk Place, one may have no idea about what goes on inside the medical and health buildings to the south of the Bell Tower, as they continue to extend towards what will surely become a satellite campus known as UNC at Pittsboro (to be matched to the north of Chapel Hill as Carolina North becomes UNC at Hillsborough).

One source of information about research being conducted on around the campus, with subsequent benefits to the public, is the magazine Endeavors, published by the Office of Information and Communications in Bynum Hall. Recent issues contain articles on a link between heart disease and inflammation in gum disease, while other articles report on research to combat breast cancer, cystic fibrosis and addictions. Environmental topics include keeping reefs healthy; developing a fuel cell that, unlike a battery, never needs to be recharged or thrown away; and utilizing the new telescope in the Chilean Andes. Social issues being studied here range from the effects of the large increase in Hispanics in North Carolina; of the graduated driver license law; and of violence in families. No doubt future issues of Endeavors will examine the role of the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis, plans for which were announced on Sept. 12 by President Molly Broad, Chancellor Moeser, and Senators Dole and Burr. On this 350-acre campus UNC, along with N.C. State and UNC-Charlotte, plans to establish the UNC Institute for Excellence in Nutrition, which will focus on nutrition and obesity, cancer, and the brain. The laboratories and retail and commercial enterprises will help, in Chancellor Moeser’s words, “a region of the state particularly hard-hit by global competition in manufacturing and agriculture.”

So, on our 212th birthday, in times that are both challenging and promising, we can be grateful not only for the tangible and intangible presents we have received but also for the opportunities to give of, and to, ourselves the people of North Carolina, to the nation, and increasingly to the world. To adapt some words of Frank Porter Graham, “Here in our books, libraries, classrooms and platforms for speakers, we hear the voices of the world and hear the winds of the world blow from [any] direction, in this free University where we may meet ideas and grow strong in the freedom of the universe.”