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This wasn't just any crash course. Students crammed hard almost around the
clock, but there wasn't a test to take--just the chance to soak up as much as
possible about North Carolina and its people while riding a bus 1,200 miles
over five days.
The students were 29 new University faculty and administrators along for an
issue-oriented ride aboard the second Tar Heel Bus Tour. The May 18-22 trip
included 19 stops and stretched east to Manteo and west to Grandfather
Mountain. Riders hailed from other states and one foreign country and included
new deans of education and public health as well as directors of admissions and
financial aid.
The real teachers for the week included paratroopers at Fort Bragg, American
Indian experts in Pembroke, ecotourism proponents at the North Carolina
Estuarium in Washington and leaders of a University program that has built a
grassroots effort to fight breast cancer among rural black women.
Guides and others brought history, nature and tradition alive in historic
Edenton, Nags Head Woods Preserve, Somerset Place near Creswell, North Carolina
Zoological Park, Grandfather Mountain and Fiddler's Grove. Others sharing facts
and anecdotes about the Tar Heel state and its challenges included current and
incoming University students, fellow researchers, alumni, top state
environmental officials and craftsmen or executives at furniture and textile
plants.
Such stops helped put human faces on some of the state's pressing issues. It
also gave participants the chance to see towns and cities that produce 82
percent of Carolina's 15,000-plus undergraduates and to hear directly from
taxpayers who provide their paychecks.
Chancellor Michael Hooker said the tour connects faculty and administrators
with the citizens and communities they serve.
"You come away convinced that it's a big state and that there are two North
Carolinas--the prosperous and less-than-prosperous--and that the biggest
challenge facing North Carolina is education, not just at the University level
but also in grades K-12," he said. "The faculty will come away from it with a
renewed sense of self-esteem, and they are really the future of North Carolina.
They are providing for our future by educating students. It gives them a sense
of where they fit into the whole picture. It gives them a good feeling."
Added faculty chair and second-time tour participant Pete Andrews, "I heard
nothing but praise and enthusiasm from our new colleagues on the bus, and at
least several of them were explicitly reconfirmed in their sense that they had
made exactly the right decision in coming to Carolina."
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