History
The city of Charlotte had sought a public university since 1871 but was never able to sustain one. For years, the nearest state-supported university was 90 miles (140 km) away. The city submitted a bid in the late 1880s for what would become North Carolina State University, but lost to the city of Raleigh after a local farmer offered to donate land for the campus. In 1946, the city sought a state-run medical school; instead, the state expanded the existing two-year school at UNC-Chapel Hill.
On September 23, 1946, the State of North Carolina opened the Charlotte Center of the University of North Carolina with an enrollment of 278 students. It was originally founded to serve the education needs of returning World War II veterans. Like many of the United States' "post–World War II" universities, it owes its inception to the G.I. Bill and its effects on public education. In 1949, when the state began closing the centers, the Charlotte Center was taken over by the city school district and became Charlotte College, a two-year institution. It was first funded by student tuition payments, then by local property taxes. Classes were held at Central High School near uptown Charlotte, but by 1957, enrollment increased to 492, and the school's leaders began searching for a permanent site for the campus. They decided on a 250 acre (1 km²) tract of land northeast of the city near the Cabarrus County border. The college became state-supported in 1958 upon joining the newly formed North Carolina Community College System and moved to its current location in 1961.
In 1963, Charlotte College became a four-year college. It adopted its current name July 1, 1965, upon becoming part of the Consolidated University of North Carolina, since 1972 called the University of North Carolina. In 1969, the university began offering programs leading to masters degrees. In 1992, it was authorized to offer programs leading to doctoral degrees.
Read more about this topic: University Of North Carolina At Charlotte
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“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)