Looking back over my 28 years at Carolina, I can think of several reasons why our graduate programs have remained among the best in the world. One of the most important reasons is Carolina’s diversity. By recruiting students from all walks of life and admitting the brightest among them, we have built a culturally and intellectually diverse community, so that our students thrive both academically and personally.

Diversity pervades the Carolina campus. Graduate admissions records for 2000 show that about 25 percent of our graduate students are minority or international students. And 59 percent of our graduate students are women.

In a diverse academic community, graduate students benefit from the unique perspectives of their colleagues.
The richer the mix of students’ backgrounds in a graduate research setting, the more thorough and comprehensive students’ research questions will be. Between the covers of this issue of The Fountain, we hope to show you why diversity is vital for fostering a high quality environment for graduate education. Carolina’s interdisciplinary and global approaches to research and education, along with a strong sense of community among students, faculty and alumni, have made the Graduate School at UNC-Chapel Hill one of the nation’s top research institutions.

We also feel it’s important to design programs that encourage students to extend their skills beyond their particular area of expertise, so they may begin learning the languages of other disciplines and the value of teamwork. We have been able to provide that opportunity for students, thanks to the persistent support and vision of committed donors, who are often featured in The Fountain.

In this issue, you’ll meet Professors Emeriti Shirley and Charles Weiss, whose legacy of academic excellence and vision lives on in the Weiss Urban Livability Fellowship program. The Weiss Fellowship program and others like it provide a wealth of diversity, in terms of ethnicity, gender, age and academic interests. We’ll introduce you to donor William Darity, who is a devoted advocate of graduate education at Carolina and a member of the Graduate School Advancement Board.

Both Darity and the Weisses recall a time when the University had just begun reaching out to African Americans and women. To put their memories into perspective, we’ve given you a history of diversity on campus, from the first international student admitted to Carolina in 1893, to the substantial growth in the number of women and domestic minorities in the last century.

You’ll meet the Latané Fellows, who have embraced one another’s intellectual and cultural differences to work together on an interdisciplinary human and social science research project, which they will complete this semester. We feature a Native American graduate student, whose cultural background has permeated her professional and academic pursuits and drives her involvement in campus activities.

We’ll tell you about two international students’ unique accounts of life at Carolina and their academic pursuits, which are on the cutting edge of research in their fields. We’ll also share The Fountain’s conversation with a Royster Fellow whose Mexican-American background continues to influence her life and her work.

These stories, as engaging as they may be, are just examples of the wealth of diversity on the Carolina campus. We hope you’ll enjoy these engaging accounts of academic excellence, generosity and vision, cross-cultural friendships and intellectual diversity.

-Linda Dykstra

© 2002, The Graduate School, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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