Walter Royal Davis Library Case Study

Expansion of the school, changes in institutional policy, and excellence in athletics and academics from the hard work of several notable individuals helped to form the rich history and tradition ingrained into UNC. However, the opening of the Davis Library is the main event because The Walter Royal Davis Library is the central library for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it is the primary resource for all students, and was completed after a lengthy transition in February of 1984 (Bradsher, 1983, 3). The changes that came along with this move, brought upon difficulties for the university employees, the students and faculty requiring library resources, and student relations, specifically between undergraduate and graduate students.

Yet, these policies were controversial among the university’s population. For example, UNC was dealing with issues regarding desegregation and integration of larger percentages of minority students into UNC. Chapel Hill was lagging behind in its goal to raise the percentage of minority students to 10.6% over the next few years as mandated by the State Government (Parker, 1984a, 1). There were plans throughout the university to make campus more integrated for black and white students. One of these decisions was to have a certain percentage of black and white students in all dorms. At that time, most blacks lived in dorms on South Campus, but there were plans to remedy this by forcing white students to live in black dorms and black students to live in white dorms. Yet, not all students were fond of this idea. The Campus Y’s People Against Racism had a meeting where the chairperson stated that it would be unfair to minorities. Sibby Anderson said, “I only see dorm integration as a way that forces minorities to make a compromise” (Parker, 1984b, 1). On the other hand, the university reactions committee was in the progress of another, yet similar, idea. It was proposed that students could volunteer to live with students of other cultures, not race (Pipkin, 1984, p. 1). The concept of students living with people from other countries was going to expand the campus diversity and thought throughout the students. “If you know there are more cultures on this campus than black and white, and there are, and you set it up racially, it’s got to be for political purposes.” Sherrod Banks, the president of the Black Student Movement stated, agreeing that integration should be cultural rather than racial. Segregation was seen as two cultures interacting with each other, rather than two separate races. (Lucas, 1984,