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than maximum service consistent with preserving the traditional excellence of the University of North Carolina.

In reviewing its responsibilities, the Special Committee decided that it should meet with the administrative officers and the trustees of the community colleges at Asheville, Charlotte, and Wilmington to assess at first hand the need for the kind of education that only a university can provide and to study the programs and facilities of these institutions. These visits were made and an opportunity was offered the administrative officers and trustees of the three community colleges to explain their needs and their reasons for requesting that they become units of the University.

Members of the Special Committee also visited the University of California to study the way in which that University had met the problems of providing at the university level for a rapidly expanding population. California has had a highly successful system of community colleges for many years and the Committee sought the opportunity of studying the effectiveness of this program and the relationships existing between the community colleges and the University. The officers of the University of California gave generously of their time and members of the Special Committee profited from the frank and informative discussions.

The Committee also sought the advice and counsel of representatives of the faculties of the three units of the University of North Carolina. In these discussions the desirability of enlarging the University to include additional campuses at Charlotte, Wilmington, and Asheville was explored thoroughly as were other matters affecting the future welfare of the University. Prominent among the latter were the desirability of adapting the names of the three units of the University to reflect their status as units of a single multi-campus state university, and their responsibilities for offering programs at the graduate level. The desirability of utilizing more fully the resources of the three existing campuses by making all three fully co-educational was also explored; also the wisdom of broadening the academic programs on the Raleigh campus to include degree programs in the liberal arts.

THE IMPORTANCE OF UNIVERSITIES

Universities are unique agencies of our culture. They are communities of scholars drawn together by a common desire to enrich their understanding of man and the environment in which he lives and by their responsibility for the advanced education and training of rising generations. A distinctive mark of universities is the freedom which faculty members enjoy to study whatever seems important to them without regard for any immediate practical benefits which may result from their efforts. They are centers of ideas where competent and experienced scholars may devote their lives to the study of the unknown and, through the understanding thus achieved, contribute to the happiness and wellbeing of all mankind. Society protects the university in this freedom because it believes that an agency devoted to unfettered search for truth serves the best interest of society.

The three basic responsibilities of a university - instruction, research, and the preservation of knowledge - are inseparably associated in the pattern of academic life. The research studies of the faculty and the advanced students strongly influence instructional programs, and the accomplishments of those who labored in earlier days, available for restudy in university libraries, serve as a source of inspiration to teachers and research workers alike. The spirit of intellectual adventure permeates the air of the campus and its influence is reflected in the creative work of those who live for a time in such an atmosphere.

The State University

The institution which is the immediate object of our concern is the state university. This peculiarly American institution is an expression of academic traditions which have come down, essentially unchanged, from the middle ages combined with a deliberate organization and application of intellectual resources to the well-being of the democratic state.

Like all ideas and institutions that were carried from Europe, the university was shaped by the conditions of the New World. The colonial