Qualla: University of North Carolina at Greensboro

University of North Carolina at Greensboro: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Charles Duncan McIver believed that educating women would educate everyone, because the women he taught would teach the next generation. In 1891 the North Carolina legislature gave him the legal scaffolding for that conviction, and in October 1892 he opened the State Normal and Industrial School in a single brick building in Greensboro with 198 students and 15 faculty, an enrollment that grew to 223 by year's end. It was North Carolina's first - and remains its only - public university founded specifically to educate women. The building still stands. Now called the Julius I. Foust Building, it anchors a campus of 20,000 Spartans that grew from McIver's stubborn proposition about teachers and mothers and the multiplier effect of a single educated woman.

University of North Carolina at Greensboro: From Normal School to Coed University

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The school's name changed almost as often as the country's ideas about who deserved a college education. State Normal and Industrial School in 1892. State Normal and Industrial College by 1896. North Carolina College for Women in 1919. Woman's College of the University of North C...

University of North Carolina at Greensboro: Minerva Watches the Quad

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The goddess of wisdom showed up on UNCG's first diploma in 1894 and has been on campus ever since. A bronze Minerva, helmeted and spear-bearing, was installed east of Elliott University Center in 2003 to give the long-running symbol physical form. The historic core around her is ...

University of North Carolina at Greensboro: Writers in the Pines

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Allen Tate. Caroline Gordon. John Crowe Ransom. Peter Taylor. Randall Jarrell. The Woman's College pulled in some of the most influential American writers of the mid-20th century in its early decades, and the tradition continues. In 1973, the poet Louise Gluck spent a brief stint...

University of North Carolina at Greensboro: Spartans, Soccer, and a Quiet Dominance

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

UNCG's athletic identity solidified as the Spartans after coeducation arrived in 1963 and the first men's basketball team formed in 1967, when "Spartans" was officially adopted as the athletic nickname. Through the 1980s the teams climbed from Division III non-scholarship to Divi...

University of North Carolina at Greensboro: Why It Still Matters

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering - a collaboration with neighboring NC A&T - opened in the 2010s with what was then the only nanobioscience emphasis in the country. The Bryan School of Business sits in the top 1 percent of business schools worldwide for dual ac...