By Jill Yesko , University Relations
Contact: (336) 334-5371
Posted 9-11-07
Warren Ashby
GREENSBORO, NC – Dr. Warren Ashby, one of UNCG's most distinguished and influential professors, will be honored on Saturday, Sept. 29 when Residential College will be re-named Warren Ashby Residential College.
The UNCG Board of Trustees took action Thursday, Sept. 6, to name the campus’s oldest living-learning community for Ashby, who taught at UNCG from 1949 until his retirement in 1983. Ashby died in 1985.
The event will take place at 4 p.m. in the Ashby Parlor of Mary Foust Hall where Residential College is housed.
The ceremony corresponds to the completion of the $500,000 Ashby Endowment given by members of the Ashby family, former students, colleagues and friends. The endowment supports supplemental programs such as symposia, retreats, student travel and other events under the aegis of Residential College.
Known as the social conscience of the university, Ashby served as head of the philosophy and religion departments and was chairman of the Honors Council during its formative years. During his tenure at UNCG, Ashby received numerous awards, including the Gladys Strawn Bullard Award and the Alumni Teaching Excellence Award. He received a PhD from Yale.
A fervent supporter of human rights, Ashby wrote a well-received biography of Frank Porter Graham, former president of the University of North Carolina and a leader in Greensboro’s civil rights movement in the 1960s. Ashby was an ordained Methodist minister who presided over many of his students’ marriages.
In 1970, Ashby and Dr. Robert Miller, professor emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry and former dean of UNCG’s College of Arts and Sciences, established Residential College, one of the nation’s first “colleges within a college”? a model that has since been adopted by over 100 schools in the nation. Under Ashby’s direction, Residential College pioneered classes linked by interdisciplinary themes where faculty and students live and learn together under one roof.
Now in its 37th year, Residential College enrolls about 120 freshmen and sophomores who share a core curriculum and who take classes as well as live in a consolidated learning environment.
“Warren Ashby was a modest man who believed that an individual could only fully discover himself in community,” said Paul Ashby, Warren Ashby’s son and the office manager for Residential College. “My father would have been delighted to share this honor on behalf of his family and everyone who has been changed by the presence of this college in their lives.”
