“It is hoped that the rays of light from your university, the Sun of Science, will illuminate the darkness of society, and chase away ignorance and vice . . . . With all due respect to the faculty of the University of North Carolina . . . they seem to constitute as motley a group as I have lately heard of. Presbyterians and Arians, infidels and Roman Catholics. Bless me, what a collection. The Age of Reason has surely come.”

-- John Henry Hobart, in a letter to his former Princeton classmate and University of North Carolina Presiding Professor Joseph Caldwell, 1796

 

Source: William D. Snider, Light on the Hill: A History of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992, p. 33.