{"id":9870,"date":"2015-02-13T13:23:31","date_gmt":"2015-02-13T18:23:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/college.unc.edu\/?p=9870"},"modified":"2024-07-02T16:07:05","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T16:07:05","slug":"iahremembers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/?p=9870","title":{"rendered":"The \u2018complete picture\u2019: The Institute for the Arts and Humanities remembers Dean Smith"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In the early 2000s, Kenan Professor of English Alan Shapiro received an unusual job offer from Dean Smith.<\/h2>\n
\"Coach<\/a>
Coach Dean Smith with IAH board member Alan Neely.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Smith had recently retired from head coach of the men\u2019s basketball team at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and he asked Shapiro to be the next shot clock keeper for the team\u2019s home games. \u201cI didn\u2019t know what that entailed exactly,\u201d Shapiro remembers. \u201cBut I certainly was open to the idea.\u201d<\/p>\n

The job offer wasn\u2019t entirely out of the blue. It had been a mutual love for the sport that catalyzed a friendship between a poet and a basketball coach, and Shapiro wasn\u2019t the unlikeliest of candidates for the job, either. He had played competitively as an undergraduate and was known for being a regular at campus pick up games in Chapel Hill. When Smith invited Shapiro to pay a visit to the basketball court to scope it out, he obliged.<\/p>\n

On the court, Shapiro had what he calls a \u201cclassic Dean Smith\u201d moment. Prior to his visit, Smith had distributed copies of Shapiro\u2019s latest collection of poems to members of the athletics staff and team. \u201cHe wanted me to feel as though as I was well respected and honored within the department.\u201d Shapiro declined the shot clock job (\u201cIt\u2019s no way to watch a basketball game\u201d), yet the memory is poignant, and indicative of how Smith approached his work at Carolina. \u201cIt was a gesture of how much he wanted the athletic program to be integrated into the intellectual and cultural life of the university as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shapiro and Smith had become fast friends in the spring of 1999 while in the same cohort of the Faculty Fellows program at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. The program offers faculty semester-long, on-campus leaves to work on major scholarly projects, and then-director Ruel Tyson personally invited Smith to join and work on his autobiography. \u201cI was not fishing for a famous person to be a visiting Fellow. I was looking for a \u2018case in the making\u2019\u2014his biography\u2014and for ways to enrich the conversation,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s presence in the 13-member cohort generated more than a small amount of excitement at the group\u2019s first weekly seminar. \u201cWe\u2019re sitting around the room, about to have lunch and meet everybody,\u201d remembers mathematics lecturer Mark McCombs, a recipient of the Chapman Family Teaching Award that year. \u201cCoach Smith walks in and I\u2019m going, \u2018Okay, am I in the wrong room?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Excitement gave way to mutual intellectual curiosity and respect between Smith and the cohort. \u201cHe was a complete participant and he read everybody\u2019s work,\u201d says Shapiro. The Faculty Fellows format gives each Fellow one three-hour session to present on his or her work and then solicit feedback, and everyone remembers Smith\u2019s ability to ask incisive questions. McCombs was developing a math course for liberal arts majors at the time. \u201cHe helped illuminate what was going on in a way I hadn\u2019t thought about,\u201d he says. George Lensing, Mann Family Distinguished Professor of English, adds that Smith\u2019s participation was always without pretension. \u201cHe consistently would make comments or ask questions that were very insightful and intelligent, but also authentic to who he was. He wasn\u2019t trying to play the scholar, even though the rest of us were responding in that capacity. He was obviously a very intelligent man.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smith worked on what would become his autobiography, A Coach\u2019s Life<\/em>, throughout his time as a Faculty Fellow at the Institute. Co-written with John Kilgo and Sally Jenkins and published in 2002, Smith names each member of the cohort in his introductory acknowledgments.<\/p>\n

In 2002, Smith joined the Institute\u2019s advisory board (a \u201chappy consequence\u201d of his fellowship, says Tyson) and he remained on the board for the next seven years. Fellow board member Jennifer Lloyd Halsey \u201994 was struck by his warmth and humility. \u201cHere is this accomplished man with international acclaim, and yet there was none of that in his demeanor. He was the most humble man in the room. He was so open, and natural, and easygoing.\u201d Smith was committed to the mission of the Institute\u2014and therefore a bit reluctant to talk sports. \u201cHis focus was genuinely on the opportunities faculty needed to do this interdisciplinary work,\u201d she says, yet he did offer Halsey a small piece of advice when her first son was born. \u201cDribble left, shoot left, go left,\u201d she remembers, laughing. For Halsey\u2019s father\u2019s eightieth birthday, Smith secured the family front row seats to the Carolina-State game and spent over an hour with him before the game. \u201cI think he did that over and over and over again for people. He welcomed them in and shared that experience with them, which is just a sign of his extreme generosity of spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the opening pages of A Coach\u2019s Life<\/em>, Smith writes: \u201cI\u2019m interested in the complete picture. I\u2019ve witnessed some significant cultural shifts, from the civil rights movement to the burgeoning of collegiate basketball as a commercial enterprise worth billions, and one can\u2019t do that without deciding there is more to life than strictly Carolina basketball.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the Institute and well beyond, Smith\u2019s legacy is very much about the complete picture.<\/p>\n

By Jenny Morgan, Institute for the Arts and Humanities<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the early 2000s, Kenan Professor of English Alan Shapiro received an unusual job offer from Dean 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