This week, we want to celebrate our colleague and friend Dr. Mimi Chapman for receiving the Thomas Jefferson Award.
The Thomas Jefferson Award was established in 1961 by the Robert Earll McConnell Foundation and is presented annually by the chancellor on recommendation of the faculty’s Honorary Degrees and Special Awards Committee. The award recognizes “that member of the academic community who through personal influence and performance of duty in teaching, writing, and scholarship has best exemplified the ideals and objectives of Thomas Jefferson,” whose complex legacy includes the values of democracy, public service, and the pursuit of knowledge.
Below are the full remarks Mimi prepared for her acceptance of the award at the Oct. 9 Faculty Council meeting. You may also watch her remarks via the Faculty Council recorded livestream. Her introduction, delivered by Bland Simpson, begins at the 16:00 mark, and Mimi’s remarks begin at the 20:30 mark.
Congratulations, Mimi. We are very proud of you and applaud the UNC Faculty Council for recognizing your academic achievements and dedication to the Carolina community.
In addition to reading Mimi’s remarks below, we also encourage you to watch the “State of the University” video released early this week in honor of University Day on Oct. 12. There are many remarkable things happening on Carolina’s campus – in large part thanks to dedicated faculty members like Mimi.
Comments on The Honor of Receiving the Thomas Jefferson Award
Mimi V. Chapman
Professor of Social Work, UNC, Chapel Hill
Faculty Council Meeting, October 9, 2026
What a wonderful moment for any faculty member to be honored by colleagues as I am today. To be chosen when so many faculty members on this campus are so deserving means more than I can say.
Thank you to Bland Simpson, Daniel Wallace, Lisa de Saxe Zerden, and Jane Thrailkill for nominating me. Chancellor Roberts, I was delighted to receive your phone call last May letting me know about this honor, and I appreciate you being here today to award it. Thank you also to the Committee on Awards and Honorary Degrees, which considers nominations and moves them forward. It is painstaking work, and I appreciate it. And to Joy, Michael, and the Office of Faculty Governance, thank you for coordinating this recognition.
I also would like to thank my home School of Social Work. My colleague Tamsen Foote is receiving the Rebecca Clark Award for Moral Courage at University Day next week. The School of Social Work honored us both with a luncheon yesterday. The School has been my academic home for many years. I appreciate the support of my colleagues and my Dean, Ramona Denby-Brinson.
Finally, I want to thank my husband and younger son who are here today. My oldest could not be with us. But I could do nothing without each of them.
When I was Chair of the Faculty, a number of people wrote to me wanting to revisit this award to decide whether, given all that we know about the disturbing juxtaposition between Thomas Jefferson’s written ideals of equality, public service, and the pursuit of knowledge and his daily life as an enslaver of 200 souls at the time he penned the Declaration of Independence, we should revisit either the name of the award or awarding it at all.
Then Chancellor Guskiewicz, Vice Chancellor for Development David Routh, and I talked long and hard about this question. We reviewed the initial gift agreement, asked about renaming the award, and, learning that wasn’t possible, discussed simply ending it. We discussed it in the Faculty Executive Committee and asked Pat Parker and Jim Leloudis, who have since received this honor and led the Commission on Race, Reckoning, and a Way Forward, for advice. In the end, we decided to keep the award. Faculty have so few ways to be publicly recognized by their peers, and we did not want to give up that opportunity.
Lucky for me!
But beyond expressing my deep thanks, it is challenging to know how to speak about this award, particularly since I am not an historian or a constitutional scholar. As Lloyd Kramer wrote in his remarks when he received this award, “History rarely gives us everything we want.” By that I take him to mean that giants of history are all too human and sometimes even monstrous in some aspects of their lives.
So, as I’ve prepared to receive this award, I’ve spent more time thinking about the long list of faculty members who have come before me in accepting this distinction. Some, of course, are no longer with us, and some I’ve had the good fortune to know quite well. From across the university, lawyers, writers, physicians, historians, philosophers, anthropologists, mathematicians, and scholars in numerous other disciplines have received this honor. Many have held leadership roles within and beyond their home departments and schools. Their disciplines and contributions to the campus are as varied as their scholarship and their personalities. Yet there are commonalities too. First is a deep commitment to Carolina’s particular mission – the last line of which says, “With lux, libertas — light and liberty — as its founding principles, the University has charted a bold course of leading change to improve society and to help solve the world’s greatest problems.
Individuals on that list live, study, teach, and serve with boldness, believing that to do so is necessary for positive change.
Next, they recognize that each part of this great university has contributed to making this place “a light on the hill” for so many North Carolinians for so long. The list of awardees includes people who look beyond the campus’ boundaries and understand what this University means to people in every corner of our state.
My husband and I have had the opportunity to spend a lot of time in a small fishing town on Core Sound in recent years. Bland spends time there too. We hear regularly from people who never went to college themselves but were able to send their children to Chapel Hill. They speak with such pride in their graduates, of course. But also in this place. To them, UNC Chapel Hill is not just the university their children graduated from; it is a place that they, as North Carolinians and as Carolina parents, have a stake in. They believe in what we do here, in what the faculty does here. They know that we serve every corner of this state and always have. They are as proud of our global mission as our local mission.
We are told a lot these days about a broken public trust, but personally I don’t buy it. UNC Chapel Hill has been committed to the health and well-being of this state for generations. The people of this state know that. We must uphold their trust, surely. But there is no need to doubt it.
The final quality that jumped out at me as I reviewed the list of recipients is that they used their voice. They used it to talk about public affairs, university policies, and choices that affected student life. They asked questions, often hard ones, of our leaders, all in the hope of helping our University live up to its commitments, its history, and its mission. And in receiving the Thomas Jefferson Award, I want to ask us all to think for a bit about our own voice and how we can use it in service of the University we love and call home.
We do not have to speak or write or use our voice in the same way. We all have our own tone and tenor. Some voices are better at the diplomacy table. Some explain the facts and the science. Others find their voice in the public square. Each one is needed, especially now, when higher education is struggling, when some of us don’t recognize our workplace, worry that we are abandoning our mission, that the relational culture that has long defined Carolina is being eroded. Even as we praise all of the amazing work done on this campus – and the scope and breadth of invention and scholarship is truly breathtaking – we can’t stay silent to make other people comfortable or because we are afraid.
This award is presented by faculty governance at a meeting of the Faculty Council for a reason. Thomas Jefferson is remembered as the person who gave voice in the Declaration of Independence to our nation’s ideals. In a great irony, he wrote what MLK would later describe as the “promissory note” that was not yet fulfilled at the time of King’s “I Have a Dream ” speech. Indeed, it is still not fully fulfilled. This body is charged with being a forum where hard questions are asked, and clear advice given with the goal of making the work we do here work that advances equality, fairness, and justice. When we doubt the power of our own voices, which we all do sometimes, look no further than the Declaration of Independence.
This document, which Jefferson was assigned to write as part of “the committee of five,” went on to inspire quests for equality both domestically and across the globe. Abolitionists, suffragettes, and revolutionaries in France, Haiti, and our own civil rights movement cited the Declaration in their quests for justice and equality.
These days we feel the words of the Declaration all too acutely. When those who commit injustices remain in power or position, even when no one contests the facts of what has occurred, can we honestly say we believe all people are created equal? Can we convince ourselves that, as individuals or as a society, we are living the virtues we say we aspire to?
Reading the words of the Declaration’s preamble forces me to confront whether, in my individual relationships, I see and treat others as people whose rights and personhood matter as much as my own, to question whether the systems I’m part of are designed and implemented to uphold those ideals, and if not, what my part should be to make sure they are reimagined toward equality and justice? To read the Declaration is to keep grappling with fairness – what does it mean and look like in this situation or in that one? Do the students I teach and the colleagues I interact with have what they need to have a fair shot at whatever their goals might be, a degree, a promotion, or tenure?
Reading the Declaration asks me to decide: am I doing enough? Am I being courageous enough? While I am under no illusion that every founding father was some sort of saint, they did take risks to create something new and, in doing so, inspired so many others who seek freedom, equality, and justice the world over. The work for equality and justice is unending and currently is under severe strain. It is tempting to believe that there is nothing more to say, write, or give voice to that will make a difference. When we believe that silence is safer and easier than getting involved, that is when we lose.
Thank you to each of you for all that you do for this institution, this state, and our larger society. I could not be more proud to be a member of this faculty. And I thank you for this award.
Other Exciting News:
Missed the University Day video? Here’s a look at the remarkable work happening across campus. Watch now!