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“He was a memorable professor,” said Gray, president of Gray Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Atlanta. “He was a great teacher, but he also left an impression that carries with me today.” Gray said it’s been rewarding to meet professors who are so passionate about what they do. “They all care about the student as a person, about the University as an institution and about trying to make the world a better place,” he said. Perhaps communication studies scholar Julia Wood, the first woman to receive a Bowman and Gordon Gray Professorship in 1983, says it best: “We have four years to work with these incredible students [at UNC], four years that should change a student’s life. If they don’t, we haven’t done our job.”
Marianne Gingher:
The grammar-isfun evangelist By Pamela Babcock Marianne Gingher is an academic subversive. She wants to overturn the established view about the most vexing part of writing — learning grammar. Instead of grammar lessons being boring and even painful, she thinks they can be fun. And the response she gets? Laughter. Uproarious, sidesplitting laughter. It’s not that people don’t agree that there’s humor in gerunds, participles and conjunctives. It’s that they couldn’t agree more. Each year, Gingher, a creative writing professor at Carolina, pours her ingenuity into the popular course “Stylistics,” a.k.a.“Gramo-Rama.” Students tackle the basics of grammar by “performing” it in a musical medley of puns, parodies, diphthongs and dangling modifiers. At the end of the semester, the show goes before a live audience in Wilson Library. Alisa Eanes ’08, who took the course as a senior, saw a “Gram-o-Rama” show during her first year at UNC and said she walked out “crying with laughter and holding my sides because they hurt so badly.” She said Gingher’s “playful spin on life and learning is motivating and inspiring.” Gingher is an evangelist for an idea of grammar fun introduced by writer Daphne Athas, a long-time UNC creative writing lecturer. Athas learned grammar following the tedious path of sentence diagrams and conjugating verbs. That worked for earlier generations, but when she introduced “Stylistics” in 1976, Athas decided on a method that would, she said, “beguile and delight.” Gingher saw the wisdom in Athas’ insight and has brought it to another — yet more electronically distracted — generation. “It’s the grammar lesson as performance art,” said Gingher, c o n t i n u e d
Carolina Arts & Sciences • FALL 2010 • college.unc.edu • 7