Bonnie Cone: Charlotte's Guiding Star

UNC Charlotte’s existence is a testament to the pioneering spirit and dogged determination of Bonnie Ethel Cone. A year after joining the Charlotte Center of the University of North Carolina in 1946 to conduct placement testing for students and teach engineering-mathematics — while keeping her full-time job as a high school teacher — Cone took over after the resignation of center director Charles Bernard. For the next three decades, she devoted herself to championing access to higher education for students in Charlotte and the people of North Carolina.

The University is an institution devoted to excellence in teaching, the nurturing of the whole person and enriching the lives and understanding of all people within its influence because of Bonnie Cone and the vision she held before us. She has been our guiding star.

- Chancellor Emeritus Jim Woodward

Her contagious passion and never-take-no-for-an-answer temperament led the state to authorize the Charlotte Board of School Commissioners to oversee the institution as a two-year junior college starting in April 1949. Over the next five years, Cone persuaded community leaders to support Charlotte’s fledgling college. Her efforts were rewarded in 1954 when a designated two-cent city property tax was passed, then extended in 1958 to all of Mecklenburg County.

By 1960, planning was underway to construct the first two buildings on a new campus location in what would become known as University City, purchased by the Charlotte College advisory board in 1957. With sights set on Charlotte College becoming a four-year, state-supported institution — which the N.C. General Assembly approved in 1963 — Cone and her allies planned the expansion of the UNC System to include Charlotte College. Their vision was realized on March 2, 1965, when the state legislature passed a bill to transform Charlotte College into The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, effective that year on July 1.

Cone served as director of Charlotte College until 1961 when the board of trustees voted to name her president. Following the selection of Dean W. Colvard as UNC Charlotte’s first chancellor in 1966, Cone served in the new position of vice chancellor for student affairs and community relations until her 1973 retirement. She championed the University for the rest of her life, remaining a constant presence at commencement ceremonies and athletics events.

Forever Bonnie

Cone touched the lives of thousands of students, as a teacher and leader. A year after her death on March 8, 2003, she was interred in the Van Landingham Glen, part of the UNC Charlotte Botanical Gardens she helped create. Her gravesite marker reads “Founder The University of North Carolina at Charlotte.” It is inscribed with a quote by American author Edward Everett Hale that Cone kept on her desk:

I am only one But I am one I cannot do everything But I can do something What I can do I ought to do And what I ought to do By the grace of God, I will do

Miss Bonnie Cone

Atkins Library’s Special Collections and Archives

Some say Bonnie Cone saw what others could not. Specifically, she envisioned Charlotte as home to an exceptional four-year university. Seventy-five years later, her legacy thrives in North Carolina’s largest, most vibrant city.