Remembering Eve Carson

The loss of Eve Marie Carson on March 5, 2008 continues to be felt deeply throughout the communities that had the privilege of knowing her—from the administration, faculty, and student body of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to the close-knit neighborhood in Athens, Georgia, where she grew up. Through her actions, her accomplishments, and the strength of her character, Eve was able in her short life to impact the lives of literally thousands of people—virtually all of whom considered her their friend and her death a grave personal loss. The future for them and for all of us is much dimmer without Eve in it. Our nation and world truly lost a great leader, scholar, servant, and companion the night Eve's life was taken from her.

One way to measure the impressiveness of Eve Carson is simply to name the many positive contributions that she made during her 22 years of life. Eve's focus on others and her deep desire to make a difference in her community and the world at large—and the astonishing list of achievements that resulted from them—became evident several years ago. Eve’s parents raised Eve and her brother in a charming, supportive neighborhood that often served as an extended family. Early on, Eve took to heart the lessons of simplicity and social-mindedness that she was being taught. Of her youth, she wrote: “I have grown up in a household un-preoccupied with the grand advances of technology. . . . I have walked to and from school, I have gone to the public library to type my papers, I have learned how the seasons feel in our unheated, un-air-conditioned and drafty home, and I have become a deft dishwasher.” She was the oldest of the children in the neighborhood and thus became the “big sister” and role model for the younger ones.

At Clarke Central High School in Athens, Eve was, among other roles, vice president of the National Honor Society and a member of the school's Academic Team. She volunteered as a “peer educator” at the Athens Area Attention Home, a safe house for abused and runaway teenagers. She served as a page in the U.S. House of Representatives after her sophomore year, and during the summers after her junior and senior years, she worked as a lab assistant in a stem-cell research laboratory at the University of Georgia. As fitting benchmarks of a luminous high school career, Eve was also elected student body president and achieved the rank of class valedictorian.

Her outstanding accomplishments in high school led to Eve’s selection for the prestigious Morehead-Cain Scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, given to 50 of the top high school seniors in the nation for promise in the areas of leadership, scholarship, physical vigor, and moral force of character. At UNC, Eve continued her role as an enthusiastic and successful leader, both inside and outside the classroom. She was co-president of the Honors Program Student Executive Board; a member of Phi Beta Kappa; a member of the North Carolina Fellows leadership development program; co-chair of Nourish International (a student movement to eradicate global poverty and hunger); a science tutor in the local public schools; an orientation counselor at Freshman Camp (run by UNC’s Campus Y); and even the captain of several intramural sports teams. During her sophomore year, she spent a semester studying at the Universidad de la Habana in Havana, Cuba.

Through the Morehead-Cain Summer Enrichment Program, Eve spent her college summers in Wyoming, Ecuador, and Egypt. In Wyoming (2004) she participated in a wilderness leadership course through the National Outdoor Leadership School. In Ecuador (2005) she volunteered as a physician’s assistant to a traveling doctor in the rural countryside and worked on a coffee farm. She also taught computer skills that summer in an indigenous Siona community in the Amazon rain forest. In Egypt (2006) Eve worked with a U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit in Cairo.

Eve also had an interest in “ethical-economical” models of international development as a result of her travels in Cuba, Egypt, Ecuador, Honduras, and Canada. She took a course at UNC titled “Issues in International Development” and was particularly moved by one of the readings. She wrote that “the author asserted that while we see the capitalistic economy as constantly producing more . . . capitalism is simultaneously ‘degrading at the margins.’ Beyond even physical degradation, the writer used metaphors of faith to wonder if capitalism led to spiritual degradation. That is, for example, for every city that is revitalized and ‘booms’ in a third-world country, a rain forest and a way of life might be irreversibly destroyed.” Eve expressed the need to educate herself further in order to make herself as useful to the world as possible: “I know now that a more developed understanding of economics and finances will be essential for any work, humanitarian ideas/ideals, or value systems that I could develop in the future.”

Just as it had been in high school, Eve's senior year at UNC was marked by her election to the office of student body president. In this position, she worked tirelessly to improve the college experiences of all UNC students, addressing a multitude of issues involving academics, extracurriculars, campus-town relationships, and community projects. She became a public face of the university that she loved, and her enthusiasm was contagious, including among the faculty and administration. In her role as SBP, Eve was universally loved and admired. People often show their true colors under pressure, and Eve, no matter how busy she was, remained upbeat, gracious, and perceptive to the needs of those around her. She seemed to have a limitless capacity for listening, for serving, for learning, and for remaining goal-oriented while still having fun. She had a charming way of cajoling others to rise to her level of cheerful intensity. And she clearly relished the role of student-leader, especially because it allowed her to have close relationships with so many people and give voice to many of her fellow students' concerns.

There was so much that Eve hoped to accomplish at UNC and beyond. At her death, she was only a month and a half away from completing her very successful term as student body president and two months away from graduating from the University with highest distinction in biology and political science. She had a 3.9 grade-point average and a job offer from a prestigious management consulting firm. She had dreams of changing the world for the better and planned eventually to attend law school or graduate school in public health and/or public policy. Her focus was on “scientific policy”— governmental legislation and policy regarding gene therapy, embryonic stem-cell research, and nanotechnology. She wrote: “I feel that the next decade will be years of incredible complexity that could (and probably will) have long-lasting and important consequences for our country and society.”

When the news of Eve’s murder became public, the UNC campus went into a state of shock and grief. The turnout of thousands of members of the UNC community at a campus-wide meeting in the afternoon and a candlelight vigil that evening—as well as the memorial service subsequently held at the Smith Center, hosted by UNC System president Erskine Bowles and other administrative and faculty leaders—attest to the respect and love everyone had for Eve. At the time, one of her fellow students said, “I thought I misheard or something because with a public icon like Eve, student body president—just someone everybody loves—you kind of make them invincible. You think nothing bad can happen to a person like that. And I just didn’t believe it.”

As further testament to the UNC community’s admiration and affection for Eve, she was posthumously awarded the prestigious Chancellor’s Award for most outstanding woman in the senior class. (The Irene F. Lee Award was first given in 1955 and is presented annually to the woman in the senior class judged most outstanding in leadership, character, and scholarship.) And on October 2, 2009, Eve was awarded the General Alumni Association's Distinguished Young Alumni Award, which recognizes alumni age 40 or younger whose achievements have brought credit to the University. At the campus-wide gathering on March 6, 2008, Chancellor James Moeser encouraged the assembled mourners: “Let us be the University that Eve Carson envisioned. Let us show the ‘Carolina Way’ that she lived, that she talked about . . . .” Many remarkable initiatives have emerged in the last few months, as Eve’s Chapel Hill and Athens communities have banded together to honor her memory and continue her good works.

Two merit scholarships have been established in Eve’s memory at the University of North Carolina. The first, the Eve Marie Carson Memorial Junior-Year Merit Scholarship, will further one of Eve’s own dreams: a merit scholarship given to juniors at UNC who have shown promise in the areas of academics, social justice, and leadership. Almost 2,000 donors have given gifts totaling approximately $400,000 to the University’s Eve Marie Carson Memorial Fund, which will finance the scholarship. At its February 2009 meeting, the Morehead-Cain Scholarship Fund board of directors voted to make a gift of $30,000 to this fund.

The Morehead-Cain Foundation is also establishing the second scholarship—a four-year undergraduate Carolina Scholarship in memory of Eve that will attract top out-of-state students to UNC—by giving the University a grant of approximately $400,000. The Eve Marie Carson Carolina Way Scholarship will help the University recruit and support outstanding students like Eve.

Friends and loved ones in Athens and elsewhere have given more than $60,000 in Eve’s memory to the Foundation for Excellence in Public Education, which supports public schools in Clarke County. The funds will be used to present annual Eve Carson Awards at the county’s 21 schools, as well as a competitive $1,500 classroom award for a teacher, administrator, coach, or club director. The classroom award will fund creative, experiential opportunities for students, such as field trips or visiting speakers.

Chase Street Elementary School and Barrow Elementary School in Athens have established service-learning awards in Eve's honor, and students at the University of Georgia have founded a chapter of Nourish International. Carolina students have come together to form a new campus organization in Eve’s memory called Students for the Carolina Way (SCW). The mission of SCW is to "strengthen the UNC community by inspiring all students to work together in the pursuit of a single philanthropic goal.” In November 2008, SCW sponsored the Eve Carson Memorial 5K for Education, which attracted more than 2,000 registrants and raised more than $23,000 for the Eve Carson Fund and other educational causes. A music festival is planned for the spring of 2009.

There have also been several striking and symbolic physical memorials to Eve, such as tree plantings and park bench projects at various spots in Athens and Chapel Hill. Two memorial gardens are planned for the UNC campus (one, in her beloved Arboretum, features a tree that will glow with flaming red foliage in the fall). Artistic endeavors honoring Eve have included a painting/poster by Brenda Behr, assorted concerts, and the “Belie-v-e” music CD produced in Athens. Twenty-five DVDs of the stirring film Darius Goes West were purchased anonymously and given to university student body presidents across the country. These are just some of the ways that people have been inspired to commemorate Eve's causes and values.

Eve was robbed of her life; and, as those who would have gained so much from her future accomplishments, so were we all. Her vision, her intelligence, her determination, her sensitivity, her talent for leadership, her aspiration to help others—these are all rare attributes that undoubtedly would have led to great things had Eve been allowed to live. In her absence, Eve's friends are left to carry on in her spirit, and for many it will be a lifelong and gratifying journey. The image of people working together to improve the world, of making something beautiful out of such a senseless tragedy, is one that Eve would deeply treasure.

—Megan M. Mazzocchi, October 2009

Click here to view our Flash presentation in remembrance of Eve.

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