On Monday, Matt and I visited the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. As we explored the paint and woodworking shops and strolled the “Hollywood Boulevard” set for student films, we picked up a couple of fun facts:

  • UNCSA is home to the nation’s fifth-largest film archive, with more than 16,000 films.
  • The School of Design and Production has a graduate concentration in animatronics.
  • Their mascot, the Fighting Pickles, came from a student naming contest in the 1970s for a touch football team. As legend has it, the idea was submitted as a joke about a classmate’s obsession with finding the perfect pickle.

Days like that one—where I get to meet great people working in higher ed and have interesting (and sometimes silly!) conversations about this complex and quirky world—perfectly encapsulate what I love about this beat and my job.

Thanks again to UNCSA for hosting us, and let us know what campus we should visit next! […]

Matt Hartman is a higher education reporter for The Assembly and co-anchor of our weekly higher education newsletter, The Quad. He was previously a longtime freelance journalist and spent nearly a decade working in higher ed communications before joining The Assembly in 2024.

Erin Gretzinger is a former higher education reporter at The Assembly and co-anchor of our weekly higher education newsletter, The Quad. She was previously a reporting fellow at The Chronicle of Higher Education and is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.