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Together, Sewells give back
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| Cecil W. Sewell, Jr. |
“Giving to Chapel Hill is just something special,” says Cecil W. Sewell, Jr. ’69. “It’s not only a good thing to do, but it makes a great deal of sense in estate planning.” Sewell is married to one of his classmates, Linda C. Sewell. Their daughter, son, daughter-in-law and son-in-law are Carolina graduates as well. Just as this family cheers on the Tar Heels together, it makes decisions about giving the same way: together. “We’re a whole Tar Heel family, with pretty strong ties,” Sewell said. “Everything we’ve done, the whole family has sat down and talked about it.”
Regular contributors at the Chancellors’ Club level for many years, the Sewell family’s larger gifts were to establish a Carolina Scholarship, and to establish a professorship in the Division of Marine Sciences. “We decided to endow a Carolina Scholarship because of Michael Hooker,” Sewell said, referring to the late chancellor. “He was fired up about it. He knew that was the way we could recruit the top students, and to improve the quality of the students and the academics.” So the Sewells talked it over, and decided to do it. The Cecil W. Sewell, Jr. Family Carolina Scholar award was established in 2000.
The second big gift was a professorship that, in a way, honors the generations. Cecil’s father, Cecil Sr., attended UNC during the Great Depression, but did not graduate. “Chapel Hill was special to him as well,” Sewell said. “His education was interrupted because of the Depression.”
Many years later, Cecil Sr. took his grandchildren, Kacey Coley Sewell ’95 ’00 (JD) and Lindsay Fodrie Sewell ’98, to the Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, when there was a study going on. “That was a special memory,” Sewell said. So the professorship is in the Department of Marine Sciences.
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