By Eric Johnson

ASHEVILLE (January 16, 2025) – On Wednesday afternoon, after more than three months of empty classrooms, UNC Asheville celebrated an extraordinary return for the spring semester.

Over a welcome-back dinner of tacos and nachos inside Kimmel Arena, faculty, staff, and students greeted one another, swapped harrowing stories, and settled in to watch the Bulldog’s basketball team take on their I-26 rivals, the USC Upstate Spartans.

“It feels amazing to be back,” Chancellor Kim van Noort said between handshakes and hugs.

Fully 93% of UNC Asheville students returned for the spring semester — a higher retention rate than normal. That accomplishment was backed by an intensive outreach effort from the campus and generous backing from North Carolina lawmakers, who provided emergency funding to make tuition free for spring of 2025.

“The students are so excited to be back,” said Toby King, chair of the university’s music department. “I usually have to convince them to move up from the back of classroom, but today all of the front rows were full.”

A joyful return seemed a long way off last fall, when Hurricane Helene tore through Asheville and knocked out power, water, and communications across much of the region. In her State of the University address Wednesday afternoon, van Noort recalled the surreal scenes from those early days. 

“In the midst of the chaos, you cleared the roads, pushed the trees, fed the students and first responders, found ways to communicate, hauled water, flushed toilets, stepped out of your home to help your neighbors,” she said.

Faculty and staff personally drove students down to the local K-Mart, where they could get a cell signal, or made hand-drawn maps so phone-dependent students could find their way to the highway and back home.

And they flipped classes to online instruction when it became clear that the City of Asheville wouldn’t be able to welcome everyone back to finish out the fall.

ALL OF THAT DISRUPTION hit the university at a particularly vulnerable moment.

Van Noort and her team had just managed to reverse a years-long slide in enrollment, welcoming one of the largest first-year classes in the university’s history in 2024. A painful round of program cuts and budget freezes had finally put the campus on a more stable financial footing, able to think about future growth and investment.

After the storm sent students packing and faculty scrambling, there was a real sense of despair “that all the progress we made over the last two years might be washed away,” van Noort said yesterday.

At one point last fall, when images of a wrecked mountain region were all over the news, applications to Asheville were down by almost 35%.

That has now reversed, and admissions head Marcio Moreno said the campus is on track to match last year’s elevated application numbers.

“UNC Asheville is back in the game,” he told faculty and staff, praising the efforts of admissions counselors who were back on the road just 10 days after the storm. “We can do magic.”

Back in Kimmel Arena, as the university’s pep band — complete with electric fiddle — swayed and shouted during breaks, the Bulldogs eeked out a one-point win against the Spartans. It was a closely fought game, with the lead changing hands and momentum swinging back and forth right until the end.

“That’s how you hustle!” screamed one of the students in the row behind me, high-fiving friends after a tough rebound. “That’s a hustle play right there.”

UNC Asheville has proven adept at hustle plays these last few months, with more to come.

“We have much to celebrate. We have much to grieve,” van Noort told her campus. “And we have much work to do.”

Eric Johnson is a writer in Chapel Hill. He works for the UNC System and the College Board.. He can be reached at [email protected].