When UNC consolidated in 1931, joining together State College, the women's college of Greensboro and the Chapel Hill campus, William Friday was beginning to learn leadership skills on his grade school basketball team that he would later use make the University of North Carolina one of the largest university systems in the country. Throughout his childhood and on into his young adulthood, Friday would learn the lessons that would help him lead the university administration through athletic scandals, racial tensions, political opposition, and financial distress.

Around the time that Friday was being inaugurated into his presidency,

In 1964, under the guise of President Lyndon Johnson, John Gardner and William Friday established the White House Fellows program, a program that allowed college students to work in assistantship positions with the President of the United States. Soon after, Gardner offered Friday a position as assistant secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare that Friday refused, a decision he later regretted.

In the years surrounding the Vietnam War, university enrollments swell as young Americans take advantage of draft deferrals for college students to escape the expanding war in Vietnam. Not only does this add to the responsibilities of Friday and University Presidents across the country, but the social environment of the mid-60's led campuses to be tense with unrest.

Despite the fact that many U.S. colleges would close down due to anti-war protests, during the years of 1967 through 1971, Friday becomes involved in the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Higher Education leading to two other major achievements in North Carolina's educational history: gaining more federal funding for student aid in Pell Grants and establishing the Area Health Education Centers. In addition, he influences the National Humanities Center's decision to locate their offices in Research Triangle Park, increasing the scope of North Carolina's research mecca.

The new consolidated sixteen-campus system of the University of North Carolina was inaugurated in July 1972, becoming the capstone of Friday's presidency.

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