The Emerging Life of Emory University
GA RY S . H A UK an d S AL LY W OL FF KIN G, ED ITO RS
A BO U T T HE E D IT OR S
T
HIS BOOK CELEBRATES MEN AND WOMEN
whose spirit of inquiry—their sense of curiosity and ways of thinking—nudged them down paths that tested their mettle.
Most passed the test. Sometimes risking social disfavor or finding themselves at odds with academic convention, occasionally doing nothing more than inhabiting the scholar’s lonely solitude, most of the characters who fill these pages also filled their lives and those of their friends and colleagues with a quiet courage that shaped their world for the better. Their courage also made a better Emory. Institutions, like individuals, do not always manifest the ancient virtues of fortitude, moderation, justice, and wisdom, as the latest news reports confirm. Institutions draft charters, credos, mission statements, and mottos, just as individuals adopt philosophies and creeds. When institutions succeed in meeting those high standards, it is because of the men and women who live up to them. Emory University, now close to the end of its second century, has sought to square action with rhetoric and model the best aims of education. Whether establishing new programs or undermining long-held assumptions, moving to another city or pausing campus development to examine principles, the institution has asked difficult questions. Emory has endured because of the virtue and stamina of individual men and women who knew where this courageous inquiry should lead.
Gary S. Hauk is vice president and deputy to the president of Emory University, where he has served in senior administrative positions for more than twenty years, working closely with three successive Emory presidents. He is the author of a previous history of Emory, A Legacy of Heart and Mind: Emory Since 1836 (Bookhouse Group, 1999). Hauk received his PhD from Emory’s Graduate Division of Religion and earned a master of divinity degree from the Methodist Theological School in Ohio and BA and MA degrees in English from Lehigh University.
Sally Wolff King teaches in the Department of English at Emory University, where she has also served as associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and as assistant vice president. Her new book, Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an Antebellum Diary, is forthcoming from LSU Press. She has also published Talking about William Faulkner (1996) and is coeditor of Southern Mothers: Fact and Fiction in Southern Women’s Writing (1999). King has written about Eudora Welty, with whom she shared an eighteenyear literary friendship. She received her MA and PhD degrees from Emory University.
The forty-four chapters in this book tell story after story of an academic community striving to exercise the courage of its ideals and its questions. Design by Jill Dible PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
WHERE COURAGEOUS INQUIRY LEADS The Emerging Life of Emory University
Emory in Atlanta, 2009
WHERE COURAGEOUS INQUIRY LEADS The Emerging Life of Emory University — G A RY S . H AU K an d SA L LY W OLF F K ING , EDITO RS —
WHERE COURAGEOUS INQUIRY LEADS The Emerging Life of Emory University
Editors: Gary S. Hauk and Sally Wolff King Editorial Advisory Board James W. Wagner, President, Emory University Susan Ashmore, Associate Professor of History, Oxford College, Emory Virginia Cain (Emory College 1977, Graduate School 1982), Interim Director of Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory Rose B. Cannon, Professor of Nursing, Emerita, Woodruff School of Nursing, Emory Peter W. Dowell, Professor of English, Emeritus, Emory College Thomas E. Frank, University Associate Professor, Wake Forest University David Goldsmith, Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, Emory College Eric Goldstein (Emory College 1992), Professor of History, Emory College Leslie M. Harris, Associate Professor of History, Emory College Irwin Hyatt, Professor of History, Emeritus, Emory College Consuela Kertz (Emory Law 1975), Professor of Accounting, Goizueta Business School, Emory Richard M. Levinson, Charles Howard Candler Professor, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory Clyde Partin Jr. (Emory College 1978, Medicine 1983), Associate Professor of Medicine, Emory School of Medicine Polly J. Price (Emory College and Graduate School, 1986), Professor of Law, Emory Law School Copyright 2010 by Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Emory University. ISBN: 978-1-4507-1924-7 All photography in this book is the property of Emory University with the exception of Russell Major, Page 333, courtesy of Blair Rogers Major, and Moses Hadas, Page 277, courtesy of Classical World and the Classical Association of the Atlantic States.
Emory University 201 Dowman Drive Atlanta, Georgia 30322 www.emory.edu While the content of this book is correct to the best of our knowledge, please note that research is a continual process. We encourage anyone who has relevant information to contact Emory University. Book Development by Bookhouse Group, Inc. Atlanta, Georgia www.bookhouse.net Editorial Director: Rob Levin Project Manager: RenĂŠe Peyton Design and Prepress: Jill Dible Copy Editor: Bob Land Indexer: Eric R. Nitschke Printed in United States
Contents I NTRODUCTION GARY S. HAUK AND SALLY WOLFF KING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IX SECTION 1 STORY AND PLACE IN THE SHAPING OF INSTITUTIONAL CHARACTER “The Spirits of This Lawn”: Poem commissioned for inauguration of President James Wagner, April 2, 2004 JOHN STONE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 1
“Emory Are Here”: Emory as Place and Story .................................................3
MARSHALL P. DUKE
Chapter 2
“Dreams Deferred”: African Americans in the History of Old Emory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
MARK AUSLANDER
Chapter 3
Lynching, Academic Freedom, and the Old “New South”: President Dickey and the “Sledd Affair” THOMAS H. JACKSON JR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Chapter 4
National Ambition, Regional Turmoil: The Desegregation of Emory MELISSA F. KEAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Chapter 5
Putting Black Blood and White Blood on the Same Shelf: The Integration of Grady Hospital JERRY GENTRY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Chapter 6
Lullwater and the Greening of Emory: Catalyst for a New Environmental Commitment NANCY SEIDEMAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Chapter 7
Shaped by a Crucible Experience: The Center for Women at Emory ALI P. CROWN AND JAN GLEASON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
SECTION 2 BUILDING A COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS Chapter 8
Catching Up: The Advance of Emory since World War II NANCY DIAMOND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Chapter 9
How It Came to Pass: Oral History of a Half-Century in Emory Arts and Sciences Interviews with Former Chancellor Billy E. Frye; Former Emory College Deans David Minter, George Jones, David Bright, and Steven Sanderson; and Former College Senior Associate Deans Irwin Hyatt, Peter Dowell, and Rosemary Magee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Chapter 10 Campus Life: The Interplay of Living and Learning at Emory WILLIAM H. FOX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Chapter 11 The School of Theology as Prelude: Candler Conversations . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 MANFRED HOFFMANN, WILLIAM MALLARD, THEODORE RUNYON, AND THEODORE WEBER Chapter 12 African American Studies at Emory: A Model for Change DELORES P. ALDRIDGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Chapter 13 “Struck by Theater-Ideas”: Theater as a Site and Mode of Inquiry at Emory University MICHAEL EVENDEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Chapter 14 “If You Build It, [They] Will Come”: The Birth and Growth of Film Studies at Emory, DAVID COOK . . . . . . . . . . 197 Chapter 15 Guy Redvers Lyle and the Birth of Emory’s Research Libraries ERIC NITSCHKE AND MARIE NITSCHKE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Chapter 16 Emory Law and the Formation of a University NAT GOZANSKY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 Chapter 17 Feminist Activism and the Origins of Women’s Studies at Emory MARY E. ODEM AND CANDACE COFFMAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 SECTION 3 CREATING ENGAGED SCHOLARS Chapter 18 Adventure as Self-Transcendence: The Romance of Arthur Evans RICHARD S. WARD AND MAXIMILIAN AUE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 Chapter 19 John Howett, Art History, and Cultural Ferment at Emory CATHERINE HOWETT SMITH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Chapter 20 Lore Metzger: Pioneer for Women Faculty RALPH FREEDMAN, CAROLE HAHN, PETER DOWELL, MARTINE BROWNLEY, AND GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 Chapter 21 “Athletics for All Who Wish to Participate”: The Career of Thomas Edwin McDonough Sr. CLYDE PARTIN SR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Chapter 22 Richard A. Long: Public Scholarship across Disciplines and Institutions RUDOLPH P. BYRD AND DANA F. WHITE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Chapter 23 A Century of Vitality: Patricia Collins Butler MARTHA W. FAGAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 Chapter 24 The Osler of the South: Stewart R. Roberts Sr. CHARLES STEWART ROBERTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Chapter 25 The Classicist: Moses Hadas HERBERT W. BENARIO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Chapter 26 Emory Historical Minds and Their Impact GARY S. HAUK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 Chapter 27 The Charles Howard Candler Professorships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 GARY S. HAUK AND SALLY WOLFF KING Chapter 28 The Biographer: Elizabeth Stevenson Looked Steadily at Lives and Life BETH DAWKINS BASSETT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Chapter 29 Medievalist Extraordinary: George Peddy Cuttino IRWIN T. HYATT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311 Chapter 30 Remembering Floyd WILLIAM B. DILLINGHAM AND WILLIAM GRUBER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
Chapter 31 A Fortunate Life: William B. Dillingham GREG JOHNSON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Chapter 32 Russell Major: Candler Professor of Renaissance History ALEXIS VICTORIA HAUK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Chapter 33 Richard Ellmann at Emory, 1976–1987 RONALD SCHUCHARD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337 Chapter 34 In Praise of a Legal Polymath: Harold J. Berman, Emory’s First Woodruff Professor of Law JOHN WITTE JR. AND FRANK S. ALEXANDER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 SECTION 4 RELIGIONS AND THE HUMAN SPIRIT Chapter 35 Emory and Methodism RUSSELL E. RICHEY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 Chapter 36 Studying Religion at Emory: Continuing Tradition, New Directions PAUL B. COURTRIGHT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363 Chapter 37 Uniting “The Pair So Long Disjoined”: Science and Religion at Emory ARRI EISEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369 Chapter 38 The Case for Law and Religion APRIL L. BOGLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379 SECTION 5 FRONTIERS IN SCIENCE AND MEDICINE Chapter 39 The Making of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center SYLVIA WROBEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395 Chapter 40 Humans and Other Primates: Yerkes since 1979 FREDERICK A. KING AND STUART M. ZOLA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 409 Chapter 41 A Legacy of Heart: The Evolution of Cardiology at Emory J. WILLIS HURST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421 Chapter 42 Pioneering in Radiology: Heinz Stephen Weens PERRY SPRAWLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429 Chapter 43 Partnering for Health Care in Tbilisi, Georgia H. KENNETH WALKER AND ARCHIL UNDILASHVILI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435 Chapter 44 Looking Back with Boisfeuillet Jones BOISFEUILLET JONES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447 A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457 C ONTRIBUTORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459 E DITORIAL B OARD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465 N OTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467 I NDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 505
INTRODUCTION
T
HE CONCEPT FOR this book took shape about five years ago, as the Emory community began to chart the future of the University by developing a strategic plan. After many months of brainstorming by hundreds of faculty members, and countless hours of deliberation by a core of several dozen faculty and administrators, the strategic plan was hammered out, tempered, burnished, and finally unveiled in the spring of 2005. The title of the plan, “Where Courageous Inquiry Leads,” seemed too good not to use more than once. True, a title alone is not foundation enough on which to build a book, but the double meaning of the title is appealing and suggestive. First, Emory—a “destination university,” in the language of its vision statement—is a place to which courageous inquiry leads men and women when they boldly follow the logic of their curiosity. Emory also is a place of leadership—a place that leads Atlanta, other universities, our nation, and our world—whenever it demonstrates its own kinds of courageous inquiry. The strategic plan had other attractive features besides the title. The broad themes of the plan—“faculty distinction,” “the student experience,” “engaging society,” “confronting the human condition,” “frontiers in science and technology”—also invited reuse for a wider audience. Intended to focus the thinking and energy of Emory people moving into the future, these themes also suggested a way of framing Emory’s history. They posed, at least for the editors, compelling questions: In what sense do the aspirations of Emory for the future grow naturally out of its past achievements or disappointments; and, on the other hand, in what sense, if any, do the aspirations of Emory represent a departure from its past? Is the plan a portrait as well as a road map? With these questions in mind, and with an acute awareness of certain lacunae in published histories of Emory, we set about inviting answers. Knowing that the keepers of the Emory story are many, and that each story keeper witnesses to different scenes and acts of the whole drama, we invited a host of narrators to tell their tales, and we were delighted by the response. This volume brings together the perspectives and voices of more than five dozen men and women. Some of them are longtime members of our community, and some are observers from outside; some are still very active, and some have long retired or (several of them) died. They write about a wide array of scholarly interests in a variety of personal styles with a number of institutional interests. They write about eras, persons, movements, and the daily activities that make up the passage of time at a rapidly changing university. Organized thematically in sections, this book reflects the current commitments of Emory while ranging freely over some of the activities and plans that Emory has left behind. A few of the essays reach back to the earliest years of Emory College to shed new light on old stories, while broadening our sense of the unusual historical community that is Emory. The overwhelming majority of the essays focus on the latter half of the twentieth century and unfold for the first time in one place a comprehensive narrative of how Emory grew from regional distinction to national excellence: by negotiating the end of its racial exclusivity; by making increasingly effective forays into the higher elevations of research; and, through it all, by demonstrating its true distinctiveness as a place that seeks to blend goodness of heart and greatness of intellect. Some readers will look for themselves in this book and be disappointed. We could not tell the whole Emory story because of the limits of time and resources—ours as well as those of our collaborators. We regret as much as anyone that not all of the worthy Emory stories have their deserved place here. We hope that other editors and writers will pick up where we leave off. We do know that these pages reflect the growing interest in the history of Emory over the ix
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
past decade, an interest that has also borne fruit in many other efforts across our campus and beyond. Over the past few years the Emeritus College has recorded timely and important video interviews of many retired faculty and administrators as part of its oral history project. The Goizueta Business School has produced several video histories leading up to and celebrating its ninetieth anniversary in 2009. The Transforming Community Project—launched in 2005 as an endeavor to understand more fully the racial past of Emory—has created a legacy of groundbreaking historical studies by Emory students, staff members, and faculty members. The Internet has also facilitated the posting of much Emory history online, including the history of the Chemistry Department written by the late Professor Emeritus R. A. Day (http://chemistry. emory.edu/department_info/history/), the more general University history at http://emory history.emory.edu, and even a wiki devoted to Emory at http://wikiemory.emory.edu. The past decade also has brought publication of at least six other books about different facets of Emory history. Most encouraging of all is the growing level of interest in this history among Emory students, alumni, and staff. Our hope is that this book not only will fill some of the gaps but also will spur still more studies of the life of this remarkable university. Gary S. Hauk Sally Wolff King DECEMBER 2009
x
SECTION 1 Story and Place in the Shaping of Institutional Character
The Spirits of This Lawn For let us consider the spirits of this lawn who have gathered to speak with us For the daffodils have flared in fanfare the bagpipes have skirled the brass and bells have sounded For this is a high time For the spirits of this lawn have decided that the time is wholly right on this quad, this place, this lawn, this commons, this yard, this space For the spirits roam this ground scattering their invisible atoms as Lucretius knew full well they would For so do we all scatter our atoms hereabouts For the Frisbee, wobbling in its orbits, has shed its atoms, too, over this approving ground For birds have seen the buildings of this quad take shape from the air, time-lapse, over decades, like Georgia pyramids For the Lost Pharaoh, great spirit of Egypt, has returned now to his earthly home For here we have commenced, processed, recessed, in these, our best medieval clothes For in the wings is James W. Dooley—and his cousins For these are truly our stomping grounds For I have seen a single jogger, early morning, move in circles, one step ahead of solitude For I have seen this lawn alive in the evening, crying with memory candles For this quad is larger than a whale, than a hundred whales For it swallows me whole, as though I were Jonah and disgorges me into art, music, theology, history, words, by which I survive For we have spoken, thought, taught, learned under these trees For the flagpole, center, reminds us that alumni, visible and invisible, have gathered here For during the wars, Emory footfalls made of this space a parade ground, a sacred lawn For the spirits of the lawn honor teachers who have taught us to listen completely: For as it is written, “If you listen carefully, at the end you will be someone else.” For the spirits honor those who search: the scientists—the biologists, chemists,
1
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
psychologists, the healers, all . . . For let us take more careful notes about Lucretius. For the musicians and artists of this city For the poets, of whom there can never be too many For the lovers, without whom there would be no poets For we are mindful always of the need for perspective: Van Gogh conferred perspective on his world by simply painting a road diagonally up and through the fields of wheat, letting the crows fly where they would For perspective may take us a bit longer than Van Gogh: But let us walk together into the paintings of our lives and talk of what we find there For everyone comes to the arts too late For there is the matter of that famous sparrow— the one that flew out of a raging storm through the great banqueting hall in the words of the Venerable Bede the sparrow that flew in one door and out another, from winter dark and back to dark, in an eye’s twinkle For is that flight not like our lives: “What there before-goes or what there after-follows we know not.” For the human quest begets more questions For the question is at least as important as the answer Praise both. For what matters finally is how the human spirit is spent In the names, then, of the Genii Loci of this lawn the timeless spirits of this commons of this humane and mindful city— In the names, then, of all this lawn’s lively spirits, some of whom you know already, Mr. President— the newest of whom you now most assuredly become. Welcome. Written for the inauguration of James W. Wagner as president of Emory University, April 2, 2004
John Stone 2
CHAPTER 1
“EMORY ARE HERE” Emory as Place and Story — M A R SH A LL P. DU KE —
With its quaint British use of a plural verb for a group, Marshall Duke’s essay title offers a way of illuminating Emory as place. For him, the campus as place—buildings, land, people— is “far more than the sum of its parts” and relies on narrative to define and sustain itself over time. Supported by research into the importance of family storytelling to the long-term resilience of children, Duke embraces the “intergenerationality” that arises from being a part of this community. For Duke, the Emory narrative locates us in the physical university but finally and infinitely resides in our hearts and minds. 3
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
I
T WAS IN the summer of 1985. Our bus had traveled from Gatwick Airport outside of London to Canterbury, some fifty-five minutes west, and had pulled up in front of the London Guest House, a Victorian-looking bed-and-breakfast that would serve as our group’s headquarters for the coming two weeks. On board with me were my colleague Stephen Nowicki, two graduate teaching assistants, and some thirty undergrads from Atlanta, all of us eager to begin our study abroad program gathering data on comparative child development in the County Kent school system. Our innkeeper, Sharon Rockhill, came to the door of the London Guest House as the bus’s door opened. She turned, ducked her head into the doorway of the inn, and shouted to her husband, “Emory are here!” It was with this, to-our-ear-quaint, British grammar, which sees group nouns as plurals rather than singulars, that our presence was made known in Canterbury. Emory “were” indeed there, despite being some four thousand miles from Atlanta. To Sharon Rockhill’s eyes, we were Emory—not the Quadrangle, not the Administration Building, not then-president James Laney, nor anything or anyone else that we might identify as belonging to the University. To put it another way, where we were, Emory was. This was surely not my first confrontation with the notion that Emory—that any human entity or community that comprises heart and history spanning time and space—was something more than bricks and mortar and fixed location. This was, however, a profoundly and powerfully simple demonstration of the phenomenon, so it is there that I begin my examination of Emory as place—of Emory as story—of Emory as something that, while it is land, buildings, and people, emerges as something far more than the sum of its parts—a force that not only is shaped by those who spend their time here but also shapes them as well. This essay is an attempt to consider Emory as story and to think about the ways in which it has sustained us and itself through its century and three quarters. I begin with one of my favorite moments in the Emory story.
The Great Library Book Turnaround | On an otherwise unremarkable spring day in the mid-1970s, the usual large number of Emory students were studying late into the evening at Emory’s Woodruff Library. As the 11 p.m. closing time crept up, most of these students packed up their books and headed to their dormitories. On that particular evening, however, a still-unknown number of them packed up their books and headed for various restroom stalls on the upper floors. It was there that, like a well-trained covert military unit, they waited until the library had closed and all the staff had left for the night. At precisely midnight,1 they emerged from their hiding places and converged on a particular floor—the humanities collection—and began their night’s task. Diligently they walked up and down the stacks, removing every book from its unique Library of Congress classification space and reversing it. Each book remained in its proper place but with its spine turned inward. By sunrise, every book on that floor of the library had been turned around in this manner. When the library reopened, the students once again sequestered themselves in the bathroom stalls, being careful to allow time for the flow of students in and out of the library to resume. Then they joined the flow outward and reunited with their comrades, who had been busily preparing the campus for stage two of this operation. As the day began and students, staff, and faculty walked across the campus, they beheld an unusual scene on the Quadrangle. The normally hyperpristine enclave was lined with yellow and blue balloons tied to the posts that encircle and purportedly protect the grass. On the Quad and elsewhere, flyers were either posted or distributed saying simply, “Emory beware! Do not turn your backs on the Humanities. They may turn their backs on you!” This, then, was the purpose of the prank: to sound the alarm against the rampant “Me-ism” that had begun to infiltrate Emory and other college campuses across America, where focus on career and financial success drew students away from the liberal arts, which have always been at the 4
“Emory are Here”: Emory as Place and Story
heart of an Emory education. Point made, the midnight book turners went on their way. But the library was left with an entire floor of books with their backs turned. Here began the unplanned, but exhilarating happening that resolved the Great Library Book Turnaround. Faced (or not faced) with all of these reversed books, the staff of the library sent out a campuswide call for help. Anyone who could spare a bit of time was asked to come to the library and help undo the work of the pranksters. Within a short time, faculty, staff, and students began to ascend to the humanities collection, and soon everything was made right. Emory as an unseen yet not unfelt force had risen up and righted itself. This was not the first time that such a thing had happened on this campus, nor would it be the last. In fact, it was just one example of a phenomenon that in so many ways defines the Emory community. I say more about this On the Quad and elsewhere, flyers later, but here I end this library story as an were either posted or distributed isolated event and reframe it as just one part of a much larger Emory narrative. saying simply, “Emory beware! In 1999 Emory became the home of the Do not turn your backs on the Alfred P. Sloan Center for the Study of Myth Humanities. They may turn their and Ritual in American Life—acronymically backs on you!” known as the MARIAL Center. Comprising a broad-ranging interdisciplinary core of faculty, postdocs, and graduate students, MARIAL has focused on ways in which families use rituals and stories to establish and maintain their identities, and on ways in which family stories add to the well-being of family members. The director of the center is Goodrich White Professor of Anthropology Bradd Shore, a campus treasure. Along with my colleague Robyn Fivush, Dobbs Professor of Psychology, I have been part of the MARIAL Family Narratives Project for more than a decade. Much of what I say about Emory as narrative is based on our work at MARIAL, so it is helpful to start with what we have discovered about the stories that families tell and how they tell them. We have interviewed more than a hundred families to examine the nature and effects of family narratives. To describe all that we have found will take several books (we are working on them!), but a few things are particularly relevant to Emory as narrative. First, we have found that strong families tell their stories. They tell them at holiday gatherings, family reunions, birthdays, birth celebrations, and funerals. They describe the good times and the bad. They tell of family heroes and family outcasts. They typically describe histories that have an oscillating pattern; they have been up and they have been down, but they have risen up against adversity and gone on. The stories are told by many people, but usually by the elders (look who was asked to write this essay) and, in families, most often by the grandmothers. One more thing about these narratives: They are not necessarily true or consistent. They are often tailored to fit situations. For example, a child having trouble with math hears about the problems that his or her mother had with math when she was a child. To a different child, struggling in English, the very same mother might be described as having had writing difficulties. Regardless of veracity, the stories have clear purposes. Two appear to be most important. The first purpose of the family narrative is to establish and maintain a sense of identity and continuity for the family. Each day, as the family comes back together after being out and about in the world, they tell “Today, I . . .” stories. Kids tell about school, Mom and Dad tell about work, and together they incorporate the day as another page in the history of the family. The family dinner continues to be a critical venue for family storytelling and identity maintenance. A second important outcome of telling family stories is a powerful relationship between how much family members, especially children, know about their families and their psychological and social adjustment. To assess family knowledge we have used a brief questionnaire called the Do You Know (DYK) Scale, which inquires about things such as where grandparents grew up, health history of the family, places lived, and jobs held. We have learned that the 5
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
more kids know about their families, the higher their self-esteem will be, the lower their rate of problem behavior in school, the higher their level of psychological adjustment, the higher their level of family functioning, the less likely they are to develop social or legal problems, and the better their prognosis in the face of life challenges. Trying to understand why knowing about family history has such a strong effect, Robyn Fivush and her students developed a concept termed the “intergenerational self.” The intergenerational self describes the sense that we exist beyond our actual years—that, for example, as a ten-year-old child, I have connections that stretch back fifty or sixty years, because I know and am part of the stories that I hear from my grandparents. I am part of an entity—my family—that has certain qualities and has had certain experiences. The family’s experiences are my own. The intergenerational self decides whether I as a ten-year-old should steal that candy bar or cheat on a test. The question before me as that ten-year-old is not “Do I steal or cheat?” Rather the question—the more powerful question—is “Do people in my family steal? Do they cheat?” The intergenerational self, arising out of the family narrative, provides us with a way of understanding the importance of the Emory narrative. To reach this understanding, we must move from the family at the dinner table to the University—admittedly a rather large leap, even for an academic. To help bridge the gap, let me tell another MARIAL story. Each summer, some fifty southern extended families pack up their vans and SUVs and head toward Salem, Georgia, some thirty miles southeast of Atlanta, and take up residence for one week as part of something called the Salem Camp Meeting.2 Each family attending Salem is multigenerational and lives for the week in sparsely furnished wooden cabins called “tents” (recalling their original form) that these same families have used for many decades. All meals are taken communally, and there are prayer assemblies and other group activities, but the heart of the gathering is the extension and transmission of the family stories from generation to generation. In addition to long conversations on the tent porches and at the family-style tables in the dining hall, inside the individual family tents are other signs of continuity: family pictures and other treasured objects on display; handprints on the walls, outlined in pencil, with names and dates written below them; a series of prints of the same person ranging from “age 1” through “age 87.” Such lifelong representations are not uncommon at Salem, for the same fifty families have been gathering here since 1828—eight years before Emory’s founding. This is in fact one of the oldest such gatherings in the United States. No one who was there at the beginning is present now, and yet, because of the rituals and the stories, each living member of the Salem families feels a connection with those who have been part of Salem and have passed on. Though the people are different, the entity called Salem Camp Meeting—an unseen, yet not unfelt force—continues. It is shaped and maintained by those who are living, and they in turn are shaped by those who went before. In 2005 I had the honor of delivering the welcoming address at the opening convocation for the incoming Emory College Class of 2009. My theme in that address, guided by our work at the MARIAL Center, was that each of the new students not only was about to receive an Emory education but was also going to be given a history. I told the new students the story of the library books; I told them about the pushball competitions and Wonderful Wednesdays and balloons on the Quad; I reminded them about Emory’s 1977 NCAA Division I national football championship (that got a rise out of them, too, dear reader). I told them that Emory’s stories were now their stories, and that Emory’s history now belonged to them. I told them as well that along with this history came an identity as an Emory student with all of the familiar “rights, privileges, and immunities thereunto appertaining.” I also told them, though, that along with this identity and history came a responsibility to be sure that they added to the Emory story, so that when they graduated in 2009, the story 6
“Emory are Here”: Emory as Place and Story
would be at once the same and better. I was invoking the notion so often put forward at Emory that we should do well, but we should also do good. That 2005 opening convocation was directed at the students, but the intergenerational Emory story affects all of us. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the multiple manifestations of an unseen yet not unfelt force that transcends us as members of Emory and assures Emory’s survival regardless of who is currently living in its tents. Here is another story. Anyone who has spent any time at a college campus knows that faculty are often lost in their own research, thinking great thoughts, or writing about esoterica. Similarly, most students are too weighted down with work and social activities to worry much about other things. Rarely do faculty and students get worked up about anything, much less the same thing. Yet they did rise up as one in the early 1990s at Emory, when it was announced that the architectural plan for the expansion of the Carlos Museum included a significant structural incursion into the Quadrangle. The thought of one corner of the new building breaking the inviolable rectangle of the Quad resulted in veritable paroxysms. Faculty felt that one simply could not violate the essence of the Quad, the lawn that our late beloved colleague John Stone said held the “spirits” of those who have walked through it over the decades. Students felt that the traditionally most playful part of the campus, where Frisbees flew and friends gathered in the spring sunshine, was being threatened. In a congenial fashion, the architectural plan was changed in short order, and the faculty went back to thinking great thoughts, students returned to their classes and term papers, and peace settled over the heart of the campus. Why is this event important? Because not one of those faculty members or students was here when the Quad was laid down; not one had a truly and deeply personal reason to see it maintained. What had happened was an example of the Salem Camp Meeting phenomenon— the sense of intergenerationality that arises from being a part of this community had driven these faculty and students to exercise their responsibility to and for Emory, an entity greater than themselves. In a conflict between progress and tradition, a balance was struck; old Emory and new Emory had worked things out. Emory in many ways harbors a dynamic tension. On one hand is a force driving us toward progress and growth. This force is counterbalanced by a second force seeking to maintain our sense of history and tradition. Neither force will ever win out, but the tension between them is essential to our identity and guides what we may or may not do. There are many examples of these forces playing out in the core Emory conflict between tradition and progress. They represent the manifestations of our connection with our forebears—the Ignatius Fews, the Eléonore Raouls, the Robert Woodruffs, the Floyd Watkinses, the Evangeline Papageorges, the Jim Laneys, and all the others who have come here before us and felt the same way most of us do about this place called Emory. The first place that Emory occupied was, as most know, in Oxford, Georgia, where Emory College was founded in 1836. From its inauspicious beginnings, Emory grew in size and stature until it was apparent that it needed to move to Atlanta. This move, completed in 1919, was an early manifestation of the conflict between tradition and progress that defines Emory as a place. The oldest buildings on the Atlanta campus date back to 1916, when the grand new Emory began taking shape in the Druid Hills suburb of Atlanta. But even though progress was desirable and inevitable, the advent of the new Emory awakened that tension with the old. In the specific instance of the move to Atlanta, it was not until 1937 that this tension was reconciled through the construction of the now-familiar Haygood-Hopkins Gate at the main entrance to the campus. That it was constructed to retrieve and remember the old Emory is not mere speculation. John D. Thomas documents it in the description of the dedication of the gate: On October 8, 1937, Robeson [Linton Robeson, Class of 1886, the man who donated the gate] delivered an address in Glenn Memorial Auditorium in honor of the gateway’s dedication. During
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Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
his remarks, he said, “In thinking over what I could do to honor these two great and good men, Haygood and Hopkins, and keep their names before the youth of the land, it occurred to me that a gateway at the entrance to the campus of Emory University would be the best thing. I thought it would serve to bring the “Old Emory” a little closer to Emory University, and to link the two together, and to remind the present and future generations of the fact that Emory is a great institution and has a great history extending back many years before it was moved to Atlanta. (emphasis added)
The inclusion on the Atticus Haygood pillar of a favorite saying of that past president of Emory further strengthens the connection between the old Emory and the new Emory: “Let us stand by what is good and make it better if we can.” Even today, on leaving the Oxford campus one is bid farewell with a sign posting this same inscription. While the Haygood-Hopkins Gate served as the main entryway for all traffic entering the Druid Hills campus for decades, in 1971 traffic was detoured around the pillars after several incidents in which large trucks damaged the overhead crossbar. In a literal and figurative sense, new Emory had bypassed old Emory. Progress had trumped tradition—at least until 2009, as we shall see. Other examples of the unseen but not unfelt conflict that defines Emory have appeared over the years. In the 1950s, during the presidency of Goodrich C. White, a proposal was put forward to increase the amount of space in the Candler Library by dividing the majestic twenty-five-foot-high main reading room horizontally, creating two floors, each with twelvefoot ceilings. As described by Guy Lyle, then head of libraries, this was not received well by the old Emory: No sooner had this proposal reached the architect who originally designed the building, and the critics on the campus who were against all change, than they swarmed over to the President’s office to suggest that this meddler was about to ruin the aesthetics of the Asa Griggs Candler Library and ought to quit.
From the new Emory side came Lyle’s rationale for the redesign: The Reading Room divider gave us three-quarters of all usable new space in the building and make [sic] possible the creation of a Science Library. . . . We might reasonably expect a hundred percent increase in library use because the two new reading rooms would be air-conditioned and the lighting greatly improved by the reduction in ceiling heights.3
As Emory moved forward with the renovation, it appeared once more that progress had won out. But that other unseen but not unfelt force remained. Emory itself seemed not to be comfortable with this decision; something had been lost. This restlessness persisted until the late 1990s when the widow of William Matheson—who had studied history at Emory for but two semesters in 1946–47 and had become a generous donor, thanks to this brief experience with the Emory narrative—came forward with a $1.5 million gift to restore the grand reading room in Candler Library, re-created down to the chandeliers from its original design of 1926. In a concession to modernity, however, the base of each Art Deco–style reading lamp on the long oak tables contains DSL ports and power connections for laptop computers. But the apology to Emory about the loss of the original Candler Library did not stop with re-creating the reading room. When the building was gutted for reconstruction—down to its bare shell—measures were taken to assure that, amid the new materials of the completely rebuilt space, a bit of the original building would remain. Taking either the right or the left stairway to the second-floor Matheson Reading room, one ascends new marble steps, all with 8
“Emory are Here”: Emory as Place and Story
sharp and crisp corners and edges. On close inspection, however, the visitor will see that the edges of the stair landings are not similarly sharp. These marble landings are in fact the 1926 originals, carefully removed, stored, and then put back. Their edges are rounded and uneven, worn by the literally millions of footfalls they have absorbed in the eighty-odd years since they were as new as the steps that now rise to meet therm. The plaque that stands outside the Candler Library perhaps says it best: “Candler Library— Built 1926. Renovated—1955; Restored—2003.” “Restored”—as if to say, “Someone made a mistake, dear Emory. Please forgive us. We have made you right once more.” Like those who rose up to protect the Quadrangle from the incursion of the Carlos Museum extension, the people who decided to restore Candler Library were not here when the original stair landings
Asa Griggs Candler Library
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Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
were installed; they never saw the original reading room; they never met the Haygoods and the Hopkinses. Yet they were guided by that same intergenerational sense of connection that has always kept Emory, Emory. There are many other examples of this dynamic tension between the old and the new Emory. The Dobbs University Center (DUC) was built in 1984–85 at the west side of the old Alumni Memorial University Center (AMUC), which dated from 1927. The former main entrance of the AMUC now forms an interior wall of the large open space called the Coca-Cola Commons. Anyone who walks into the Coca-Cola Commons and looks up at the magnificent steps and entrance to the old edifice gasps with simple joy at the idea and realizes all too well what it says about the spirit and values of this University. Or consider the recently constructed School of Medicine Building, replete with modern glass and wood paneling. Walk down some of its hallways, however, and you come upon exposed brick walls, unfinished and bare to the eye and touch. These are the original bricks of the old Anatomy and Physiology buildings, constructed in 1917 and renovated as the new medical school entrance was created. In place after place, the old coexists with the new, and unseen forces would seem to be at peace. Emory maintains its intergenerational self through such things. One more example of the dynamic tension between progress and tradition must be mentioned, and it requires a brief return to the story of the Haygood-Hopkins Gate. While it continued to serve as a pedestrian archway since being bypassed by the road in 1971, it seems that the Emory spirit remained disquieted by the gate’s having been shunted aside in the name of progress. So it was with a sense of relief, even delight, that the campus witnessed in 2008–09 the restoration of the Haygood-Hopkins Gate as the true entryway to Emory. In a concession to the past, vehicles once again pass through the gate, and in a concession to the new Emory a grand new entrance complex befitting a major, internationally recognized university has been built. This new-old entryway is a quintessential distillation of Emory as a story. Together they say, “Welcome. You are about to enter a major institution of research and teaching that deeply values its past even as it forges courageously toward the future.” If ever there was a sense of “Sorry, Emory, we [of 1971] made a mistake, but we [of 2009] have made it right”—here it is! Emory has emerged as an entity, a being with some sort of self, a place that we apologize to, a place we feel responsible for, a place that speaks to us, guides us, has expectations for us. Emory is clearly more than a group of buildings and a daily gathering of people. But what exactly is this presence that lives among all of us associated with this university? The answer lies in the concept of emergent properties. An old adage among those in my profession of clinical psychology holds that if one is working with a married couple, there are three entities: he, she, and they. A husband and a wife are very real people with very real feelings and problems. The third entity, “they,” is an emergent property, a very real presence that takes form out of the joining together of the spouses. Similar concepts abound. At some point a number of geese become a flock. At some point single sheets of paper placed on top of one another become an emergent property called a stack. When sufficient numbers of people, buildings, and history coexist, what emerges is an institution, a university, Emory. Even if Emory represents an emergent property, how do we understand the continuing presence of this entity for some 180 years? After all, the Emory campus in Atlanta occupies different space than the campus in Oxford. Further, over the past 90 years the buildings constructed in 1916 have been replaced or joined by other structures. Our student body changes almost entirely every four to six years; the current faculty and staff are totally different from those of fifty years ago and will be totally different again not many years hence. Where is the continuity between those of us here in 2008 and those “here” in 1836? How will those in this community in 2036 connect with us here today? 10
“Emory are Here”: Emory as Place and Story
This question of continuity might be asked of my colleagues in philosophy. If you bought a brand-new Ford Mustang in 1985 and, during the years since, replaced every single part of the original car, is it still the same 1985 Ford Mustang? Most people would say yes, and our philosophy friends would say that we feel this because the essence or identity of the car has remained. The same can be said about Emory. Though the buildings and people are all different, we are still the same Emory that began in 1836 at Oxford, completed the move to Atlanta in 1919, and now stands among the top universities in the world. A connection exists between those of us here now, those who have gone before, and those who will come after us. That connection both creates the emergent phenomenon called Emory and produces an intergenerational power that transforms all who have ever been a part of this university into Emory has emerged as an entity, a “family” dedicated to simultaneously ada being with some sort of self, a vancing yet preserving it. The connection is in the stories we tell of who we are. These place that we apologize to, a place stories are not only told in words about a we feel responsible for, a place that library prank, or told in books about Emory speaks to us, guides us, has expechistory. They are told in the ways we stewtations for us. ard this place—through the careful restoration of the Candler reading room; the preservation of the original marble landings in Candler Library; the restoration of the Haygood-Hopkins Gate. These stories produce an intergenerational self in all who have ever been and ever will be a part of this place. This intergenerational self assures that new presidents will honor the work of old presidents; that current faculty, staff, and trustees will never forget that they stand in place of and share responsibilities of their forebears; that the new Emory never loses sight of its responsibilities to the old Emory; and that the magnificent tension between the two remains the tradition that we live by. This is the essence of the Emory narrative, a story nearing two hundred years in length with no foreseeable ending. Where does Emory actually reside? There will be little argument that Emory exists physically on some seven hundred acres off North Decatur Road in Atlanta and some fifty-six acres in the town of Oxford. To say that this is where Emory is, however, pays insufficient attention to the extent of Emory’s impact. Recall the words of our innkeeper in Canterbury, England: “Emory are here.” I have remembered this moment so vividly because it represented so much more than the arrival of a busload of Americans. It represented a phenomenon not unique to Emory but one raised to a glorious level in our community. I experienced the same phenomenon in Jerusalem in 2008, when I was fortunate to attend an awards reception for the worldwide winners of the Jewish Book Awards. One of the award recipients was Professor Eric Goldstein of Emory’s History Department, the keynote speaker was Professor Deborah Lipstadt of our Religion Department, and the young coordinator of the event was an Emory graduate and a former student of mine. As the four of us stood and chatted during the reception, I was struck by the feeling that, in addition to us, there was a fifth presence. Emory “were” there. I have felt the same thing meeting with alumni groups across America or speaking to Emory groups off-campus. Wherever Emory people gather, one emergent presence is added. Emory is there. In a short story called “The Infinite Lawn,” Italian writer Italo Calvino describes a Mr. Palomar, who, like the observatory for which he is named, examines things closely and thinks deeply about them. Mr. Palomar thinks about his lawn and its boundaries. He ponders where the lawn ends and where nonlawn begins. He notes that it is easy to conclude that the center of the lawn is part of it, but as he moves toward the edges, he realizes that although the grass thins out at the edges, there are wisps of new grass growing and extending out into the places 11
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
where, just days before, they had not been. Mr. Palomar realizes ultimately that in fact the lawn, any lawn, is infinite, because over time it can and will spread everywhere. The Quadrangle, the heart of the campus, is Emory’s own infinite lawn. It is surely a physical entity, but it is a metaphorical presence as well. Physically it is continuous with the earth upon which every building at Emory stands, the soil on which each of us walks, whether on campus or not. Metaphorically it is continuous with every part of the world to which we at Emory travel, every place where Emory graduates live and work, every mind enlightened by knowledge generated here, every life made better by applications of research conducted here, every part of the world—large or small—that is in any way touched by this university. When our group of students stepped out of that bus in Canterbury in 1985, the infinite lawn of the Quadrangle was beneath our feet. And when our innkeeper called out, “Emory are here,” she said the truth. For what had arrived in Canterbury were those thirty-four persons, to be sure; but the thirty-fifth passenger on the bus from Gatwick was Emory itself. This place had traveled with us in the same way that it has traveled with all who have been privileged to be part of its family, some for four years, some for forty, some since 1936, some since 1836. In this instance, despite the odd sound of the British plural verb, the sentiment was accurate. Emory is plural. In Walt Whitman’s sense, it “contains multitudes.” Emory are in Atlanta. Emory are in Oxford, Georgia. Emory are in every state of the union. Emory are in nearly every country on earth. No matter where those of us who have been touched by this place may be, Emory is with us, because all of us, in different ways and for different reasons, stand on the same Quadrangle, the same infinite lawn that reaches out and supports our journeys, no matter how far they take us or how long we have been away. Emory as place has no boundaries. Emory as story has no end.
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CHAPTER 2
Laying the cornerstone for old Pierce Hall, Oxford, 1903.
“DREAMS DEFERRED” African Americans in the History of Old Emory — M A R K A US LAND ER —
A former Oxford College professor of anthropology, Mark Auslander unveils difficult truths about the history of interracial relations at Emory in Oxford, Georgia. Using documents that range from minutes of the Emory College board to “diaries, memoirs, letters, probate records, bills of sale,” and oral history, Auslander focuses on the thirteen decades of Emory’s history before desegregation, from the founding of the College until the 1960s. Among the case studies that shed light on slaves’ lives, particularly those with strong bonds to the College community, Auslander reinterprets the story of “Kitty” with the help of stunning new evidence unearthed by diligent research. Kitty’s story continues to stimulate controversy and demonstrate the lingering effects of a culture divided. 13
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
T
HIS CHAPTER EXPLORES the important contributions of African Americans to Emory College and Emory-at-Oxford during the roughly 130 years from the College’s founding to desegregation. Excluded by law and custom from the ranks of students and faculty, African Americans were nonetheless a vital presence in the institution—in slavery and in freedom. They served as builders and laborers, groundskeepers and cooks, washerwomen and maids, mechanics and carpenters, chauffeurs and caretakers. In a more subtle sense, African Americans functioned as “distant companions” and interlocutors for virtually all the prominent white families and individuals associated with the College from the 1830s onward. In ways that may not have been fully appreciated at the time, ambiguous encounters with Oxford’s African American residents functioned to define the institution for generations of white faculty, administrators, and students. To be sure, African Americans’ participation at Emory before the 1960s was complex. Generations of African American employees during the eras of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow labored for the school with the knowledge that neither they nor their children were allowed to attend Emory as students. They were often subjected to other forms of racial discrimination, including unequal pay. In spite of their qualifications, they were not hired into professional staff or faculty positions. In many instances their contributions to the institution were not properly acknowledged. Nonetheless, through the decades, African Americans were vital participants in the College, contributing with pride and dignity to the education of students and the mission of Emory in innumerable ways.
Slavery, Race, and the Founding of the College | A strong case can be made that the problem of slavery was central to the creation of the College in the 1830s. The institution’s founders were, without exception, slaveholders. In seeking to develop a prominent Methodist educational institution in the South, they took it for granted that their students would largely be drawn from southern white families who owned slaves, or for whom slave owning was considered normal. At a time when the struggle over slavery was taking on increasing national importance, those involved in the early years of the College would often find themselves called upon to legitimate the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery. In a proximate sense, the decision to name the new college for the recently deceased Methodist Bishop John Emory (1789–1835) was owing to his important contributions as an educator and the role he played presiding over the Washington, Georgia, conference at which the development of a Methodist college in Georgia was proposed. Yet in a more nuanced sense, the naming of the College for Bishop Emory was embedded in the fact that for its white founders, John Emory was emphatically one of their own. He had recently published a powerful tract against abolitionism, came from a prominent Maryland slave-owning family, and was himself a slave owner.1 College officials publicly defended the institution of slavery. College president Augustus Longstreet, who played a central role in the great national schism of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the mid-1840s over the issue of slavery, published several impassioned defenses of involuntary servitude, including an 1845 commentary on the scriptural foundations of slavery, Letters on the Epistle of Paul to Philemon, and Letters from Georgia to Massachusetts (1848), in which he denounced the hypocrisy of northern abolitionists for not attending to the plight of exploited New England mill girls. In contrast with some prominent Georgia institutions, such as the Georgia Railroad, the College itself never owned slaves. Rather, the College and its predecessor, the Georgia Conference Manual Labor School, at times rented slaves from their owners. For instance, the minutes of the Manual Labor School Board of Trustees for February 9, 1837, state, Resolved that the Treasurer be instructed to pay the sum of Fifty Dollars for the hire of a negro woman by the name of Sib for 1836 and to give notes for the hire of the negroes ordered to be
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Dreams Deferred: African Americans in the History of Old Emory
hired for the present year and the following rates, for Sim: $150, for Charles: $150, for Sib and her children: $75.
Slaves and Slave Owners | The economic fortunes of the men who founded Emory and guided the College in its early years indisputably rested upon the institution of slavery and upon the labor of hundreds of enslaved persons. Most slaves were moved back and forth between farms on the city’s outskirts and residences within Oxford itself. Some were rented out as factory laborers and artisans to businesses in Covington or elsewhere in the state. The nature of slavery has rendered many of these persons anonymous. Yet through diaries, memoirs, letters, probate records, bills of sale, and oral historical research it has been possible to identify by name some of the slaves African Americans were vital owned by the College’s antebellum leaders; participants in the College, in some instances, through census records contributing with pride and dignity we have been able to determine their years of birth or death and the surnames they to the education of students and assumed after emancipation. For example, the mission of Emory in innumerBishop James Osgood Andrew, president able ways. of the Emory Board of Trustees, in 1850 owned twenty slaves, including Addison, Edward, Elleck, George, Jacob, James, Jefferson, Kitty, Laura, Lillah, Thomas Mitchell, Nick, Orlando, Peter, and Susan. Iverson Graves, an important College trustee, owned Charley, Lawrence, Leniah, and Nick. Alexander Means, professor of natural sciences and a president of the College, owned Albert (b. 1818), Fanny (b. 1828), Harriet (1852–1861), Iveson (b. 1858), Samuel Means, Henry Robinson (b. 1806), Cornelius Robertson (b. 1836), Ellen Robertson (b. 1835), Milly Robinson (b. 1811), Mildred Robinson Pelham (b. 1836), Thomas Robinson (b. 1850), Troup Robinson (b. 1852), Thaddius, and Anna Tinsely. Gustavus John Orr, professor of mathematics, owned Charles, Hannah (b. 1833), George W. (b. 1853), Henry, Lizzie, Octavia Hunter (b. c. 1856–57), Peter, Phil, and Walter. A later professor of mathematics, George W. W. Stone Sr., owned Abner, Anna, Caesar, Clinton, Darcus, Duncan, Frank, Hunter, Isaac Stone (b. 1810), Jake, Lucinda, Mary, Louisa Means (c. 1832–1882), Nancy, Phillip, Ruth, Sallie, Silas, Sterling, Tempy, Tony, and Victoria [Carter]. James R. Thomas, the president of the College before and just after the Civil War, owned eight slaves in 1860, including Charity and Dave. Professor George W. Lane owned at least seven slaves, among them Elleck (or Allick) and Aphy. In some instances, it has been possible to trace the descendants of these enslaved men and women, among whom are African American families whose members have been involved with Emory for generations. Consider, for example, the family of Ellen and Cornelius Robinson, enslaved by Alexander Means. According to their descendants, Cornelius (b. 1836) and Ellen (b. 1835) were married to one another, and were allowed to live in a small house behind the Means mansion, Orna Villa, on present-day Emory Street in Oxford. Cornelius, a Native American, was Means’s valet. Ellen was the personal maid of Means’s wife. As such, they seemed to have occupied the highest status among all those enslaved in the Means household. After emancipation, Cornelius and Ellen formed an independent household, which by 1870 consisted of their children Cora (b. 1857), George (b. 1859), Sarah (b. 1861), John (b. 1863), and Thaddius (b. 1867). Sarah Robinson married Robert, the son of Thomas Mitchell, who had been enslaved by Bishop Andrew. One of the sons of Robert and Sarah was Henry “Billy” Mitchell, who served as chief janitor of Emory at Oxford for much of the first half of the twentieth century. His daughter, Sarah Francis Mitchell Wise, and grandson Billy Wise were close friends to many faculty and students at Oxford College. 15
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
The Enigmatic Case of Kitty | Perhaps no case illustrates the enduring legacies of slavery in Emory University’s self-conceptions as sharply as that of the enslaved woman known as Kitty (c. 1822–c. 1854), owned by Bishop Andrew. Standard white accounts hold that according to the terms under which he had inherited Kitty as a girl, Bishop Andrew attempted to emancipate her in 1841 (when she turned nineteen) by offering to send her to Liberia, where many freed slaves had been resettled. According to a legal document produced by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, then president of the College, Kitty refused to go to Liberia. Bishop Andrew, it is said, then built her a small cabin behind his own, in which she resided, “as free as the laws of Georgia would allow.” White authors further state that she married a free black man named “Nathan Shell,” had children by him, and continued to live in Oxford until her death in the early 1850s. It is asserted that on her deathbed, Kitty exulted that she would soon see “Miss Amelia,” the late first wife of Bishop Andrew, “in the better land.” Bishop Andrew’s ownership of Kitty and fifteen other slaves became a matter of national controversy in 1844, when his slave-owning status was publicly debated at the annual conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, held in New York City that year. Northern abolitionist bishops requested that Andrew resign from the episcopacy, a move denounced by Longstreet and Andrew’s other southern supporters, who asserted that Andrew was only involuntarily a slaveholder. The next year, the Methodist Church formally split over the issue of slavery, and was not reunited until 1939.2 Oxford’s African American residents contest nearly every detail of the above account. Many older residents of the community assert that Miss Kitty was the coerced mistress of Bishop Andrew and that he was the father of her children. They note that the historical record is ambiguous. Although Bishop Andrew repeatedly asserted that he had been “willed” Kitty by a rich woman in Augusta, an exhaustive search of antebellum probate and deed records in Richmond County, Georgia, has failed to unearth any such bequest. Newton County, Georgia, tax records give no record of any antebellum freedman by the name of Nathan or Shell. The identity of Kitty’s parents remains unknown; since Kitty was light-skinned and comparatively privileged among Oxford slaves, it is widely assumed that her father was a prominent white man. (Some elderly Oxford African Americans recall their parents and grandparents asserting that Bishop Andrew himself was Kitty’s father, rather than her lover.) In any event, the century and a half since Miss Kitty’s passing have seen repeated symbolic struggles over the meaning of her life and her death in Oxford. Buried within the Andrew family plot, she is the only person of color generally acknowledged to be interred within the city’s long-segregated white cemetery. In the late 1930s, on the eve of the reunification of the northern and southern denominations of the Methodist Church, the wealthy Atlanta businessman and Emory University trustee H. Y. McCord arranged to transport the former slave cabin from the land once owned by Bishop Andrew to Salem Campground, at the time an all-white religious campground about twelve miles away. McCord simultaneously erected a large stone tablet near Kitty’s grave in the Oxford City Cemetery on which was inscribed the standard white account of Kitty’s life, emphasizing Bishop Andrew’s blamelessness in the matter.3 Meanwhile, the old slave quarters, renamed the “Kitty’s Cottage Museum,” served as a memorial to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy at Salem until it was returned in 1994 to the city of Oxford, where white members of the Oxford Historical Shrine Society labored to restore it. Most Oxford African Americans have refused to enter the cottage, which remains a considerable site of controversy. In 2007 an African American congregation from Lithonia, Georgia, conducted an ancestral walk to the cottage, in which they poured libations and gave Miss Kitty a new name in the West African Ewe language. Some asserted that the spirit of Kitty spoke to them, detailing the sexual assaults she had suffered from white clergymen in antebellum Oxford. These assertions, published in the local newspaper, were deeply upsetting to many of Oxford’s white residents. More than a century and a half after her death, the 16
Dreams Deferred: African Americans in the History of Old Emory
struggles over Kitty remind us that the unresolved legacies of slavery continue to haunt the Emory and Oxford communities.
Other Lives under Slavery: Case Studies | Whatever the ultimate truth of the matter, and for all the profound passions her story still arouses, the case of Kitty is exceptional in many ways. The historical record in most instances provides only fragmentary glimpses into the lives of the enslaved persons owned by Emory’s early leaders. In only a few cases is it possible to piece together more detailed pictures of family life under slavery, hinting at the In any event, the century and a half ambiguous connections between white and since Miss Kitty’s passing have seen black families in nineteenth-century Oxford. repeated symbolic struggles over the Consider, for example, the case of Louisa meaning of her life and her death in Means, a woman born around 1832 and Oxford. Buried within the Andrew held in slavery by the family of George W. family plot, she is the only person W. Stone Sr., Emory’s professor of matheof color generally acknowledged to matics during the middle third of the ninebe interred within the city’s longteenth century. Stone had purchased Louisa segregated white cemetery. on the birth of his daughter Tudie in 1841, when Louisa was about nine years old. Louisa was, in a sense, already a “member of the family,” for Professor Stone bought her from his brother John. (In significant ways, one might argue, enslaved persons functioned as the social glue that held together extended, elite white families in antebellum Georgia.) Louisa worked for the Stone family for the rest of her life, in slavery and in freedom, as nurse, cook, and caregiver. In a memoir dictated in the 1930s, G. W. W. Stone Jr., the son of Professor G. W. W. Stone Sr., recalls, [Louisa] became our head nurse, washwoman and mammy. We all thought she was one of the best niggers ever born. And we think so yet. She couldn’t have loved her own children any more than she did us. And we loved her just like she was kin to us. She married a man named Sam Means. He was a blacksmith and behaved himself until after the surrender. Then he was unkind to Louisa. He became too free. When she died in 1882 Father’s children put a tombstone over her grave.4
To modern readers, the passage seems deeply ironic. The white author is sure that Louisa “couldn’t have loved her own children any more than she did us,” although he makes no mention of her actual children. Louisa was “like . . . kin to us,” but she was buried in the segregated section of the Oxford City Cemetery, hundreds of feet away from the Stone family plot. Although the white author acknowledges that she married Sam Means, the author can never bring himself to refer to her as “Mrs. Means”; a substitute mother figure, she is always “Louisa” to him. The rather ominous figure of Sam Means, whom the white children might have regarded as threatening to alienate the affections of their substitute mother, is dismissed by the telling phrase, “too free.” The 1882 headstone, erected by the adult children of G. W. W. Stone Sr., still stands in the oldest section of the historically African American portion of the Oxford City Cemetery. It is inscribed on its east side, “Louisa. Faithful servant of G. W. W. Stone, Professor of Mathematics. Oxford College.” No mention, significantly, is made of her actual children or of her married name; instead she is referred to solely by the name she had in slavery and by which she was known by the white family for the remainder of her life. Yet Louisa’s identity was not exhausted in her relationship as substitute mother to the white children of her master. Even under slavery, her conjugal bond with her husband Sam, 17
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
a slave of Alexander Means, was sufficiently strong that Means had to take it into account when he rented Sam out for a profit. In December 1861 Means reports in his diary that he had hired out Sam, a skilled carpenter and blacksmith, to a white man in West Point, Georgia, for three hundred dollars a year, “with the privilege of coming home four times per year.” (The white renter of Sam was to provide him, as well, with at least three pairs of shoes per annum.) The fact that Means stipulated these visits home in the contract presumably indicates that he recognized Sam’s desire to see his wife and family back in Oxford. (To be sure, Means did not assign excessive weight to the conjugal bond between Sam and Louisa; he had no qualms about profiting from their enforced separation, which allowed Sam only four conjugal visits home per year.) As noted, the headstone placed by the white Stone family for Louisa did not mention her married name. Yet, as some African American residents wryly note, the Stone family did not have the final word in this story. On the west side of the headstone are inscribed—in a different, less professional hand—the words, “Louisa Means.” According to oral tradition, her full name was surreptitiously inscribed by her own kin, sometime after the white family had erected the headstone. The diverse facets of her identity—slave and free, unmarried and married, domestic servant and head of family—thus remain juxtaposed on the stone. In death, she is “kin” to at least two families, black and white, yet in some respects was distanced from both. The complexity of relations between masters and slaves is also hinted at by the experience of another family owned by Alexander Means—Henry and Milly, who, like Cornelius and Ellen, took the name Robinson after emancipation. During the first year of the Civil War, Henry was sent off to the front, as a slave to Means’s son, Thomas Alexander Means, who was serving in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Henry returned home to Oxford in November 1861, having served in the first battle of Manassas (a resounding Confederate victory), only to discover that three weeks earlier Dr. Means had sold him along with his wife, Milly, and their three children, Thomas, Troup, and Mildred. They had been sold to a Judge Reynolds in Covington. A domestic battle ensued. Dr. Means wrote in his diary, “Henry is much distressed and unwilling to go.” Over the course of the argument, Means became infuriated at Milly, Henry’s wife. He wrote, “Milly’s insolence and angry retorts first induced me to think of parting with them.” But finally Means relented and convinced Judge Reynolds to release him from the contract, with one exception. Means was so angry at Mildred, the young adult daughter of Henry and Milly, that he insisted on selling her along with her young child. Means wrote, “Mildred much in fault and therefore I sell Mildred who expressed a desire that I should [do] so.” Mildred, in turn, was given by Judge Reynolds, evidently as a dowry gift, to his son-in-law Coleman Brown, who had married Fannie Reynolds.5 Five years after the Civil War, Henry and Milly’s family was reunited. The 1870 Freedmen’s Census for Newton County records as living together in Oxford the family of Henry Robinson, with his wife Milly and three children—Thomas, Troup, and Mildred, who gives as her last name “Pelham.” Unfortunately, the story may not have had an entirely happy ending. Mildred had been sold in 1861 with her small child, who seems to have disappeared in the meantime: perhaps the child died or was sold off. What lessons can we draw from these events? First, close family bonds were present among enslaved persons. Second, in spite of the risks, these bonds were openly expressed at times to the master. Henry and Milly were visibly outraged that their family was being sold, and seem to have had enough moral bargaining power that they were able to persuade their owner, Dr. Means, not to sell off the bulk of their family. But there were limits: Henry and Milly were not able to prevent the sale of their daughter Mildred and their grandchild. Finally, we know that whatever strains may have been placed on this family, their bonds were strong enough that, after emancipation, Mildred returned to live with her parents (albeit without her lost child). 18
Dreams Deferred: African Americans in the History of Old Emory
Freedmen’s Journeys | In some cases, legal emancipation following the Civil War did not make an immediate impact on the economic lives of Oxford’s African American families. Take, for example, the case of the ex-slaves of Gustavus J. Orr, professor of mathematics. In August 1865, five months after Appomattox and two and a half years after emancipation, Orr signed a contract with his former slaves, Phillip, Charles, Eliza, and Hannah: As slavery has been abolished by the Government of the United States, the undersigned make the following contract. I, G. J. Orr, agree, on my part, to furnish the freedmen whose names appear below, food, clothing, fuel, quarters and medical attention, and pay them one fourth of the corn, fodder, peas, and syrup of sorghum and sweet potatoe [sic] . . . for their services for the whole of the present year. . . . I do furthermore agree that, should Phil. and Charles leave me on the first of December, there shall be no abatement as to the part of the crops they are to receive, and if they stay with me longer than that time, I am to pay them such compensation as we may agree upon. We, the undersigned freedmen, agree on our part to labor faithfully and diligently, for G. J. Orr, to obey him in all things, pertaining to labor and service and to treat him and his family with proper respect and courtesy.
The document is worth pondering. In many respects, what it offered to Phillip, Charles, Eliza, and Hannah and her children was not so different than what they had experienced, materially, before emancipation: hard work without monetary compensation. But they did, of course, have—in principle at least—the right to leave Orr’s property and to make their own lives. In time, this is just what they did. By 1870 Hannah was living on her own as head of household under the name of Hannah Hunter; her daughter, Octavia, thirteen years old, was attending the newly founded school for free children of color near Oxford’s African American church, Rust Chapel. Hannah’s seventeen-year-old son, George, was working as a domestic servant. For all the immediate constraints of their first year of freedom, within five years this family had at least been able to move out on their own as wage earners, away from sharecropper status. In this respect, they resembled many of their neighbors in the new free community of Oxford, employed as domestic servants and artisans. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly all African Americans in Oxford worked in one way or another for the College, in official or unofficial capacities. Some worked full-time or part-time as groundskeepers, cooks, janitors, masons, or carpenters; others worked in off-campus rooming houses occupied by Emory men. Israel Godfrey (1849– 1929), a former slave, was a respected farmer, stonemason, and landowner in the city, and helped build the college chapel in 1875. (An intriguing early-twentieth-century photograph depicts Mr. Godfrey seated at a reunion of the Branham and Candler families in Oxford.) Some Oxford African Americans left the town to work for the newly established Emory University in Atlanta. For instance, John Wesley Graves, who served in Oxford as college chef, moved with Emory College to Atlanta when the Druid Hills campus was established. Other members of the Oxford African American community worked as governesses and chauffeurs for prominent white Atlanta families that had roots in Oxford. Many others moved north and pursued work in factories and the professions. Prior to the Civil War, enslaved African Americans in Oxford had worshipped in their own church, in a former classroom structure provided by the trustees of Emory College. After the war, the church was torn down and the land used for the expansion of the city’s white cemetery. Around this time, the majority of the community’s African American families left the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and joined the northern Methodist Episcopal Church, founding Rust Chapel, named for the Reverend Richard Rust, secretary of the northern 19
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
church’s Freedmen’s Aid Society.6 African American children from Oxford attended a local Rosenwald School as well as Washington Street School in Covington. Many in time attended African American institutions of higher learning, including Clark, Morehouse, Spelman and Payne colleges. Noted African American educators in Oxford included Augustus Wright (1855–1928), the principal of Washington Street High School, and John Pliny Godfrey Sr. (1890–1982), a graduate of Clark and the son of Israel Godfrey. Robert Hammond and William Mitchell, who in turn served as the College’s chief janitors and groundskeepers, mentored generations of white Emory students, who routinely sought their wisdom and support at class reunions.
Oxford at Emory on the Eve of the Civil Rights Movement | Many older Oxford African Americans paint an ambiguous portrait of Oxford and Emory at Oxford during the generation before the civil rights movement. On the one hand, they note that within the two square miles of Oxford, African American families were relatively protected from the grosser inequities and racialized violence that characterized the Jim Crow South. African Americans were able to attend public lectures in science and the arts held on the campus of the College, and many were encouraged in their educational pursuits through friendship with faculty and students. Many African Americans recall quiet support for civil rights goals expressed in private by white members of the Emory community in Oxford. Many benefited from the long history of friendship between their families and Emory’s leading white families. John Pliny Godfrey Jr., the grandson of Israel Godfrey, for example, recalls that during the 1954–55 school year he had to suspend his studies at Clark College to care for his ill father. The Oxford College dean hired him that year as a janitor; however, “that whole year,” Mr. Godfrey recalls, “I never saw a mop or a broom.” He was allowed informally to attend college classes, albeit in the rear of the classroom, so that he did not fall behind in his premedical studies. (Forty years later, Mr. Godfrey returned to settle in Oxford and was elected to the city council, where he led successful struggles to desegregate the city’s cemetery and its police force.) During the most dangerous periods of the civil rights movement, the prominent Southern Christian Leadership Conference activist Forrest Sawyer Jr. recalls, he was repeatedly sheltered by Oxford College faculty and students when he was hiding out from the county sheriff’s deputies after civil rights marches in nearby Covington. Nonetheless, the College and Oxford remained embedded in the deep contradictions of this period. Many African Americans recall the deep anxiety that swept through the community when the Ku Klux Klan held processions through Oxford, the terror that followed the horrific lynching of four young African Americans at nearby Moore’s Ford in 1946, and the humiliating daily gantlet of racial epithets and stone throwing that black schoolchildren endured when walking home from Washington Street School. Perhaps no moment captures these contradictions as poignantly as the planting in 1966 of a tree near the central quadrangle of Oxford College, in front of Few Hall, one of Emory’s oldest structures. Planted by representatives of the class of 1913 in honor of two of Emory’s most celebrated African American employees, the tree is marked at its base by a small plaque: THE MEMBERS OF THE CLASS OF 1913 IN LOVING APPRECIATION
DEDICATE THIS TREE TO THE MEMORY OF BOB HAMMOND 1858 TO 1923 AND
BILLY MITCHELL 1886 TO 1958 20
Dreams Deferred: African Americans in the History of Old Emory
WHO TOGETHER CONTRIBUTED 95 YEARS OF FAITHFUL AND EFFICIENT SERVICE TO “OLD EMORY” DEDICATED JUNE 12, 1966 The ironies of the date are well worth pondering. The period immediately after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act saw, in many respects, the intensification of racial discrimination in the region. In 1966 white leaders of the city of Oxford established the Oxford Historical Cemetery Foundation, which for thirty-five years would effectively monopolize city resources to the detriment of African American gravesites. Voting rights for African Americans were severely restricted, the county’s school system remained separate and unequal, and African Americans were unable to attain employment in most white-owned businesses in Newton County. Oxford College itself was still two years away from admitting its first African American students, although Emory in Atlanta had graduated two African American students in 1963. In so many important respects, at the moment of the tree planting, the aspiration of African Americans for equality and full inclusion in the Emory community remained, as it had been for so many generations, a dream deferred.7
21
CHAPTER 3 Warren A. Candler
Andrew Warren Sledd
James Edward Dickey
LYNCHING, ACADEMIC FREEDOM, AND THE OLD “NEW SOUTH” President Dickey and the “Sledd Affair” — T H OM AS H . J A C KS ON J R . —
Shedding light on the racial tensions of turn-of-the-century Georgia, Thomas Jackson recounts a sensationalized affair involving a visionary professor, the leadership of Emory College, and the Georgia populace. In 1902 Andrew Sledd, outspoken professor of Latin at Emory College, published an article describing a particularly brutal lynching and criticizing the racial attitudes of the white South. The public, led by notorious white supremacist Rebecca Latimer Felton, responded in an uproar and demanded Sledd’s dismissal from Emory. The struggle between academic decorum and academic freedom reveals much about institutions of higher learning during the early twentieth century as well as one of the more shameful episodes in Emory’s past. 23
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
O
N JULY 8, 1902, James Edward Dickey, age thirty-eight, became the twelfth president of Emory College. The star product of Emory’s class of 1891 and a former faculty member, Dickey was the seventh in a series of Emory alumni to hold the office, following Luther M. Smith (Class of 1848), Osborn L. Smith (1842), Atticus G. Haygood (1859), Isaac S. Hopkins (1859), Warren A. Candler (1875), and Charles E. Dowman (1873).1 Less than two weeks earlier, the Atlantic Monthly, a national journal published in Boston, had run in its July issue an article modestly titled “The Negro: Another View.” The author was Andrew Sledd, a Harvard-educated Virginian who had joined the Emory faculty four years earlier. Besides being perhaps the strongest scholar at the little college, he also was its most outspoken. The coming together of Dickey and Sledd in the summer of 1902 would lead to one of the more memorable and controversial crises in Emory’s history. Dickey could claim more than alumnus kinship to Emory; he was related by blood or marriage to a number of his predecessors, including Emory’s first president, Ignatius A. Few; Dickey’s mentor, colleague, friend, and confidant Warren Candler; Dickey’s brother-in-law, Charles Dowman; and perhaps even presidents James R. Thomas and Isaac Stiles Hopkins.2 His Few relatives were among the founders of not only Emory but also the University of Georgia and Duke University.3 But even with a strong family pedigree, a sterling record as student and teacher, success in the pulpits of the North Georgia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the support and blessing of the Candler brothers,4 Dickey could not have been prepared for the crisis that would wash over the institution without warning in the first weeks of his presidency. Nor could those around him have seen it coming. The crisis would sorely test many of those relationships.
Prelude to a Controversy | The foundations of the Sledd affair had been in the making for a number of years. Its elements included the horrific racial climate in the South of the day; the populist capitalization on that climate by the likes of Rebecca Latimer Felton, whose diatribes in the state’s newspapers were fueled by personal animosities; the coming of Sledd to Emory in 1897 as professor of Latin; Sledd’s boarding in the home of President Candler and falling in love with and marrying Candler’s beloved daughter;5 and Sledd’s modernist and judgmental attitude toward the traditionalists at Emory. It probably did not help that Sledd criticized publicly the South’s deficits in education and culture, led a faculty vote to discontinue his father-in-law’s prized law department, and blocked a faculty vote to grant an honorary doctor of divinity degree to Dickey just four months before Dickey became president.6 The precipitating event to which all the foregoing added froth was the happenstance of Sledd’s being on a train bound for Covington in 1899—a train that stopped near Palmetto, Georgia, southwest of Atlanta, so the passengers could view (and some participate in) the lynching of Sam Hose, an African American.7 Subsequently, Sledd wrote for national publication an essay regarding the incident, though the publication trailed the event by some three years.8 Even to historians proficient in the period, the racial attitudes and atmosphere of Georgia at the dawn of the twentieth century are almost beyond comprehension in their ferocity and baseness. Any discussion of race began with the assumption on both sides of the argument, liberal and conservative, that “the Negro” was an inferior race. To almost the entire white populace, commingling of the races in public accommodations was unthinkable, and in sexual relations or marriage was abhorrent. Historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage chronicled nearly five hundred lynchings in the Deep South from 1880 to 1930, a perverse means of maintaining racial hierarchy and white honor. Southern whites were averse to legal authority beyond the least required to maintain “the social organism.”9 Law officers maintained minimal forces, often calling for posses or aid 24
Lynching, Academic Freedom, and the Old “New South”: President Dickey and the “Sledd Affair”
from the state authorities when demands exceeded their resources. At times such posses could become mobs, combining “the fellowship of a hunt with the honor of serving the alleged needs of the community.”10 It was an atmosphere reveled in and fed by Rebecca Latimer Felton, wife of Methodist minister, former Georgia legislator, and U.S. Congressman Dr. William H. Felton.11 She thrived on her reputation as a firebrand. She openly defended lynching in her campaign against “the black beast . . . the Negro rapist,” most famously in an 1897 address to the State Agricultural Society at Tybee Island: “If it takes lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the drunken, ravening human beasts, then I say Even to historians proficient in lynch a thousand a week if necessary.”12 the period, the racial attitudes W r i t i n g and atmosphere of Georgia at the in the Atlanta Journal, she expanded those remarks to argue that legal trial was unnecdawn of the twentieth century are essary for a Negro rapist.13 almost beyond comprehension in Almost as famously, Mrs. Felton for their ferocity and baseness. years carried on a public clash with Emory president, and later Methodist bishop, Warren Candler. Perhaps, as some have alleged, it was rooted in Candler’s dismissal of her son from college as “a vagabond and drunkard.” She was known to keep lists of enemies and their perceived offenses against her. She carried out her battles with Candler for decades over a wide range of issues. Her prominent stance as a prohibitionist on behalf of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union clashed with Candler’s belief that women did not belong in the political arena. Felton was a progressive on women’s suffrage; Candler opposed it, arguing that women should be spared the travails of politics.14 Felton’s husband, a trustee of the University of Georgia, joined her in a raging feud with Candler—he on the floor of the legislature and she in the pages of the state’s newspapers—over public versus denominational colleges, as Candler repeatedly sought to garner for private schools the same state revenues and tuition breaks as the public university had. Editor Harry Hodgson dedicated the 1893 edition of the University of Georgia yearbook, the Pandora, to Mrs. Felton. It contained a political cartoon depicting her giving a whipping to “the fat Bishop” across her knee.15 Likewise, Felton jousted with Candler over issues in the Methodist Church to which they both belonged, denouncing bishops as “ruling with tyrannical power, giving the best appointments to their toadies and punishing their enemies with small-salaried pastorates in rural areas.” As late as 1924 the two were still publicly feuding, this time over her allegation that some preachers were members of the Ku Klux Klan.16 Felton was not alone in her rabid public racism. For more than a decade beginning in 1893, Atlanta Constitution columnist Bill Arp regularly supported lynching: “As for lynching, I repeat what I have said before, let the good work go on. Lynch em! Hang em! Shoot em! Burn em!”17 Rural newspaper editors were sometimes even more extreme. The editor of the Crawfordville Advocate-Democrat wrote in 1903, “What’s the use of forever apologizing for doing something that is necessary and proper?”18 Into this social atmosphere arrived Andrew Sledd in January 1898. The graduate of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia had completed a master’s degree in Latin at Harvard the previous year. He wrote to Candler seeking a teaching position, but took one first at Vanderbilt University, accepting it on the condition that he could leave if an opening at Emory became available. He was at Vanderbilt for only one term before accepting Candler’s offer of the professorship of Latin at Emory. Candler also offered a room in his home as a boarder. The two did not warm to each other. Candler no doubt disliked the younger man’s critical attitude toward the state of Emory affairs. And as time passed, he grew wary of Sledd’s budding relationship with Candler’s daughter, Florence. Despite the bishop’s opposition, Andrew Sledd 25
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
and Florence Candler married in March 1899.19 It was not as if Sledd was a Yankee, come South to teach southerners the errors of their ways. He was a Virginian, born just after the Civil War. He grew up in the traditions of the white South, receiving his early education in Petersburg, Virginia, under a “firely unconquored [sic] captain in the armies of the lost cause.” The same southern influences filled his college days at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia.20 After stints as a schoolmaster, first in Mississippi and then in Arkansas, Sledd went to Harvard to earn a graduate degree. There, he was shocked to witness white students fraternizing with blacks, sitting at the same dinner table, and walking across campus together. For much of the first year, he remained “shocked and horrified” by such things, bound by his southern upbringing and experience. Slowly, however, his attitude changed. “I entered the university with very distinct Southern sentiments on all the negro questions, and [experienced] a gradual breaking down of certain of my then views which was taking place, not only without my consent and approval, but even without my knowledge. . . . I went to Harvard a Southerner and left an American.”21 Sledd later would characterize Emory as “a fairly good school, but intensely narrow-minded and provincial.” Candler, who hired him, was “a man of conspicuous gifts and native ability, but without the training and breadth of liberality of view that would come from a larger and more liberal culture.” In Sledd’s view, while Candler was an able administrator and fostered the material success of the College, “the president’s personal lack of scholarship or acquaintance with scholarly men, and the very narrow sectarianism of his views and those of his constituents, naturally militated against a larger culture and a higher life.”22 Undeterred by being new to the campus, Sledd took on anything that did not fit his precise view of the way Emory should run. He criticized and moved to abolish the Emory law department, which consisted of only one faculty member with three students. But it was President Candler’s pet project, and the sole faculty member was his brother, Judge (and Emory trustee) John S. Candler. Notwithstanding the authority and influence of Warren and John Candler in their own rights, their brother, Coca-Cola founder Asa G. Candler, was chair of the trustees’ finance committee and the school’s major benefactor. In the face of such authority, Sledd had the temerity to call Emory’s law program a “fake” department with a “total faculty . . . of one incompetent and inconspicuous so-called judge,” and succeeded in having the faculty abolish the law department.23 Sledd continued his impolitic actions by next targeting the awarding of honorary degrees. Sledd argued that they should not be awarded solely in gratitude for patronage or fund-raising. In the spring of 1902 he determined to fight the proposed honorary doctor of divinity degree being considered by the faculty for James E. Dickey, a member of the board of trustees since the previous year. Dickey, a favorite of the Candlers, was being positioned to succeed to the Emory presidency, apparently unbeknownst to Sledd. Initially, Sledd alone among the faculty opposed the degree, but his arguments turned around a sufficient number that, in the end, the nomination failed. Nevertheless, within four months Dickey was president and at loggerheads with Sledd.24 At age twenty-one, Sledd had taken a position as a schoolteacher in the small Mississippi town of Durant. On his first day in town, as he sat at dinner in the house where he was to board, the eldest son of the family related with lurid excitement that the town sheriff had “just killed a nigger.” The lawman reportedly had been trying to arrest the man, when the suspect attacked the sheriff with an ax—and was shot through the heart. Sledd knew well the prevailing southern attitudes toward blacks, “but an awful tragedy of this sort had never come quite so close before,” he wrote in his autobiography.25 In that same town, he experienced rampant fear among the white population of a rumored black insurrection to be led by a militant black preacher seeking revenge for the killing of a compatriot. White fear was such that armed posses guarded nightly against an uprising. “I 26
Lynching, Academic Freedom, and the Old “New South”: President Dickey and the “Sledd Affair”
did not expect such a thing nearly thirty years after Appomattox,” he wrote. One posse eventually confronted the preacher, who fired first, according to Sledd’s account, after which the posse shot his body “into an unrecognized mass to make sure that he could never come to life again.”26 Add to this background the critical incident Sledd witnessed in 1899. On April 12 Coweta County farmer Alfred Crandall was alleged to have been brutally murdered by Sam Coweta County farmer Alfred Hose, an African American, or “negro,” as Crandall was alleged to have been the media and polite society called persons of brutally murdered by Sam Hose, an his race in those days.27 Mrs. Crandall reAfrican American. The authorities ported the brutality of the murder and aloffered large rewards for Hose’s leged that Hose raped her beside the body of capture; newspapers fanned the her dead husband. The authorities offered flames, leading to a vigilante large rewards for Hose’s capture; newspapers mentality; posses formed. fanned the flames, leading to a vigilante mentality; posses formed. The Atlanta Constitution reported that the nearby town of Woodbury “is practically deserted. Every man and boy able to carry a gun and help in the chase has left home determined to assist in the capture.”28 Newspapers reported sensational and lurid details—some almost certainly fabricated—that Crandall had been peaceably eating supper in his home when Hose sneaked up behind him and bashed in his skull with repeated blows from an axe. Hose robbed the house, the newspapers alleged, dragging Mrs. Crandall with him with a pistol to her head, snatching her eightmonth-old baby from her arms and throwing it to the floor, inflicting injuries it would not likely survive. He raped the helpless wife twice beside the body of her dead husband, and, as a correspondent reported to Rebecca Felton, “stripped her person of every thread and vestige of clothing, there keeping her till time enough had passed to permit him to accomplish his fiendish offense twice more and again.” Further, “he was inflicted with loathsome ‘Sxxxxxxs’ [sic—to stand for syphilis] for which Mr. Crandall was having him treated.”29 That the newspapers exaggerated, even fabricated wholesale, the facts of the Crandall murder is likely. Within two months of the incident, the leader of a group of black antilynching activists in Chicago hired a private detective to investigate. His report, widely published in white newspapers of the North and black newspapers of the South, was that Hose was not the “burly black brute” portrayed in the press, but five feet eight inches tall, weighing 140 pounds. The detective’s version was that Hose asked Crandall for money to visit his ill mother. Crandall refused, and the two men exchanged harsh words. The next day, as Hose was chopping wood, Crandall resumed the argument to the point of drawing a gun on Hose and threatening to kill him. Hose threw his axe in self-defense, the detective reported, hitting Crandall in the head and killing him instantly, leading Hose to flee in fear.30 As a week went by without Hose’s capture, the Atlanta Constitution ran columns from prominent citizens suggesting ways to put a stop to such brutal crimes. Rebecca Felton repeated and embellished her now-standard answer: “lynch the black fiends by the thousands until the Negro understood that there was a standard punishment for rape and he could not escape it. She urged Horse’s [sic] pursuers to forget the reward offered for his capture and to shoot him on sight as they would a mad dog.”31 Ten days after the murder, on April 22, Hose was captured and jailed in Newnan, Georgia, not far from the site of the murder. The next morning, a mob took him from the jail to the countryside, where “he was emasculated and then burned alive. When the fire subsided, men pulled grisly souvenirs from the coals.”32 As this grotesque scene unfolded, the train bearing Professor Andrew Sledd of Emory College happened past and stopped, the passengers being given the opportunity to step from the train to view the horrible sight, or even participate, as 27
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
they wished.
The Article That Sparked the Firestorm | Moved by the brutal lynching to put pen to paper, Sledd at first could not find a publisher. He sent his article to the New York Independent but received a lengthy personal letter of rejection. About the letter, Sledd said, “[A]ll of his criticisms [were] at the first half of the article, which arraigned the northern attitude toward the black man, as I understand it; while he has nothing but cordial commendations for the latter part of the article arraigning the southern attitude and treatment of the negro.” Sledd next submitted his account to the Southern Methodist Review of Nashville, “which publisher had uniformly accepted my contributions before that time,” but which rejected it without explanation. Sledd continued to shop the piece, finally finding acceptance from Bliss Perry, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. The article ran in the July 1902 issue, which appeared the last week of June, less than two weeks before Dickey took office as Emory president.33 Under the title, “The Negro: Another View,” Sledd undertook to add to the public discussion of “the negro problem in the South,” criticizing previous works as both sectional and partisan. He asserted, Northern writers, with practically no knowledge or experience of actual conditions, have theorized to meet a condition that they did not understand. . . . Southern writers, on the contrary, remembering the negro as the slave, consider him and his rights from a position of proud and contemptuous superiority, and would deal with him on the ante-bellum basis of his servile state.34
Noting that “partisan and sectional discussion cannot fail to be alike bitter and unfruitful,” Sledd said the South regarded the issue as a local matter, and “met any suggestions and offers of outside help with a surly invitation to ‘mind your own business.’ The North, on the other hand . . . has approached it from the side of preformed theories, rather than of actual facts. . . . As is usual in such cases, the truth lies between the two extremes.”35 Sledd decried those on both sides who offered opinion while ignorant of the facts, and then proceeded to lay out his two fundamental assumptions: “(1) The negro belongs to an inferior race. . . . (2) But the negro has inalienable rights.” Sledd asserted that he was not speaking of the “utterly worthless and depraved,” of which there were many in both races, but noted that the black man could not expect a white man even to tip his hat while passing on the street, or to share a restaurant or a train car, or to sit in the same section of a church before “the maker of the black man as well as of the white, and invoke the Christ, who died for black and white alike . . . The black man, because of his blackness, is put in this lowest place.”36 In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Sledd continued, “More men met their death by violence at the hands of lynchers than were executed by due process of law,” that “seventy to eighty percent” of lynchings occur in the South, that “three quarters of those thus done to death are negroes,” and that “the lynching penalty does not attend any single particular crime . . . but murder, rape, arson, barn-burning, theft,—or suspicion of any of these,—may and do furnish the ground for mob violence.”37 Sledd asserted that officials and newspapers of the South had defended lynching as deserved punishment for the crime of violent rape, but that most lynchings were not connected to rape, and that most lynchings were not in immediate retribution by offended husbands, fathers, or brothers but were acts of calculated mob violence.38 Sledd described the lynching scene he had witnessed. His readers may have been aware of the details already, as the lynching of Sam Hose had been reported widely in the regional and national press. “The burning of Sam Hose took place on a Sabbath day. One of our enterprising railroads ran two special trains to the scene. And two train-loads of men and boys, crowding from cow-catcher to the tops of the coaches, were found to go to see the indescribable and 28
Lynching, Academic Freedom, and the Old “New South”: President Dickey and the “Sledd Affair”
sickening torture and writhing of a fellow human being. And souvenirs of such scenes are sought,—knee caps, and finger bones, and bloody ears. It is the purest savagery.”39 Sledd indicted the double standard of the “Southern community”: “If the negro criminal may be burned at the stake with the usual accompaniments of fiendish cruelty, a white man guilty of the same crime deserves, and should suffer, the same penalty. There is nothing in a white skin, or a black, to nullify this. And yet to the average Southern white man this manifestly just view seems both disloyal and absurd.”40
Reaction | Sledd’s article appalled his northern audience for the brutality it described. He himself recognized that it would be read in the South as “disloyal and absurd,” even incendiary and seditious. But the Atlantic Monthly was neither widely read nor well respected by most in the South, so it took awhile for word of the publication to spread and for the reaction to set in. In the same week the article was published at the end of June 1902, Emory president Dowman resigned unexpectedly to accept an appointment by Bishop Candler as presiding elder of the Atlanta district of the Methodist Church. The annual meeting of the Emory trustees during the first week of June had given no indication that a presidential change was imminent.41 On July 5, five days after Dowman’s letter of resignation and the call of a meeting of the Emory board, J. W. Renfroe, a former state treasurer of Georgia, wrote Rebecca Felton to make her aware of the Atlantic Monthly article and the fact that it was written by Professor Andrew Sledd of Emory College. Felton took no apparent action.42 Three days later, on July 8, the Emory trustees met at Atlanta First Methodist Church, accepting Dowman’s resignation and electing Dickey his successor.43 Three days after that, on July 11, the Atlanta Constitution finally tackled the Sledd article, publishing a highly critical editorial. With no direct evidence of how the newspaper learned of the article, but knowing how such things work and knowing Felton’s record, one might surmise that Felton or Renfroe prompted the newspaper’s editors. Not revealing that Sledd was on the Emory faculty, the Constitution blasted “the southern negro for being incapable of improving his lot and thereby demonstrating his deserving of rights.”44 The editorial continued with the old but popular argument that if they don’t like it here, they can leave: And as for the complaint of Mr. Sledd and the Boston cult that the negro must ride in second class cars and eat in negro restaurants apart from the whites, we do not accept responsibility for those things. Any northern man who wants to open a restaurant on the bi-colored plan can doubtless obtain a license for the same by paying the cash at the counter of the city clerk of Atlanta, and then get what customers he can. . . . We may also remark that most of our railway lines are now owned and controlled by investors and managers who live in the east and north. There is no law, in Georgia at least, to prevent the railway owners from giving the colored people as fine cars as can be turned out from the Pullman or Wilmington factories. . . . In view of these plain facts, we cannot see that Mr. Sledd has illuminated the race problem in any sense. He has only helped to encourage an old form of northern fool-osophy!45
The Constitution’s vitriol did not immediately stir its readership to action, nor did the regional or national press take up the cause early. Finally, though, on July 29 another state official, Madison Bell, the executive secretary of the Georgia Commission on Statuary Hall, wrote to Rebecca Felton urging her to weigh in, saying she was “the best qualified person to present the facts of this discussion to the Northern people.”46 Felton came through. She unloaded all guns at Sledd, the son-in-law of her old foe, Bishop Candler, in a diatribe published in the Constitution on Sunday, August 3. Not satisfied with what she could print in the pages of the newspaper, she also purchased a card insert for issues 29
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
delivered in the Covington-Oxford community surrounding Emory. She disingenuously claimed in her column not to know who Sledd was but insisted that “the statements he sets forth in the Atlantic Monthly go to show that no more unfriendly writer to the southern people has ever printed a line in a northern magazine. I am, however, comforted in not being acquainted with Mr. Sledd, or his whereabouts or his profession, because the loathing that his article has inspired to my mind has in no wise been the result of any individual dislike or acquaintance with the writer.”47 Perhaps Felton was at least half-truthful that her dislike was not of the writer; it was of his father-in-law. Felton suggested that if Sledd lived in the South, he should “be politely compelled” to prove his assertions or move to another part of the country—“for his health’s sake.” She took particular offense at Sledd’s notion that blacks in the South were treated as no more than “a beast, with a curse and a kick, and with tortures that even a beast is spared”—an accusation that she called “‘rot’ . . . vomited into the columns of the Atlantic Monthly.”48 In response to Sledd’s description of the lynching of Sam Hose, Felton returned to her longstanding justification of lynching: This white man (I presume his color will pass, as he calls this “our” section) has not a single word to say of the fiendish murder of a father and husband, of the outrage inflicted on an agonized wife and mother, who was blood covered beside the body of her dead husband, or of the little girls who witnessed the horrible sights, and his logic is only here applied to condemn the white men who put the beast to death! Every man in Georgia should read this outrageous indictment of southern manhood and then dismiss the writer of it! . . . Now that Andrew Sledd (may God spare me the sight of this maligner of his own color, and perhaps of his own section) has printed his views of southern white men in a Boston magazine, the world outside will be ready to malign the suffering wife still further.49
Felton closed with an ominous suggestion: “If left to a vote in Georgia . . . the slanderer would be made to retire, and he may yet be thankful to get off without an extra application of tar and feathers.”50 Rather than being appalled by Felton’s diatribe, the Georgia public in the summer of 1902 applauded. Newspapers around the state as well as the competing Atlanta newspapers, the Journal and the Constitution, fanned the flames of anger by publishing lurid stories about Sledd and his article every day from August 3 through August 13. Sledd was horrified by Felton’s “tirade and libel.” He later wrote that the experience led him to believe “that an expression of unorthodoxy (meaning any difference in opinion from the prevailing opinion in the South) on the negro question is sufficient to jeopardize a man’s career, if not his life.”51 Yet in his characteristically uncompromising style, he attempted a response by granting an interview to an Atlanta Journal reporter who was an Emory graduate and a former student and fraternity brother of Sledd’s. According to Sledd’s version of the interview, the reporter had not read the Atlantic Monthly article and asked Sledd to recount it. In doing so, Sledd reiterated the premise that had so outraged the public: “that the negro is treated lower than a brute in the South. I believe the average white man in the south would sooner kill a negro than a forty dollar mule.”52 This interview seemed to cause more difficulty than the original article.53 The Constitution pounded away. The front page on August 5 carried a six-by-nine-inch photo of “Professor Andrew Sledd of Emory College, whose article on the negro question has caused him to be roundly censured.” Asserting that Felton’s criticism of Sledd “came almost as a thunderclap to the citizens of Covington,” the Constitution reported that “Professor Sledd has always been very popular here and his best friends were not aware of his antagonistic ideas against the south, his home, and the southern people.” Someone identified by the Constitution 30
Lynching, Academic Freedom, and the Old “New South”: President Dickey and the “Sledd Affair”
only as “one of the Emory professors” attempted to defend Sledd, saying that Felton had misconstrued things. But the newspaper reported that Sledd retracted nothing.54 The Constitution sought out Atlanta’s leading black clergy for comment. By tradition built on years of intimidation, they were careful in their statements. Bishop Henry M. Turner called Sledd a “humanitarian.” R. D. Stinson, identified by the newspaper as “collecting commissioner” for Morris Brown College, “stated that he believes the article has done harm to the negro race and that it was inopportunely written.” Bishop J. W. Gaines “preferred not to give any opinion.”55 Sledd, meanwhile, began receiving letters on both sides of the issue. Those from the North were “generally commendatory,” he said, as were clippings from northern newspapers. Some northern writers took a calm and rational approach, he said, while others “were inclined to make a martyr of me, and to be as intemperate in their commendation as the majority of those of the south were in their abuse.” Almost without exception, the southern comment Sledd received, both in letters and in the press, was “harshly critical and unfair.” Those few southern editors who insisted upon a right of free speech “were drowned in the midst of uproar and denunciation and of intemperate abuse.”56 In Covington on the evening of August 5, white youths (there is no evidence that they were Emory students) dragged through the streets and then burned on the town square an effigy depicting Sledd hugging a black man. Citizens of Covington disclaimed any part in the street action but circulated a petition of thanks to be presented to Mrs. Felton. Sledd was emphatic that those responsible were not his students: “Several of my students, in fact, wrote me affectionate and touching letters with reference to the matter.”57
Emory College Responds | In the five days following the publication of Felton’s August 3 column, seventeen trustees contacted President Dickey, all calling for Sledd’s departure. As Dickey later told Bishop Candler, all believed that Sledd’s continued service on the faculty would hurt the College; six said they would not send their sons to Emory while he taught there—if they had had sons. Letters arrived from around the state calling for Sledd’s dismissal. Two of the most passionate were from Candler’s brothers, Asa and John. The matter clearly was grievous for the Candler family, forcing Warren to choose loyalty to his daughter, and therefore his son-in-law, over his lifelong devotion to his brothers. As for Dickey, he was inclined to defer to the president of the board of trustees and the unanimous opinion of the board. The trustees included some of Candler’s—and Emory’s— best friends. “When I was asked therefore as to my opinion concerning Mr. Sledd’s remaining at Emory,” Dickey wrote to Candler afterward, “I could not arrive at any other conclusion than that his stay would be hurtful to the college.”58 Sledd clearly did not like nor respect Dickey. He wrote three years later in his unpublished autobiography that Dickey “was a man of amazing ignorance and the intensest bigotry, but he made up for these defects by great pompousness and pretense of manner and of discourse and by an authorodixy [sic] of religious opinion which would be ludicrous if it were not so pitiable.”59 His view of Dickey, written in hindsight after what seemed to him a great wrong, reflected his view of the Emory faculty and administration in general. Sledd gave no quarter to faculty members, including Dickey, who came to their positions from the ministry, referring to them alternately as “incompetent” or “not a scholar.” Dickey’s airs and pontification certainly chafed against Sledd’s critical nature. Their personalities were aligned for a clash. Dickey met with Sledd in the president’s office on the Oxford campus on August 7, when, Sledd reports, “I called at his office to see him about some other matters.” The two walked from Dickey’s office in Seney Hall, across the green and down Wesley Street toward the president’s house several blocks away. The only account of that meeting comes from 31
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
Sledd’s unpublished autobiography, in which he reports that he asked Dickey if he had read the article. Dickey said he had not, and Sledd retorted, “Then it does not seem to me that you have any basis for an opinion.” Dickey replied, “The truth of the article is not involved. My ignorance of it is not the question. The press and the people of the state are railing at you; and members of the Board are approaching me upon the subject.” Sledd’s account confirms Dickey’s own implication that he and the trustees acted not because of what Sledd said but because of the public criticism being heaped upon Emory because of his comments. Sledd asked if Dickey sought his resignation. Dickey replied that he was merely sharing information, “leaving the course of action in your own hands.” Sledd told Dickey that he would not resign but would force the board to take formal action. He did not then understand that he would not necessarily have the opportunity to be heard on the question. Sledd presented other arguments for keeping him on. Others on the faculty had faults: “Bradley preaches Unitarianism in a Methodist college,” and “Bonelson is, and has for years, been totally incompetent to fill his chair,” and nothing was said to either. Some, he said, were “not above suspicion in moral lines,” and nothing was said. Yet, “I have worked here for five years diligently, faithfully, and successfully; I have preached righteousness, and lived righteousness, and now for the supposition of a heresy which you have not done me the justice to verify by a half-hour’s perusal of the article, I am called upon to take my wife and my little one and go out in disgrace.” Promising to protest throughout Georgia, Sledd vowed, “I shall not tolerate such an injustice.” As the two separated, Dickey informed Sledd he would call at his home that evening for his decision. Despite his readiness for battle, after discussing the matter with Florence, Sledd determined that dignity should be preserved, and that the appropriate course was to resign. He apparently was swayed by Florence’s concern that her family—the Candlers—not be further drawn into the fray. Dickey called at the home that evening after tea, and the three of them had further discussion. Dickey informed Sledd that he had just received a wire from the president of the board of trustees, asking, “Has Sledd resigned?” Dickey said this was indicative of the sentiment of the board, and that if Dickey were in Sledd’s place he would give it up. Sledd responded that he had reached the same conclusion, but did not know how he would meet his obligations, to which Dickey gave his assurances that the board would be willing to vote for Sledd a considerable portion of his salary for the year. The next morning, Sledd delivered a letter of resignation through English professor W. L. Weber.60 Dickey released Sledd’s resignation letter to the papers the same day, along with his own written statement: “In justice to Professor Sledd, I submit the full text of his letter to me. His reference to September 15 as the date at which his resignation shall take effect grows out of the fact, I presume, that he is now engaged in preparing pupils for the fall term, and it would be manifestly unfair to drop them at this date. His resignation will go to the executive committee of the board of trustees for action.”61 The Constitution printed Sledd’s resignation letter in full, and it was duly recorded in the minutes of the Emory Board of Trustees executive committee meeting of August 12: Oxford, Ga. Aug. 8, 1902 Rev. Jas. E. Dickey Prest. Emory College Atlanta, Ga. My dear Mr. Dickey,— You have of course observed the bitter attacks that have been made upon me in certain of the newspapers in consequence of an article of mine upon the negro question. These attacks seem to me to be quite unjust, and my critics have by no means fairly represented my sentiments or my attitude either to this particular question or to our common section. This I presume you
32
Lynching, Academic Freedom, and the Old “New South”: President Dickey and the “Sledd Affair”
know. It seems to me likely, however, from the attitude that the newspapers and certain of the public have taken in the matter, that our College may suffer some harm, or at least be temporarily embarrassed, by continuing to maintain upon its Faculty a man who is even supposed to entertain such sentiments as have been attributed to me. I am of course responsible for my own utterances; and I am ready to bear anything in the line of misrepresentation or of loss that my utterances may bring upon me. But Emory College is in no sense responsible for anything that I may say or think and it does not seem to me either just or wise to call upon the institution to assume responsibility or suffer loss for utterances that it may not, and doubtless does not endorse. In view of these facts, it has seemed to me best to tender to you my resignation as Prof. of Latin in Emory College. As to the time such resignation shall go into effect, I should suggest the middle of September, but leave that entirely in your discretion. Permit me to add an expression of my very high esteem, and believe me Very sincerely yours Andrew Sledd62
On August 8 the Atlanta Journal declined to publish another submission on the matter from Rebecca Felton.63 The Constitution continued to pursue the story for several more days, reporting on August 10 that the trustees had not yet taken action but would likely accept Sledd’s resignation.64 On August 11 the Constitution for the first time reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly the entire article, “The Negro: Another View.” On August 12 a page-seven story previewed the meeting of the executive committee and forecast the committee’s acceptance of the resignation.65 In that same paper, an “about town” commentary column called “The Passing Throng” revealed for the first time to the general public the relationship between Sledd and Warren Candler: “Professor Andrew Sledd, of Emory College, who has recently resigned the chair of Latin language and literature . . . was in Atlanta yesterday at the home of his father in law, Bishop Warren A. Candler. . . . This afternoon he returns to Oxford, where he is now conducting the summer school and has a large number of boys under his instruction.”66 The evening before the executive committee meeting, Candler sent a handwritten note by “special delivery boy” to Dickey’s home, suggesting, “as a trustee of the college,” that the executive committee delay acting until the full board meeting in November. Dickey would later imply, though no record exists, that the note also contained the suggestion that Sledd be granted a severance package. Knowing that he already had discussed such a severance package with Sledd, Dickey tore the note up, “fearing that someone else might chance to read it and obtain a false impression.” Candler later would express being hurt by Dickey’s decision not to respond to that note.67 The next day, the newspapers reported dutifully, “Sledd Is to Leave Emory.” The article closed with this editorial comment: “The action of the executive committee . . . is final and will doubtless bring to a close the discussion of this unfortunate affair, which has caused Professor Sledd to give up his position and Emory college to lose one of the best men on its faculty.”68 That same week, Sledd received a letter from Antioch College in Ohio, offering him the presidency of the institution. Sledd declined on the grounds that he was needed “in my own section and with my own people”; that he was not sufficiently prepared to teach history and philosophy, which the Antioch president must do; and that he did not want to give his critics the satisfaction of seeing him move to be with “the Negro lovers of the North.”69 Candler and Dickey spoke by telephone the evening after the committee met. In a later letter to his mentor, Dickey recounted the conversation as one of warmth and support: “I remember that you bade me not to be depressed, saying that God was not dead, and then, in a spirit of humor, adding that every time lightning struck, a mule was not killed.”70 33
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
If the crisis strained the relationship of Candler with Dickey, the furor had drawn the bishop and his son-in-law closer. Through it, Candler found a new respect for his daughter’s husband. He was hurt and bitter at the treatment Sledd had received and at the mistakes he believed had been made by the board, which included his brother Asa and his protégé Dickey. He was embarrassed for Emory College as reaction set in from national media and his contemporaries in the clergy and the episcopacy across the country. Candler let it rest, publicly, holding his tongue in the press. But privately he expressed to friends and colleagues his bitterness and deep depression at the wrong he felt had been done to him and his son-in-law. At the root of his hurt was the effect on his beloved daughter, Foncie. He wrote many letters seeking work for Sledd. In each, rather than defend Sledd’s position, Candler asserted that it had been misrepresented, and that Sledd did not hold the beliefs attributed to him. This may have been wishful thinking on Candler’s part, as Sledd more than once in the media defended and restated his position. Sledd, meanwhile, considered further response to the Constitution, but Candler talked him out of it. Bliss Perry, the Atlantic Monthly editor, invited Sledd to examine the article’s aftermath in a subsequent edition, but Sledd urged him “not to give any undue prominence to the matter in the Atlantic. . . . I do not wish to pose as a martyr, or make any capital out of all this disagreeable experience.”71 By all indications, Dickey determined to set the incident behind him and the College and move on, almost as if ignoring it would make it go away. He showed no inclination to discuss, much less reopen, the case. His first correspondence with Candler following the explosion of the affair was either blithely ignorant of the furor or incredibly hard-nosed, as his attitude was all business and no Sledd. He informed the bishop that the Quillian Lectureship needed just under two hundred dollars to be fully endowed at three thousand dollars, and proposed to nominate Candler to deliver the next series of lectures. He informed Candler of an anonymous fund-raising prospect, and asked the bishop to appoint Fletcher Walton to a half-time pastorate that would free him to serve as assistant to the president. With a bit more news about progress on raising money for the new science hall and for the Lowe fund, and the prospects for fall enrollment of one hundred new boys, the letter closed, “Hoping to hear from you in the matter of the Lectures and of the appointment, I am affectionately yours, James E. Dickey.”72 In fact, throughout the several months of the crisis, Dickey was apparently determined to maintain a regular schedule and to move College business forward. Just one week after Felton’s first letter exposing the Sledd essay appeared in the Constitution, Dickey preached the opening sermon at the Atlanta District Conference, on the subject, “The Need of the Spiritual in an Age of Materialism.”73 Despite the upheaval of July and August, regular work continued, in many cases requiring Candler and Dickey to continue their traditional consultation and cooperation. In a called meeting on September 3, the executive committee approved Dickey’s agreement to pay Sledd a thousand dollars in severance pay, Sledd’s entire salary for the academic year. (Apparently unaware that Dickey already had agreed to do this, the Emory faculty had met August 14 and urged such a payment.) The executive committee also appointed Professor M. H. Arnold, a Virginian, to succeed Sledd in the Latin chair as a temporary appointment to finish the academic year.74 Candler continued his correspondence, seeking a position for Sledd, but Sledd determined to return to Yale to complete his doctorate, apparently underwritten financially by his father-in-law. He wrote from New Haven, “I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your kindness in this matter, or what your attitude and service means to me. I trust that I may be able in some way at some time to show you that I am not heedless of the service that you are doing me. If it suits your convenience, you may just deposit the money to my credit at Third National.”75 Candler was prone to periods of depression and self-doubt and often required reassurance 34
Lynching, Academic Freedom, and the Old “New South”: President Dickey and the “Sledd Affair”
and praise from colleagues. His biographer reports that Candler would grow moody, would “sulk around the house,” and had “periodic episodes of self-flagellation.” Over the years on several occasions, he would think “after all I have done” for them and the institution, they don’t appreciate me. He would proffer a resignation from the presidency or from a board, submitting that he was unworthy for the position. Of course, these resignations were never meant to be accepted. Candler would be unanimously reelected amid great assurances that he was much loved and the man for the job.76 The Sledd affair touched many of Candler’s Candler was prone to periods of closest personal relationships—with his depression and self-doubt and often daughter and son-in-law, with his brothers, required reassurance and praise with his protégé, with the church and college from colleagues. . . . Over the years so dear to him. It would have been trying on on several occasions, he would anyone, but in particular, given Candler’s think “after all I have done” for temperament, the emotional effect on the them and the institution, they don’t bishop was deep. appreciate me. Only seven years in age separated Dickey from Candler. The two had been close since that day in the spring of 1898 that the twenty-three-year-old freshman walked into the office of the new thirty-year-old president. Under Candler’s close tutelage, Dickey had rocketed from freshman to president in fifteen years. All that Dickey knew about issues of politics and administration in the government, the church, and the College, he had learned at Candler’s knee. He shared Candler’s views on virtually every major issue of the day. It truly was a mentor-protégé relationship, and the Sledd affair placed it under great strain. In the six weeks from the end of November 1902 through early January 1903, Candler and Dickey finally attempted to move beyond the furor that had complicated their long-standing relationship. An exchange of long letters attempted to sort out the story and understand what had happened and why, and where fault lay. At the heart of the matter lay the slight that Candler perceived in not getting a reply to the note he had sent Dickey the night before the August executive committee meeting. Dickey wrote to Candler and recounted that the delivery person left without waiting for a reply, that Dickey had already told Candler a severance package was in the works, and that he destroyed Candler’s note about a severance package rather than have posterity read it and misunderstand. “I beg to assure you that no discourtesy was intended. . . . No man ever entertained a more affectionate regard for you than I, and I could not purposely be discourteous to you.”77 Candler responded much as a father taking a beloved child behind the woodshed: “[I must] be candid. I thought & think you [responded] to my suggestion inconsiderately. I have apologized for it to myself on the ground that a sensation was spinning on you at the outset of your administration and you lost your accustomed sobriety of judgement. I did not and do not think you have any disposition to be offensive to me. But I thought and think the college could have been saved injury if you had not acted so precipitously and with such persistence in pushing Sledd out.”78 Dickey dispatched a response to Candler, thanking him for his “frank statement,” and relating to him the reaction of the seventeen trustees who sought Sledd’s ouster, and the determined stance of Candler’s own two brothers, Asa and John. He added that the full board of trustees had ratified the action of the executive committee without dissent.79 The bishop was not swayed. In the last recorded word between the two on the matter, Candler said he believed that he and his son-in-law had been wronged, and that Emory had made a grievous mistake. He closed his last letter on the matter by underscoring his personal hurt. “But enough,” he says—and then goes over the old ground yet again in thirteen sentences, before adding, “Now spare me any further discussion of this matter.” At last he finishes by 35
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
laying a burden on Dickey by majestically retreating into the solitude of suffering: “My pain is my own and need concern no one else. With best wishes for the New Year, I am Yours affectionately, W. A. Candler.”80 Ralph Reed, writing on the Sledd affair, concluded that the matter grievously damaged the relationship between Candler and Dickey, writing that “an icy silence separated Dickey and Candler for years to come.”81 But the evidence is to the contrary. In their letters, neither man quit the other; they came through it with The forced departure of college pain and hurt, much as family members professors was not, in those days, caught up in a serious misunderstanding. But they continued to be colleagues and even peculiar to the South, nor solely a warm, dear friends. They sat in numerous matter of racial attitudes. meetings of Emory College and University trustees for the next twenty-six years. Dickey remained in the presidency for thirteen years, longer than any of his predecessors including Candler, before being appointed by the bishop as pastor of the largest church in the conference, Atlanta First Methodist. Upon his subsequent election as bishop, Dickey became a close ally of Candler’s in the conservative wing of the Council of Bishops. Candler was of such power and authority during those years that Dickey could not have achieved those leading positions without Candler’s support. Perhaps more telling is the personal closeness the two men and their families maintained. Candler officiated at the weddings of Dickey’s two eldest daughters.82 In later years, the men had homes just three doors apart on North Decatur Road, across the street from Emory’s Druid Hills campus, Dickey at 1627 and Candler at 1655. Indeed, Candler wrote a glowing memorial of Dickey on the younger man’s unexpected death in 1928, as well as the foreword to Elam F. Dempsey’s tribute, The Life of Bishop Dickey. Candler’s words carried no hint of the feelings he expressed in his letters after the Sledd affair.83 Reed also concludes that the Sledd affair had a negative financial impact on the college, echoing a similar assertion made earlier by Henry Y. Warnock.84 But Emory, like many southern colleges of its day, faced constant financial difficulty, usually running a deficit, and often dependent on the generosity of individual trustees, particularly Asa G. Candler, to help meet its financial obligations. The trustees’ minutes reveal that this was the case for years before and after the Sledd affair, and no evidence is apparent that the financial condition was any worse after the incident than before. Another general conclusion reached by several writers is that the affair was a unique product of the racial attitudes of the turn-of-the-century South. Yes, Bishop Candler was “an avowed and unabashed racist,”85 and by extension, so was his man Dickey, as were most other whites in the South of the day. W. J. Cash, in his landmark study The Mind of the South, counts Sledd among “a growing handful of men” on southern campuses who from the late 1890s turned “directly to examining and criticizing the South.” Cash notes the growing tendency at most schools “to back them up in it, or at least to maintain their right to their heresies.” But the Emory faculty, “perhaps intimidated by the uproar of the press against him . . . silently acquiesced.”86 C. Vann Woodward (College 1930) deals with Sledd briefly in his Origins of the New South. Woodward praises Trinity College for preserving the position of Professor John Spencer Bassett in a similar case and criticizes Emory for its “unfortunate example.”87 While it is true that Sledd’s position on “the negro question” was the proximate cause of the upheaval at Emory, the root issue was institutional public relations—the matter of an outspoken faculty member embarrassing the institution and being dealt with as a result. Sledd himself acknowledged as much in his autobiography.88 Emory was not alone in experiencing an incident harmful to public relations. Several other institutions recorded similar incidents during the years surrounding Emory’s Sledd affair. In 36
Lynching, Academic Freedom, and the Old “New South”: President Dickey and the “Sledd Affair”
October 1903, at Trinity College (now Duke University), another Methodist college in the South, Professor Bassett published an article in the South Atlantic Quarterly pronouncing, among other things, that Booker T. Washington was the second-ranking citizen of the nineteenth-century South, second only to Robert E. Lee. As Sledd was to Emory, Bassett was arguably the Trinity faculty’s strongest scholar. When Bassett opined that a small group of blacks had made “remarkable progress” and were no longer content with an inferior place in society, the Raleigh News and Observer pounced, much as the Constitution had done in the Sledd case.89 The difference in the Bassett case was the reaction of Trinity officials. Perhaps they had been enlightened by the Sledd affair. As President John C. Kilgo had corresponded with his close friend Candler over the Sledd matter, so now Candler wrote the chairman of Trinity’s board of trustees. He disagreed with some of Bassett’s positions but urged the Trinity trustees to make it clear that “our faculties do not hold office at the will of irritable and inflammatory people who too easily join in any hue and cry that may be raised.”90 Trinity College at first remained silent. Kilgo gave Bassett an opportunity to “clarify” his statements, and Bassett did so in the next Quarterly, saying that by “equality” of the races he meant economic opportunity, not social equality; and that Booker T. Washington’s “greatness” was in overcoming great handicaps.91 The clarifications and his offer to resign left Kilgo room to offer Bassett support. In fact, he was able to turn trustee Ben Duke toward supporting academic freedom. By the time the full board met on December 1, 1903, they were able to affirm Bassett’s clarification and reiterate their confidence in Kilgo. The college officially disagreed with what Bassett had written but defended his right to publish it.92 The forced departure of college professors was not, in those days, peculiar to the South, nor solely a matter of racial attitudes.93 Laurence R. Veysey, in The Emergence of the American University, asserts that there was a larger, umbrella concern governing such matters: unfavorable publicity.94 He cites numerous cases of troublemaking faculty being shown the door for creating ill will and bad publicity: Richard T. Ely at the University of Wisconsin in 1894, Edward W. Bemis at the University of Chicago in 1895, the Andrews case at Brown in 1897, the Herron case at Iowa (Grinnell) College, and the Edward A. Ross dismissal at Stanford in 1900.95 The “new order of academic freedom” had not yet established itself over the “older order of academic respectability.”96 Other cases included Henry C. Adams at Cornell for a pro-labor speech; George Steel, president of Lawrence College, for leanings toward free trade and greenbacks; and Docent Hourwich at the University of Chicago for participation in a Populist convention.97 In those early days of the Progressive Era, the concept of academic freedom was just emerging. The notion of a faculty member as an employee who serves at the pleasure of the employer still held sway, and embarrassing one’s president, trustees, and institution bought a quick ticket out the door at any number of institutions. Even in southern schools like Emory and Trinity, where race was the hot-button issue, the underlying concern was the faculty members’ violation of institutional image. Emory provides further evidence of this in its historical treatment of the Sledd affair. For a century, the official Emory story was that Sledd had resigned. Bullock’s centennial history of Emory College and University, published in 1936, gives the Sledd affair one page. But even in that slight treatment, Bullock recognized public relations as the basis for the issue, as he reported that Sledd “resigned in the summer of 1902 to protect the College from the antagonism.”98 Not until a 2002 exhibit of lynching photographs came to the Emory campus did the school take the opportunity to acknowledge the Sledd scandal. Emory marked the one hundredth anniversary of the affair with an exhibition at Pitts Theology Library titled Protesting Racial Violence: Andrew Sledd, Warren Akin Candler, and Lynching Controversies in Early Twentieth-Century Georgia. The exhibit of photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, and other original materials explored the larger “conversation” about lynching among white and African American scholars and the faith community in Atlanta in the early twentieth century. The 37
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
keynote address of the symposium was delivered by Professor Emeritus James Hinton Sledd of the University of Texas, Andrew Sledd’s son born in Atlanta in 1914, a 1936 Emory graduate and Rhodes scholar, who died in 2003.99 And what of the elder Sledd? He departed for Yale in September and completed work on his PhD in nine months. He returned South, joining the faculty of Southern University in Alabama in 1904,100 and moving soon to become the first president of the University of Florida, from 1904 to 1909. A dispute with the Florida trustees over admission requirements forced his resignation. After a brief stint as pastor of the First Methodist Church of Jacksonville, Sledd returned to Southern University, this time as president, often working without pay when the college could not meet payroll.101 In 1914, when his wife’s uncle, Asa G. Candler, gave $1 million to transform Emory College into Emory University and build a new campus in the Druid Hills section of Atlanta, his father-in-law, Bishop Candler, became the new university’s chancellor. Sledd joined the faculty as professor of Greek and New Testament in the new School of Theology, Candler’s first hire. For the next twenty-five years, he wielded significant influence in training a generation of Methodist preachers, inculcating in them a philosophy of racial tolerance and justice. Sledd’s long tenure as one of the nation’s most respected scholars in his field continued until his death in 1939. The late Bishop Kenneth Goodson, who was Methodist bishop in Alabama when a 1963 church bombing in Birmingham killed four black children, recalls that the small, brave core of his ministers who helped calm the situation by courageously attending an interracial memorial service were “almost to a man, students of Andrew Sledd.”102
38
CHAPTER 4
Charles Dudley, first African American graduate of Emory College, 1967.
NATIONAL AMBITION, REGIONAL TURMOIL The Desegregation of Emory — M E L I S SA F. KEA N —
In an essay rich with historical detail and insight, Melissa Kean examines the social factors that led to Emory’s 1962 decision to admit African American students. The struggle to this end was closely tied to the communities in which Emory was embedded, in a South still rampant with racial tensions. Postwar University President Goodrich White began the slow march toward change, often caught between the conflicting allegiances of justice and politics. His successor, Walter Martin, continued to play a balancing act as the Georgia public school crisis and tax exemption for segregated schools weighed heavily on the minds of faculty, trustees, and alumni. Mounting internal and external pressures finally led the University to chart a path out of the thicket. 39
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
T
HE IDEA OF THE UNIVERSITY as an oasis set apart from the daily concerns of the world has had a very long life. It still thrives today, along with the image of the absentminded scholar oblivious to the real world. While these stereotypes may contain an element of truth, in most important ways universities are closely bound to the world around them. All universities, including Emory, evolve as part of their communities. Nowhere is this more evident than in the long and tumultuous run-up to Emory’s 1962 decision to admit black students. Beginning in the mid-1940s, Emory struggled to adapt its goals, its traditions, and its very sense of identity to a new and sometimes unclear set of demands. The story of that struggle reveals Emory’s profound connections to its local, regional, and national communities. In the wake of World War II, all those communities were undergoing deep and rapid change. Nationally, the Cold War with the Soviet Union rose to paramount importance, and in the propaganda battle for the loyalties of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the racial discrimination practiced in the U.S. South was a serious handicap. At the same time, the South itself was being transformed—economically, socially, and demographically—in some ways more thoroughly than it had been by the Civil War. Widespread mechanization of agriculture fed migration from the countryside to the cities (as well as out of the region entirely). Newly created manufacturing jobs and employment opportunities in government and defense contracting enabled growing numbers of blacks and whites to reach middle-class prosperity. Primary and secondary education improved steadily. Meanwhile, American higher education was undergoing its own transformation. Scientists and engineers, most based in universities, had been crucial to the war effort. The Cold War only deepened the understanding that American national security depended on a strong university research community. A new commitment arose on the part of the federal government to expansion and democratization of universities, mainly through funding of graduate studies, research, and the GI Bill. Private philanthropies such as the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations also took a keener interest in strengthening higher education, especially in the South, which lagged badly behind the rest of the country. The greatly increased flow of money from these sources created a wholly new set of opportunities and pressures. At Emory, as at other universities in the rapidly changing South, this development, although welcome, was fraught with difficulties. Emory had begun its existence as a small Methodist college in Oxford, Georgia. It was, of course, for whites only. Like almost all southern schools of that era, it focused on teaching a classical curriculum and Christian doctrine to undergraduates. It also served a powerful social purpose, carefully bringing young men (and, in the twentieth century, women) into membership in the society of respectable adults and anchoring them in the region’s traditions. After the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, smarting from its acrimonious split with Vanderbilt University, decided to launch a new Methodist institution of higher education, Emory was relocated to Atlanta, given slightly more resources, enlarged by the addition of professional schools, and christened a university. Progress toward true university standing, however, was slow. Building a significant program of graduate studies and research was difficult. Until 1946 Emory offered no work toward the doctorate and limited work at the master’s level. At the end of the war it still remained a thoroughly conservative regional school, serving mainly undergraduates from Georgia and Florida, a creature of its time and place.1 With the ongoing transformation of traditional southern life, though, and the outpouring of new money for education, change was clearly coming to Emory. The struggle that would occupy its leadership for a decade and a half was how to shape that change, or at least keep it under control. University presidents are never simply free to do what they think best. Even under normal conditions they are answerable to an unreasonably large number of constituencies: trustees, faculty, alumni, politicians, donors, students, neighbors, parents, and more. These groups are often deeply devoted to and passionate about their school, and they often disagree 40
National Ambition, Regional Turmoil: The Desegregation of Emory
strongly with each other about what is best for it. At Emory in the postwar era, where deeply held beliefs and long-cherished ways of life were eroding, and plans to remake the University were taking shape, the divisions became intense. Opposition based on respect for southern traditions grew in proportion to the scope and pace of change. This intertwined change required two Emory presidents—Goodrich White and Walter Martin—to perform subtle and intricate balancing acts. To navigate forward in the University’s best interests they had to cope with factors ranging from national foreign policy to the expectations of philanthropic foundations, to the intricacies of personal relationships with their friends in the Emory With the ongoing transformation community. In particular, the University’s reof traditional southern life, sponse to growing pressures for racial though, and the outpouring of new change was shaped in the cauldron of the inmoney for education, change was tense politics of segregation that played out clearly coming to Emory. The in Georgia in the decades after the war. struggle that would occupy its Emory’s president in the immediate postleadership for a decade and a half war period was Goodrich Cook White, an was how to shape that change, or Emory man through and through. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Emory at least keep it under control. College in 1908, when it was still in Oxford, and spent nearly his entire adult life affiliated with the University. After earning a master’s degree in psychology from Columbia University and briefly teaching at two small Methodist colleges, he returned to Emory in 1914 as an associate professor of “mental and moral science.” During World War I, White served as a lieutenant in the psychological division of the Army Medical Corps. After the war he completed his doctorate at the University of Chicago and returned to Emory, now in Atlanta, where he proved a stalwart administrator. He assumed increasing responsibility over the years, rising to become Emory’s president in 1942.2 An affable man and an able administrator, White was strong and stable, deferential to the Emory trustees, and personally conservative. When he took the reins at Emory, civilian male students had all but disappeared from campus, the University’s already tight finances became even tighter, and wartime concerns dominated the early years of his administration. At the end of the war the school was struggling. White understood that Emory was nowhere near as academically advanced as some others in the South, most notably Vanderbilt and Duke. His response to the new funding environment in American higher education was positive, but cautious. Though committed to Emory’s improvement and to pursuing national stature for the University, he was not one to rush into major changes. Emory resumed its master’s-level offerings as soon as possible and authorized its first PhD program in 1946, yet growth was methodical rather than explosive. Moreover, Emory was officially and tightly tied to the Methodist Church, whose conservative influence on the board of trustees was strong. Equally strong was the influence of the Atlanta business community, which provided nearly all the rest of Emory’s board members. A study of the state’s political process done in 1947 concluded that Georgia’s large corporate interests, based in Atlanta, had mastered that process so well that they were the de facto rulers of Georgia. A mere handful of people, nearly all businessmen, effectively ran the city itself. These were all rich men, all “white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, Atlantan, business-oriented, non-political, moderate, well-bred, welleducated, pragmatic, and dedicated to the betterment of Atlanta.” 3 White’s position on the emerging changes in southern race relations was deeply cautious, perhaps unsurprising given his personality and upbringing. He was born in 1889 and spent his boyhood in Griffin, a county seat town in middle Georgia. In a 1959 autobiographical sketch he reminisced about the world of his youth, a world he described as “closer in time to the Georgia of [A.B.] Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes [1835] than to the Georgia—at least to the 41
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
Atlanta—of to-day.” It was a world of cotton tenancy and sharecropping, with a mill village across the railroad tracks from town, and Saturdays spent around the courthouse square. White grew up in town, working at a general store and excelling in school. His family life revolved around the Methodist church, where his grandfather was pastor. This was also a world of Jim Crow segregation: “There were Negro schools and Negro churches. That they were any of my concern was never suggested. We saw Negroes every day. They worked in the kitchens and in the yards and gardens; as nursemaids; as porters and waiters in the two small hotels; they drove the drays.” Despite White’s recollection of a Sunday afternoon lynching that greatly upset his grandfather, for a young boy these arrangements were simply beyond questioning. “The Negroes’ status was fixed,” he explained, “and as far as I knew there was no ‘race problem.’” 4 Not unreasonably, White feared that rapid changes in these traditional arrangements could set off a violent white backlash. The volatile racial politics that overtook Georgia after the war fed this fear. Long before segregation became an incendiary issue in the politics of other southern states, Georgia’s gubernatorial contests revolved around race. The Democratic Party, which controlled the state, supported the rapid economic growth and modernization that followed the war. But it also vigorously resisted any change to the state’s traditional social order. This contradictory stance kept race relations at the forefront of politics for decades.5 Maintaining segregation became a line in the sand for many Georgians who were unhappy that their old world was disappearing before their eyes. Georgia’s county unit election system created a sort of unbalanced state-level electoral college. Each county had two, four, or six votes, determined by population. Those votes were delivered as a unit to the candidate who garnered the most popular votes in the county. This system was designed to prevent urban areas from completely controlling the state, and it did so very effectively. Biased against the most populous counties, it prevented candidates for statewide office from winning by simply courting the powerful commercial interests in Atlanta.6 Although this support was critical, so were the votes of the rural, traditional, and increasingly unhappy people in the counties of South Georgia. Politicians soon learned that fullout racial demagoguery and a fervid insistence on maintaining “southern traditions” gained votes outside Atlanta. And while sophisticated businessmen in the city may have felt distaste at the vigor and style of this invective, they were not offended by the core of the message and were willing to go along if politicians continued to serve their economic interests.7 In 1942 Ellis Arnall made race a gubernatorial campaign issue and defeated incumbent Eugene Talmadge, helped in part by Talmadge’s heavy-handed attempts to purge the faculty of the University of Georgia of “integrationists” the year before. Talmadge’s actions had cost the state’s universities their accreditation and dealt a blow to the state’s reputation and to Atlanta’s business interests.8 From this moment forward, the key issue in Georgia politics was segregation. The 1946 Democratic primary—the only election that counted—pitted two progressives against the traditionalist Talmadge in a savage campaign fought largely over white supremacy. Talmadge used a recent Supreme Court decision, Smith v. Allwright, which invalidated the white primary, to conjure up images of federal tyranny and black rule. Robert Mizell (College 1911), a longtime Emory administrator and confidant of Coca-Cola president Robert Woodruff, summed up the situation in Atlanta in February 1946: “Not since the Atlanta riots some forty years ago has the race question been such an inflammable issue as now.” Talmadge’s victory, though followed almost immediately by his death, set the tone for Georgia politics well into the 1960s. His son Herman became governor in 1948, campaigning on a promise to reinstate the white primary. These divisive elections kept racial fears at a boil throughout the 1940s and beyond.9 As president of Emory, Goodrich White understood this political reality fully. His own beliefs about race also help explain his reluctance to confront directly the internal and external 42
National Ambition, Regional Turmoil: The Desegregation of Emory
pressures for racial change that grew during his tenure. White cogently articulated his views when he served on President Truman’s Commission on Higher Education, organized in the summer of 1946. Formed amid the changes that swirled in the wake of the war, this group undertook a formal reexamination of the “objectives, methods and facilities” of American higher education “in light of the social role it has to play.”10 In October 1947 the subcommittee on “Equalizing and Expanding Individual Opportunity” presented its draft report to the full commission and called for the complete elimination of segregated higher education Robert Mizell (College 1911), a in the South. White did not speak up until it longtime Emory administrator and was time for the full commission to approve confidant of Coca-Cola president the subcommittee reports, and even then he Robert Woodruff, summed up the tried to keep a low profile.11 situation in Atlanta in February In a written dissent and in personal corre1946: “Not since the Atlanta riots spondence, White explained why he rejected some forty years ago has the race the group’s judgment. The naiveté of the question been such an inflammable northerners who dominated the commission, White argued, led them to sunder common issue as now.” sense from theory. Their insistence on immediate elimination of segregated higher education amounted to zealotry, the refusal to acknowledge the practical limitations of laudable principles of democracy and equality. Their recommendations, while inspired by “high purpose and theoretical idealism,” were “wholly doctrinaire positions which ignore the facts of history and the realities of the present.” 12 White was not insensible to the injustices of segregation. He acknowledged the “gross inequality of opportunity, economic and educational,” and urged that “as rapidly as possible conditions should be improved, inequalities removed, and greater opportunity should be provided for all our people.” But eliminating segregation at a stroke, he argued, would have the opposite effect than the one desired; it would incite furious opposition to black progress. Only incremental change would produce improvement. “There are men of good will in the South,” he wrote, “who are concerned about inequalities and injustice and who are working quietly and persistently . . . to strengthen existing institutions of higher education for Negroes. . . . It is my own conviction that their patient and persistent ‘gradualism’ is the only way to accomplishment without conflict and tragedy.”13 White’s insistence that the good works of southern whites would eventually solve the problem failed to persuade the other commissioners. Only three (all southerners) out of twenty-seven joined White in his dissent. The rest argued forcefully that the principles of democracy and equality under the law required them to challenge segregation. Failure to do so, they argued, would be “unfair and an insult to the whole of the South—Negro and white.” They took the opportunity provided by White’s formal dissent to strengthen the report’s condemnation of segregation.14 In his 1959 memoir White spoke of his regret at the South’s failure to confront on its own its problems with race and its relation to its past and to the rest of the country: There have been times when I thought—perhaps it was only wishful thinking—that the South was well on the way to mastery of its [race] problem and the attainment of maturity, properly cherishing whatever is admirable in its past but not trying to live in it and on it, facing the issues of the day as Americans, divided perhaps among ourselves but not always having our positions brought to the test of whether or no they are properly “Southern.” But I can no longer delude myself or even cherish the hope. . . . And it is hardest of all to satisfy my conscience and to define the fine line between patience, wisdom and justifiable prudence on the one hand and cowardice on the other.15
43
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
This fine line was the one that White chose to walk as president of Emory. On one hand, he believed that segregation led to gross injustices. Surrounded by accomplished men and women in Atlanta’s black colleges as well as in the city’s black business class, he was far from blind to the unfair treatment meted out to them in the name of tradition.16 On the other hand, he felt constrained by political circumstances, by the heavy weight of tradition, and by demagogues’ manipulation of that tradition. White consistently chose a guarded path. Unlike some leaders in southern higher education who pushed for By 1953 the informal presence of a real, if gradual, desegregation, he supported few blacks on campus was genera “fairer” segregation, one that would provide more opportunities for blacks within ally accepted, and student and black institutions. Rather than attempt to faculty contact with their counterbreak down the color line at Emory, he turned parts at the city’s black colleges his attention to the improvement of Georgia’s had become rather routine. segregated institutions. No hypocrite, White served for years on the board of Clark College, a historically black undergraduate college in Atlanta, and worked throughout his adult life with other black institutions. Improving these schools, he believed, was the only racial progress that white Georgians would peacefully accept.17 Despite White’s growing unease, the turmoil in Georgia politics, and the rising pressure from outside the region, the Emory campus itself remained quiet. Still, tiny cracks were beginning to appear. Emory hosted an occasional black speaker, usually at the chapel or the Candler School of Theology.18 A handful of blacks applied for admission. (The applications were simply returned.)19 The student newspaper, the Wheel, editorialized in favor of changes in race relations, including limited admissions of black students to the University.20 That there were limits, however, was still quite clear. In February 1948, the Freshman Emory Christian Association invited Rev. Harrison McMains, a local white minister active in interracial church activities, to speak on “The Teachings of Jesus as Applied to Race Relations.” This led to an invitation to the dean of Morehouse College, a black economist, to discuss Christianity and labor relations. In the course of that evening, the group agreed that they would like to invite Morehouse students to the next meeting. The sensitivity of a dinner meeting with blacks was apparent even to freshmen, though, and after consultation with several Emory administrators, they dropped the idea.21 Amid growing tension over race, however, the mere idea of such a meeting was enough to enrage at least one opponent of change. It isn’t clear how he learned of the proposed meeting, but John A. Dunaway (College 1920, Law 1923) sent White a scathing letter, implying that the president was a hypocrite if he allowed mixed meetings on campus. Dunaway also complained to trustee Henry Bowden, who sat on the board’s executive committee. Bowden suggested that Dunaway, a lawyer, prepare a synopsis of Georgia segregation law “in order that Emory might conform fully.” Interestingly, that law contained nothing that would prevent the sort of meetings that Dunaway found so offensive. (Bowden, a sophisticated and canny attorney, likely knew this already.) Nonetheless, Dunaway accurately insisted that although segregation in Georgia was “not a matter of written law,” it was certainly “inherent in our background and training.” In the end, after receiving a mild scolding from White’s assistant, Boisfeuillet Jones (College 1934, Law 1937), Dunaway backed off, claiming that he had only been concerned with Emory’s reputation.22 Where students did not mean to upset anyone, White defended their right to hear whatever speakers they chose. He was less patient when they seemed deliberately provocative. At all private southern universities, student support for antisegregationist Henry Wallace’s 1948 bid for the presidency was viewed anxiously by the presidents as a magnet for unwanted outside attention. So when, in March 1948, the Emory University Wallace for President Club passed a “Resolution on Discrimination in Education” urging White and the trustees to consider 44
National Ambition, Regional Turmoil: The Desegregation of Emory
“admission of Negroes to the University on all levels,” White responded with a letter meant to cut off debate. He outlined his personal commitment to black progress, citing his service on the boards of black institutions. But he chastised the group for making a public fuss, arguing that “the pressure tactics now being resorted to” made solutions harder to find. Finally, White arrived at the bottom line: “It is obvious that, holding these convictions, I shall not recommend the admission of Negroes to Emory University.”23 As the 1950s began, the pace of change quickened. The Communist victory in China and the outbreak of war in Korea further undermined the national sense of security and brought the rise of militant anticommunism in American politics. Wide and deep changes continued to spread throughout the South. As manufacturing industries grew, so did southern cities. By 1950 there were thirty with at least 100,000 people; ten had 250,000 or more. The region’s population had increased by nearly 4 million since 1940. These changes, though, were erratic. In many small towns and rural areas, life continued much as it always had.24 Change was also coming to race relations, although much of it simmered beneath the surface of daily life. By the summer of 1951 the five cases that would be consolidated as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka had been filed, and the issue of school segregation suddenly took on much greater importance. At the same time, the desegregation of public graduate and professional schools as the result of NAACP lawsuits continued at a steady pace.25 On the Emory campus, energies pent up during the long war effort were released. A building boom remade the campus, and the influx of outside funding began to bear fruit. In 1951 the University received a $7 million grant from the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation that required Emory to raise a $25 million match. Progress was difficult; aggressive fund-raising did not seem to come naturally at Emory. Still, by 1955 nine departments were offering the doctorate, and forty-five PhDs had been granted since the approval of the first program in 1946. This change, however, was not a headlong rush. The University exercised great care in approving new programs, attempting to ensure that every Emory degree would be worthy of respect. Emory remained thoroughly segregated. Although pressure for desegregation began to build from outside the University, most notably in the academic disciplinary societies and the large private philanthropies, there was little pressure for racial change from within. The Wheel did show some interest: on January 27, 1950, the paper editorialized in favor of limited desegregation at Emory. The following fall, with a new editorial staff, it changed its mind and argued against it.26 President White’s formal reports to the board of trustees in the early fifties don’t mention race at all, not even when direct pressure came from outside, as when the American Association of Law Schools contemplated a resolution that would force southern law schools to desegregate or face expulsion. While White’s personal views and cautious nature explain some of his reluctance to raise racial issues with the trustees, also critically important was the attitude of Emory’s board chair, Charles Howard Candler Sr. (College 1898, Medicine 1902, Honorary 1942). Howard, as he was called, was the son of Asa G. Candler, the founder of Coca-Cola and chairman of Emory University’s trustees from 1906 until his death in 1929. Howard was also the nephew of Methodist Bishop Warren Akin Candler, who was instrumental in the creation of Emory University and served as the University’s first chief executive. Howard Candler assumed the leadership of the board upon his father’s death and held it until his own in 1957. A generous donor to Emory, Candler was a very active chair and ruled the board with an iron hand.27 Candler’s views on race were deeply traditional. Even the smallest breach of Atlanta’s segregation etiquette offended him, and he saw no reason to keep his unhappiness to himself. A conference on “The Churches and World Order” scheduled at Emory’s Glenn Memorial Church in April 1953 presented one occasion for Candler’s wrath. By 1953 the informal presence of a few blacks on campus was generally accepted, and student and faculty contact with 45
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
their counterparts at the city’s black colleges had become rather routine. The pastor of Atlanta’s Wheat Street Baptist Church, Dr. William Holmes Borders, for example, spoke at vesper services in the Alumni Memorial University Center during Brotherhood Week in February. In October, the Emory Wesley Fellowship sponsored a weekend retreat with delegates from six colleges, including Morehouse.28 It’s not clear why Candler would object to the April church conference but not to these other events. Most likely, he simply never became aware of them. But someone took the trouble to send him a brochure announcing the conference, and when he discovered that the organizers planned to welcome “all persons, regardless of race,” Candler fired off an angry and threatening letter to Goodrich White, concluding with instructions to cancel the conference and to prevent “any such function” in the future.29 White did not cancel the meeting but replied to Candler with barely cloaked irritation: “At present I must say that I cannot, on my own initiative, take any steps looking to the cancellation of this engagement. To precipitate an issue over this meeting would, in my judgment, be unwise, unjustified, and hurtful.” Later the same afternoon White drafted a longer letter to Candler, which he apparently did not send, opting instead to raise the matter when the executive committee met on April 16. Defending the conference, which had been scheduled by Dean Burton Trimble of the School of Theology, White noted that it would be “discourteous and embarrassing” for Emory to force the cancellation of the event, which was cosponsored by some of the most prominent and respectable Protestant organizations in the city. He stressed that there was to be no “social intermingling” between blacks and whites at the event—that is, no “housing or meal service” provided.30 White claimed that his position on interracial meetings at Emory was “reasonably clear,” but it was not. He scrutinized each situation, rejecting some meetings and allowing others, but he never articulated any principles behind those decisions. (One meeting he disallowed was of the Judicial Council of the Methodist Church—the church’s “Supreme Court”—because it had a Negro member.) If White had any yardstick, it seemed to be that if contact between blacks and whites would not attract attention or controversy, then it was acceptable. His goal was apparently to avoid alarming or embarrassing anyone.31 White clearly hated having to deal with these matters at all. Also clear is his sense of being caught in the middle, drawing criticism for cowardice from some quarters and for going too far from others. He increasingly sat between the growing desire of the faculty and many students for change and the insistence of a traditionalist board on keeping the old ways. What White wanted was the freedom to deal with these unpleasant issues as they arose, with no pressure from either side. He believed that he knew how to make these decisions without public controversy. He was probably right. Things began to change in 1954. Although the decision was expected, Brown v. Board of Education hit Georgia like a bombshell. The failure of President Eisenhower to publicly support the decision gave room for evasion, and the rise of white “massive resistance” transformed the atmosphere in Georgia into one of crisis.32 Segregation became nearly the only issue in public life. Governor Herman Talmadge was committed to resistance and had already proposed a constitutional amendment to permit state support of segregated schooling through grants to individual students. Many Georgians, concerned about the quality of their children’s education, strongly opposed this “private school plan.” Many others, more concerned about race mixing, strongly supported it.33 The November 1954 election would determine both the fate of the proposed amendment and the governor’s seat (Talmadge was prevented by law from another term). The September Democratic primary, the real election, was hotly contested. Of nine candidates, one advocated compliance with the Supreme Court decision and eight offered plans to evade it. The winner was Lieutenant Governor Marvin Griffin, a member of the Talmadge faction, who ran on a platform of preserving both segregation and the county unit system, and whose mandate to 46
National Ambition, Regional Turmoil: The Desegregation of Emory
do so was strengthened by the easy passage of Talmadge’s “private school plan.”34 As ever, control of Georgia depended on control of the rural base and the cooperation of Atlanta’s business community. But as race relations became paramount after Brown, the interests of those two groups diverged. In the rural counties, tampering with segregation remained anathema. Atlanta was different. Increasingly dominated by large corporations, the city was also home to several prominent black colleges, powerful black churches, and influential black leaders. The city’s large black population had a small but real voice in politics.35 Relatively smooth race relations prevailed, the product of cooperation between black and white leaders who shared concern for maintaining a stable business environment. Whatever their private opinions on race, Atlanta’s leaders valued calm more than segregation, and economic growth and national influence more than the esteem of Georgia crackers.36 Emory increasingly shared this desire to participate in the life of the larger nation. As it grew and improved, Emory was drawn out of its regional orbit and into the national mainstream. It was now competing for money and for the best students and faculty with universities across the country. The growing importance of funding from the federal government and a few large foundations also meant that regional distinctiveness eroded as universities all pursued money from the same sources for the same things. By 1954 Emory had made impressive strides in improving the quality of instruction, especially in the graduate school. In addition to the grant from the General Education Board, Emory had begun participating in a program sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that provided funds to increase salaries of outstanding professors in the graduate school and the stipends of promising graduate students.37 These grants led to greater success in attracting and retaining prominent professors. The subsequent rise in the University’s reputation was not without social side effects. As more faculty came to Emory from outside the South, they often brought northern habits of mind along with their research and teaching skills. Even southerners now often identified more with their disciplinary colleagues at other universities than with their neighbors. With segregation growing rare in American universities, Emory faculty became ever more uncomfortable with it. Classes were still in session when Brown was announced, and the Wheel quickly opened debate. On May 20 nearly the entire editorial page was devoted to the decision. The editors accepted that segregation was, in effect, finished. They hoped that graceful, gradual integration would be possible. But they also stressed the danger inherent in the decision, echoing the objections that had long been standard fare for white southerners who objected to northern interference. “While progressives are congratulating themselves,” they warned, “Southern demagogues will exploit the situation to the fullest, particularly in the rural areas. Truthfully, little exploitation will be needed. In many parts of the South opinion of the Negro has remained the same since the Civil War.” The Wheel also did informal polling of students and faculty. The faculty members and administrators they interviewed all stressed the rightness of the decision, its “inevitability.” Most, however, also focused on the need for more time.38 The public reaction of the Emory administration was muted. In a speech to the Phi Beta Kappa chapter on May 21, President White identified the “beginnings of a break-down of racial segregation” as one of the major trends in higher education. Without engaging in any detailed discussion, he made it clear that the issue was not going away.39 Otherwise, there is little evidence of any internal administrative discussion. In his October report to the board, White never mentioned Brown. The issue did come up briefly at the inaugural meeting of the “Committee of One Hundred,” a group of Methodist laity headed by trustee Henry Bowden and organized by the University for fund-raising. In a wide-ranging exchange of views about the University’s goals and prospects, someone raised the matter of black enrollment. The terse notes briefly mention an issue that would soon come to loom large: “Discussion of Emory’s position on admission of Negroes developed the normal objections, as well as the further fact that under the laws of Georgia admission of Negroes would cause the University to lose its 47
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
tax-free status, which would have a ruinous effect financially.”40 The best evidence of the University leadership’s thinking is probably an October 1954 Emory Alumnus editorial. While the magazine’s editor, Randy Fort, had an independent streak and was given a fairly free hand in producing the Alumnus, it is likely that such an important piece was discussed with the administration. The editorial powerfully suggests the quandary that Emory was in. It weaves between facts that seem to mean that Emory will have to change and facts that seem to mean that it won’t, while providing no principle for deciding which sets of facts ought to prevail. While Fort’s piece aimed for neutrality, the overriding impression it creates is of paralysis of will.41 Fort’s tone was calm. He assured readers that the Brown decision did not require Emory, a private school, to do anything at all. But he immediately noted that eighty-two previously white schools, including substantially more private than public institutions, had already opened their doors to blacks. When Emory finally faced things, he seemed to imply, the outcome was foreordained. Fort’s second point was, again, designed to soothe fears. While presidents and others might recommend courses of action, he explained, “only the trustees make the policy.” Those Emory trustees were all “Southerners by birth or rearing, and in almost every case by both.” Of the thirty-one current trustees, twenty-five were alumni of the University. Third, Fort observed that Emory’s charter never refers to race, but states simply that the purpose of the University is to promote teaching and learning under the auspices of the Methodist Church. Emory could not continue to do this without maintaining its tax-exempt status, and state law allowed exemption only as long as schools that had been “established for white people” remained exclusively white. The issue now was whether Brown meant the law was unconstitutional. According to Fort, the consensus of Emory’s attorneys was that it was indeed, but that a test case would have to be mounted before blacks could be admitted. A mistake here could have catastrophic results: estimates put Emory’s potential tax bill at about half of the University’s annual budget. Fort then returned to the relationship between Emory and the Methodist Church. Bound to the church by charter, Emory could not ignore the 1952 Discipline of the Methodist Church, which said, “There is no place in the Methodist Church for racial discrimination or racial segregation.” After this wandering disquisition Fort concluded, “This is not a problem which will just fade away and leave us, for too many publics—too many institutions, organizations, and individuals—are interestedly watching and asking questions.” And it was quite clear that Emory had no answers. 42 By the late 1950s a steady stream of highly publicized events—the Montgomery bus boycott, the acceptance and then expulsion of Autherine Lucy at the University of Alabama, the mob scenes in Little Rock, the bombing of the high school in Clinton, Tennessee—had the entire South quivering with tension. At the same time, the rest of the nation was growing more willing to apply pressure to bring about segregation’s demise. And at quiet Emory, an era was about to end. In March 1955 President White announced that he would retire by September 1, 1957. Uncertainty and division followed. Emory’s chronic financial problems worsened significantly. In White’s remarks to the board at its November 1955 meeting he stressed that budget cuts, while necessary to avoid continuing deficits, were coming dangerously close to destroying morale on campus. At nearly the same time, Georgia’s political leaders threatened to close Atlanta’s public schools rather than allow even token desegregation. For the Emory faculty, many of whom had children in these schools, this was profoundly alarming.43 Any public discussion of desegregation at Emory now drew fire from some alumni and board members. One example is the reaction to a 1956 editorial in the Emory Alumnus about Georgia’s plan to close public schools that the federal courts desegregated. This piece, again written by Randy Fort, argued that such action would be disastrous. It meant “Emory’s student body would deteriorate in quality, rapidly and steadily.” Perhaps more important, the University’s faculty would begin to erode. The response to this piece was furious. One irate alumnus 48
National Ambition, Regional Turmoil: The Desegregation of Emory
copied board chair Howard Candler on his letter of complaint. Candler commended the writer, applauding his anger at “the unjustifiable use of the Emory Alumnus as a medium for propaganda.” Angry letters, he believed, “will restrain Mr. Fort if he is ever again tempted to publish in our fine magazine his personal opinion of matters which do not properly belong in it.”44 Fort’s point, though, was that Emory could no longer avoid the debate. Events on campus bore him out as student agitation on both sides of the question became common. Throughout 1955–56 the Wheel argued for desegregation, also printing a prosegregation column written by former governor Herman Talmadge and By the late 1950s a steady stream of a long letter by Georgia’s attorney general, Eugene Cook, which kept the issue promihighly publicized events—the Montnently visible. A Presbyterian student group, gomery bus boycott, the acceptance the Westminster Fellowship, submitted a and then expulsion of Autherine statement to the Wheel that decried the posLucy at the University of Alabama, sibility of closing the public schools in order the mob scenes in Little Rock, the to prevent bombing of the high school in desegregation. Officially, Emory continued Clinton, Tennessee—had the entire its refusal to consider change. In a meeting South quivering with tension. . . . with a student development committee in early 1957, White answered questions about Any public discussion of desegregadesegregation by declaring it impossible. His tion at Emory now drew fire from explanation was simple: admitting blacks some alumni and board members. would end Emory’s tax exemption, destroying its finances.45 In the waning days of White’s tenure, the dean of the Candler School of Theology, William Ragsdale Cannon, appointed a special faculty committee to consider the changing racial situation. While members of the theology faculty had long been active in promoting better race relations, as a group they had seemed reluctant to press the case, perhaps aware of Howard Candler’s views on segregation. A faculty resolution, brief and carefully worded, resulted from this report. It requested that, in line with the urging of the 1956 Methodist Discipline, the University conduct a study of the racial policies of the School of Theology, “making sure that these policies and practices are Christian.” The faculty also expressed a “willingness and readiness to have [black graduate students] as members of our classes and of the student body.” Finally, they assured the trustees that they understood the “complex and delicate nature of the problems involved in this request” and would treat the matter as confidential. Prayers would also be said. In perfect keeping with his long-standing reluctance to press this issue, White sent this resolution on to the trustees with a brief note: “I have no recommendation to make with reference to action by the Board.” The board, of course, took no action.46 Understandably, the selection of a new president dominated this board meeting. Immediately after adjournment, Chairman Candler announced the election of Dr. S. Walter Martin as the University’s fifteenth president. A native of Tifton, Georgia, born in 1911, Martin attended Furman University and trained as a historian at the University of Georgia and the University of North Carolina. He joined the University of Georgia faculty in 1935 and rose steadily in administration. In 1949 he was appointed dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, a position he held until he accepted the presidency at Emory.47 Martin was a dedicated and active Methodist layman. His religious commitment, coupled with his success as an administrator, had led several smaller Methodist colleges to try to recruit him as president. Happy in Athens, he always refused. When the search committee from Emory approached him, Martin was swayed for the first time. Howard Candler chaired the committee, which included two Methodist bishops, and he was determined that Emory’s next president be someone who would strengthen the University’s ties with the church. Martin, nonetheless, 49
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
was far from certain that moving to Emory was the right thing. He was well regarded at the University of Georgia, his family was established in Athens, and he was comfortable in his church. Assured by Candler that he was needed, though, Martin agreed. He was elected unanimously by the board and agreed to a starting date of September 1, 1957. The unanimous vote, however, concealed deep fractures. In the seventeen months since Goodrich White had announced his retirement, several internal candidates for the presidency had appeared. These were among the most powerful and able men on campus, and several could reasonably entertain the notion of becoming president. By contrast, when Martin’s name leaked out as a possible successor to White, howls of protest went up. Faculty members who could agree on little else agreed that a dean from the University of Georgia—a school they considered a “cow college”—was an inappropriate choice. A group of senior faculty members, most of them department chairs, took the audacious step of writing to Candler with their objections. Claiming “the support of a substantial majority of [their] colleagues,” they asserted that Martin did not “incorporate personally or professionally that combination of qualities so essential for vigorous and effective guidance of Emory’s future destiny.” Candler ignored this letter.48 These faculty members were mistaken in many of their judgments about Martin, but in some sense they were correct: Martin and Emory were not a good match. Martin always remained close to his roots, both social and religious. He was uninterested in Atlanta society—unimpressed by his new memberships, provided by Emory, in tony private dining and country clubs, a man more at home at a Methodist church supper than at the Piedmont Driving Club. This lack of interest in being one of the boys in Atlanta’s upper crust would hinder Martin throughout his time at Emory. Hearing of Martin’s selection, President G. B. Connell of Mercer University welcomed him to “the aspirin fraternity.” Indeed, even apart from the copious fence mending he would need to do, Martin was in for plenty of headaches at Emory.49 In May, well before he arrived as president, he received an ominous letter from Dean Rusk, then head of the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation. “I am anxious,” said Rusk, “to have a long talk with you about the background and future of the General Education Board’s grant for the development of graduate studies at Emory.” This grant, made in 1951, gave a desperately needed $7 million but required $25 million in matching funds. Emory had not been able to raise it. This embarrassing situation was a harbinger of things to come for Martin. Although he returned from his meeting with Rusk with a check for $1 million and an agreement to let Emory off the hook, Martin would be beset by fund-raising problems. In his first report to the trustees he identified money as the most critical problem facing the University.50 Martin’s troubles expanded exponentially when Howard Candler died only a few months after Martin took office. Candler had most wanted Martin at Emory, and without Candler’s dominating presence on the board, Martin was hamstrung. Like Goodrich White, Martin was no advocate of integration and would never push the Emory board to admit blacks. Still, like White, Martin was not one to give in to pressure to muffle the faculty or students. Contacts with black professors and student groups continued during the late 1950s, and Martin never considered stopping them, despite sometimes furious threats from angry segregationists. Rather, he tried to act as a peacemaker, a moderate who could avoid disaster by keeping outright division at bay. This was an incredibly difficult balancing act, especially in the late 1950s, when rising pressures from all quarters both for and against racial change meant that any day could bring fresh trouble.51 Martin was uneasy about change in the South generally. The economic and social transformations since World War II unsettled him, and he feared that prosperity would result in moral decay. Like White, Martin said little publicly about race. In speech after speech to alumni clubs, parents, students, and religious groups, he discussed the changes that swept the South without mentioning blacks or Atlanta’s increasing turmoil over race.52 The city had remained calm for most of the decade, largely because of the business community’s desire for stability. 50
National Ambition, Regional Turmoil: The Desegregation of Emory
Together with Mayor William B. Hartsfield, Atlanta’s power brokers had negotiated slow but steady progress in race relations during the 1940s and 1950s.53 This progress was threatened by the rise of massive resistance after Brown. Finally, in January 1958 the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund filed a class-action suit in the northern district of Georgia seeking the desegregation of Atlanta’s public schools.54 The outcome of the case was never in doubt, and most of Atlanta was probably ready to begin token desegregation. Georgia law, however, with its provisions for closing public schools rather than integrating them, stood in the way. The scene was set for several years of intense conflict between Atlanta and the rest of the state.55 At Emory, Martin had his hands This threat spurred Emory’s faculty to acfull. A vocal contingent of students tion. In late November 1958 a statement and faculty clamored for change. bearing the signatures of the overwhelming majority of Emory professors, including sevMany trustees and alumni, just as eral prominent administrators, was delivered vocal, were unalterably opposed. to the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. The And Emory was desperately in statement strongly objected to closing the need of money—a lot of it. schools, but race was hardly mentioned. Instead, the faculty’s arguments focused on the increasingly high cost of resisting change. Echoing the reasoning of the business community, the faculty argued that the loss of industry that would certainly follow closing the schools would harm the economic welfare of the entire state. Any interruption in the educational system would eventually lead to a shortage of trained service providers, from doctors to county agricultural agents. Closing the schools would also allow the Soviet Union to succeed in its “systematic attempt to overtake us educationally.”56 Far more interesting than the statement was the reaction to it. It is impossible to imagine Howard Candler responding with anything but fury. Indeed, the faculty half expected that there would be consequences.57 But Candler’s successor as chairman of Emory’s board, Henry Bowden, was a thoroughly different person. A trial lawyer, Bowden relied on persuasion rather than power. He also shared the perspectives of Atlanta’s sophisticated business community, including a reluctance to see the schools closed. Bowden’s response to the faculty statement was sanguine. He did not express approval of its contents, but took pains to support the right of the faculty to speak out. He contrasted this with the situation at “tax supported institutions in our State,” where professors who wanted to take similar stands were “thwarted by administrations which shuddered at the thought of reduced appropriations, open criticisms from politicians and embarrassing days ahead.” This calm response sent an unmistakable signal that a new day had dawned. Bowden would be the one to lead Emory through the difficult terrain ahead.58 But Emory’s own policies on race relations still did not change. By now, the normally placid campus roiled. A forum held during the annual “Brotherhood Week” in February brought several speakers to campus to discuss the topic, “What Are the Basic Issues of the Racial Crisis?” Dr. Harry Richardson, president of historically black Gammon Theological Seminary, and James M. Dabbs, of the Southern Regional Council of the Presbyterian Church, advocated for open schools and desegregation. A special issue of the Emory Alumnus, “Crisis in the Schools,” focused on Atlanta’s racial problems.59 Both the speakers and the article quickly drew strong objection from Emory alumni, but this time Emory officials sprang to Randy Fort’s defense.60 Articles and seminars, however, would not satisfy proponents of integration. In March, the Wheel carried a short but portentous story. Twelve members of the Atlanta chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), including several Emory students, picketed outside Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta. Emory faculty members were also involved with the group, which had staged the demonstrations against the wishes of Atlanta’s black leadership.61 Holding the peace was going to require accommodation. The new decade opened with the threat of public school closures still hanging over Georgia. 51
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
Following the federal court’s 1959 order for Atlanta’s public schools to desegregate, the city’s school board submitted a grade-per-year plan, beginning with twelfth grade. Judge Frank A. Hooper approved it but waited for the Georgia General Assembly to meet in January 1960 before he ordered implementation. Mayor Hartsfield asked the legislature to repeal its mandatory school closure law and allow Atlanta to determine its own course. It was unclear what would happen. Governor Ernest Vandiver, though publicly committed to resistance, had no taste for the consequences of closed schools. But most white Georgians would rather have closed the schools than integrate, and most Georgia politicians vocally supported them.62 In February, tensions began to ease a bit when the General Assembly appointed a commission of prominent Georgians to hold statewide hearings on desegregation and the public schools. Heading the commission was John A. Sibley, president of Atlanta’s Trust Company Bank, a partner in the law firm of King and Spalding, and former general counsel for The Coca-Cola Company. While Sibley did not like desegregation, he understood that massive resistance would devastate Atlanta. In complex and subtle ways, his conduct of the hearings during the late winter and spring of 1960 helped avert outright crisis.63 Meanwhile, other events contributed to the tense atmosphere. Martin Luther King Jr. returned to Atlanta, worrying many whites. Students from the city’s black colleges published a full-page “Appeal for Human Rights” in the Atlanta Constitution. Demonstrations continued throughout the spring, and students (including some from Emory) planned a boycott of Rich’s department store.64 On campus, the uncertainty took a growing toll. At the end of 1959 President Martin told the trustees that the public school situation “was without question an important factor in nearly all [faculty] resignations.” Replacing those who left was nearly impossible. The Emory Alumnus reported that “Emory has had turndown after turndown from able young teachers it has wanted to employ from colleges in other states. They simply would not bring their children into a climate where the future of public education is uncertain. Nor will many professors now at Emory stay any longer if the situation grows much worse.”65 Then, a seemingly minor incident galvanized faculty opposition to Emory’s racial policies. In early March the board forced Emory’s Glee Club to cancel an appearance at Tuskegee Institute, citing the possibility of a violent reaction to a white choir singing—and staying overnight—at a black college. Martin supported the cancellation but sent a conciliatory letter, which William Archie, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, read to a faculty meeting in mid-March. The letter provoked a wide-ranging discussion of Emory’s racial policies. Archie warned the faculty that the time was not “propitious to have the Board confront these issues officially,” but they refused to drop the matter. Acting on unanimous vote by the faculty, Archie appointed a committee to meet with Martin and discuss “the Tuskegee episode and related questions of policy with respect to Faculty and student relations with the Negro community.” Predictably, the group left that meeting unhappy.66 Martin was now truly caught between the faculty and the trustees. Emory professors continued aggressively pushing, inviting students and faculty members from black colleges to the Emory campus, participating alongside students in demonstrations, and drafting resolutions. The board, though led by the consummately practical Bowden, was not pleased about public identification of Emory professors and students with integration. On March 31 Martin tried to calm tensions with a formal talk to selected faculty members. He warned them that, although they undeniably had the right to participate in community affairs, that right must be exercised appropriately. He argued that Emory had no duty to help lead Georgia through this trouble, and he defended its commitment to segregation: Emory University is subject to the customs and laws of Georgia. Some of you may wish that Emory were elsewhere, but it is in the South. We simply cannot get too far out in front of the
52
National Ambition, Regional Turmoil: The Desegregation of Emory
community in which we live, or else we ruin ourselves. History teaches that; nature teaches that. The climate must be right. I can easily see this University on the road to destruction if we get too far out in front.67
It is a measure of how bad things had become that Martin thought this kind of lecture would quiet the faculty. It had, in fact, no discernible effect. On May 6 the College of Arts and Sciences passed a resolution that called “for Emory to make all of its facilities available without reference to race.” In a direct challenge to Martin, the resolution stated that “in assessing the possibility of adopting such a policy it should be borne in mind that Emory has a national as well as a local constituency.” When the board met the following week, this resolution prompted “lively discussion,” but resulted only in a brisk letter from Henry Bowden saying that “the request . . . cannot be granted.”68 Still the faculty persisted. The University Senate had also been considering Emory’s racial policies but had not yet reached firm conclusions. On May 25 the Arts and Sciences representative offered an identical resolution along with a copy of Bowden’s dismissive letter. With Martin voting against the resolution, the Senate adopted it by a six-to-five vote. The Arts and Sciences faculty now set up a committee to study ways to implement the resolution and to communicate with the administration and board. The members understood that they needed the cooperation of the trustees and hoped to meet with some of them informally. From Martin’s point of view, the best news was probably that the group did not plan to meet over the summer.69 By the time classes began in the fall of 1960, Georgia’s public school crisis was again acute. The Sibley Commission had issued its report in April, recommending that the state establish “a system of education within the limitations of the Supreme Court decision, yet one which will secure the maximum segregation within the law, which will vest the control of its schools in the people of the community.” Although many, especially in rural areas, still insisted that segregation was more important than schools, the Atlanta community largely supported the Sibley Commission recommendations. Judge Hooper postponed implementation of his order until the fall of 1961.70 Demonstrations and sit-ins at downtown Atlanta lunch counters also resumed that fall. On October 19 Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested along with fifty-one students for violating trespass laws after being refused service at the restaurant in Rich’s department store. Mayor Hartsfield quickly negotiated the students’ release from city jails, but it took an appeal from Robert Kennedy to secure King’s freedom. Demonstrations stopped until late November.71 At Emory, Martin had his hands full. A vocal contingent of students and faculty clamored for change. Many trustees and alumni, just as vocal, were unalterably opposed. And Emory was desperately in need of money—a lot of it. Never really happy at Emory, Martin was by now miserable, regularly receiving angry phone calls and lectures from all sides. Still, doing his best to salvage the situation, he kept communication open and helped create a special committee of faculty, administrators, and trustees to discuss segregation. It was far from clear that this could accomplish anything at all. Then, on January 12, 1961—the day after a mob rioted outside Charlayne Hunter’s dorm room when she enrolled at the University of Georgia—Henry Bowden decided to act. He appointed a committee “to study the policy of Emory University relative to the admission of negroes as students, and to recommend to the Executive Committee at its February 1961 meeting such changes, if any, it feels would be proper.” The membership of this committee resembled an Atlanta Chamber of Commerce roster, and Bowden himself attended the meetings.72 Most of these men may have preferred segregation. Their bottom-line mentality, though, as well as their privileged and insulated social positions, led them to value other things more than racial separation. They would not keep racial restrictions at the cost of prosperity and prestige.73 From their first meeting, their only real focus was on the threat of losing the Georgia tax exemption for segregated schools. Integration could potentially cost millions of dollars and end Emory’s drive for national promi53
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
nence. On the other hand, federal research grants to segregated schools already were being restricted and the Civil Rights Commission was calling for a total ban, a possibility that could likewise cost Emory millions of dollars and end the drive for national prominence.74 Two days later, President Martin sent a note to one of the committee members: “I believe, as most of you do, that desegregation is coming in all of our schools, so we might as well face it now, and in doing so settle it in our own way.” This indeed was the committee’s general position. Early drafts of an interim report stressed continuity, citing faithfulness to the school’s primary goal of academic excellence. This, the report suggested, would never change. The only thing that would be different was that a class of applicants that Emory had not traditionally accepted would now be eligible for admission. Martin strongly preferred gradual desegregation beginning with the graduate programs, fearing a flood of strong applications from Atlanta’s black high schools that would overwhelm the College. The trustees, somewhat surprisingly, disagreed, arguing that this would only drag the controversy out.75 The tax exemption, though, was a serious sticking point. There was good reason to believe that the state would not revoke it. Several black colleges now admitted whites and retained the tax status, as did the already desegregated public universities. The dean of Emory’s law school, Ben Johnson Jr., doubted that the state would “invite such a crisis on their own motion.” With state universities now desegregated and Atlanta’s public schools about to be, there would seem to be no point in destroying Emory University. Still, it was, after all, a lot to risk.76 In late spring 1961 the executive committee approved the final report and directed that it be presented to the full board in May, but for some reason it was not. The campus was expecting an announcement, and when there was none, anger and dismay followed. Martin and Bowden received anxious letters. The College of Arts and Sciences Legislative Council passed a resolution deploring the board’s failure to act. To calm the situation, Martin told Dean William Archie that the board would seek a declaratory judgment on the constitutionality of the racial restriction in the tax exemption, possibly as early as November, though he made no promises.77 By the fall board meeting, Georgia’s political atmosphere was far different than it had been a year earlier. The January showdown over desegregation at the University of Georgia had forced Governor Vandiver to take a stand, and he judiciously chose to accept federal authority. Almost immediately support for keeping the public schools open mushroomed, and lawmakers overturned the massive resistance legislation in a special session. In Atlanta, after meticulous planning by the mayor and civic leaders, the public schools opened peacefully on a (barely) integrated basis. Downtown, relentless boycotts and sit-ins had paralyzed business through February. White merchants were ready to negotiate, and by fall of 1961 the stores were desegregated. Peace had returned.78 Emory’s trustees now felt that they could safely act. The special committee submitted its report, noting that nothing in Emory’s charter forbade the admission of blacks and that the University’s admissions standards would not change. The board announced that Emory would admit blacks to all programs—“when and if it can do so without jeopardizing constitutional and statutory tax-exemption privileges essential to the maintenance of its educational program and facilities.”79 Reaction to the announcement was largely favorable. Faculty members were relieved but cast a wary eye at the unresolved legal issues. A handful of alumni objected, making up for their small numbers with their remarkable stridency. The Atlanta Constitution praised the decision for moving Emory “a great step forward toward its ultimate position as one of the foremost seats of learning in the nation” and called on the legislature to remove the “punitive restriction” in the tax exemption.80 After receiving an application to the dental school from a qualified black student, Emory filed suit on March 21, 1962, carefully arguing that the tax exemption was valid but its racial restriction was not. Bowden and law dean Ben Johnson argued the case, prevailing at the Georgia Supreme Court. The final order was entered in October 1962, and Emory admitted one 54
National Ambition, Regional Turmoil: The Desegregation of Emory
black part-time graduate student, a teacher in the Decatur public schools, that fall. By spring, two black women were admitted to the graduate program in nursing. The campus received them “without any turmoil or excitement whatsoever.”81 Although Emory’s trustees made the change with relative grace, there is little doubt that they would rather have kept the school white. Henry Bowden told correspondents that he would be happier if Emory could remain segregated, and that he did not want to change because of “pressure from either the government or private donors who threaten to cut us off if we do not integrate.” But he also implicitly admitted that this was exactly what had happened. “Whether we like it or not,” he acknowledged, “the Federal Government is deeply embedded in private as well as public education. We are of the opinion that in the not too distant future we will find Congress acting to cut off Federal funds from institutions which by charter or rules prohibit negroes from attending. If such is done and we lose this money we could continue to operate as a small ineffective college but not as a major university because our faculty will leave us if they do not have the chance to do research work.” In another letter he expanded the list of outside actors who had forced the school’s hand, including the foundations and the accrediting agencies. “I resent [this],” he said, “but must learn to live with it.”82 Others on the board vigorously resisted admitting what had happened. In a letter to Martin, one trustee proclaimed that in spite of his assent to desegregation, he would never support any suggestion that segregation was wrong, or that Emory was giving in to outside pressure.83 But willing to face it or not, Emory’s trustees had most certainly been forced to desegregate. Outside pressures, and internal ones, too, ensured by 1961 that the school could no longer remain both a major university and segregated. The pragmatic response of the Atlanta business leaders to the state’s public school crisis meant that the battle to preserve traditional racial relationships in Georgia, or at least in Atlanta, was already lost. There was nothing to be gained by holding out alone. The board, dominated by members of that same Atlanta business community, thus did the practical thing. The demise of segregation meant that Emory could now return its focus to the business at hand, and begin raising the money and recruiting the faculty it would need to build an institution that would grow in size, quality, and reputation throughout the decades ahead.
55
CHAPTER 5
Grady Memorial Hospital, 1960s.
PUTTING BLACK BLOOD AND WHITE BLOOD ON THE SAME SHELF The Integration of Grady Hospital — J E R RY GENTRY —
For more than a century and a quarter, faculty members in Atlanta’s schools of medicine— largely Emory’s medical school and its predecessors but also, since 1978, the Morehouse School of Medicine—have treated patients and taught students at Henry Grady Memorial Hospital, established in 1892 for the care of Atlanta’s indigent. Large, complex, and battered by vexing economic forces, this great public hospital also labored for more than half its life under the burden of Jim Crow laws. The struggle to desegregate the hospital, and thereby improve medical care for all of its patients, makes for a compelling story, told here by the author of the book Grady Baby: A Year in the Life of Atlanta’s Grady Hospital.1 57
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
O
NE DAY IN 1961 Dr. Roy Bell answered the phone at his Atlanta dentistry office and was told that a “colored” woman had died at Grady Memorial Hospital because she had not been treated. Bell had no proof the story was true, but he believed it. In 1961 Atlanta, the truth of a particular story was not as important as the daily oppressive grind of segregation, which Dr. Bell faced, and despised, every day. “That was the starting point,” he recalled years later. “Grady Hospital, to Atlanta, was a very image of the power structure of Georgia. It was just unthinkable. How can something like this be turned around?”2 The “it” he referred to was Grady’s long history of segregation. Founded in 1892 for the care of Atlanta’s indigent, the hospital was named for the renowned editor of the Atlanta Constitution, Henry Grady, who had popularized the phrase “The New South” in the 1870s and 1880s, encouraging his home city and state to move into a modern era of economic progress and national harmony promised by the resolution of the Civil War. Three years after his untimely death in 1889, the city’s public hospital bearing his name opened its doors on Butler Street, across from the Atlanta Medical College, the forerunner of Emory University’s School of Medicine. In that same year, the Southern Medical College, a rival medical school founded on Edgewood Avenue in 1878, relocated next door to the Atlanta Medical College, exacerbating the schools’ rivalry, but bringing to Grady additional community doctors who served as faculty members of the two schools. From the outset, then, Grady was a site for medical education. By the time Emory University was chartered in Atlanta in 1915, precipitating the move of Emory College from Oxford, changes in standards for medical education made it desirable for medical schools to affiliate with universities. In 1915, therefore, the Atlanta Medical College, which remained from the merger between the two older medical colleges, transferred its assets to the new university and became the Emory University School of Medicine. The instruction of medical students continued at Grady, where law and social custom required the treatment of black patients and white patients in separate buildings. Separate but hardly equal, the two facilities became known as “the Gradys.” Merely one indication of the nuances inherent in their inequality was the policy, in place for more than two decades, prohibiting medical students from treating white patients; only black patients were suitable for student practice. Roy Bell was not the first black Atlantan to question Grady’s segregation. In 1919 the Atlanta NAACP had written an open letter to the city protesting the exclusion of black doctors from Grady, and black doctors, in countless ways, had noted that a segregated hospital was unwise. But when the “new Grady” was built in the mid-1950s (it is now called “old Grady” since the construction of a newer facility in the 1990s), it would have been illegal to operate it without separate facilities. Shaped like a giant three-dimensional H lying on its back, with two towers rising sixteen floors, Grady Hospital had two emergency rooms, two waiting rooms, two labor and delivery wards, two surgery departments, two registration areas, two of everything—identical, except for the color of their patients. In fact, before the new Grady was built, the hospital had in effect been two Gradys, two wooden buildings facing each other across Butler Street, with a tunnel under the street to cross from the white world to the black world, or vice versa—which is why one might still hear reference to “the Gradys.” By 1961, when Bell received the phone call about Grady, the tremors of opposition to whiteimposed segregation were rumbling more and more confidently. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other black student groups proposed tactics more radical than those of the older black generation of Atlantans, who had forged a nonconfrontational working relationship with Atlanta’s powerful whites. The elder black leaders knew how to get certain things for the black community, in exchange for other things. They knew when to push, when to ask, when to compromise. They had an uneasy relationship with Atlanta’s white civic and business leaders that had brought some benefits to the black community without the 58
Putting Black and White Blood on the Same Shelf: The Integration of Grady Hospital
violence experienced by other southern cities. And they often were put off by militant students who made radical demands. Bell and other young black professionals in their early forties, who were eager for the end of segregation, lived, chronologically and tactically, between the two generations. Bell’s cohorts were more forceful than their seniors but less explosive than the students. Activist college students fiercely, publicly, demanded immediate change; their elders arranged deals in private meetings. Atlanta’s public transportation was integrated, for example, after a lawsuit prompted not by a Montgomery-style boycott but by Grady’s separate facilities haman arrest of black leaders who had boarded pered the quality of services for a bus and sat defiantly in the whites-only section—a defiance and arrest coordinated all. By maintaining two hospitals by black leaders in meetings with Atlanta’s in one, Grady cost taxpayers more white chief of police. The students, on the than necessary. other hand, picketed, sat in, boycotted, and demanded the end of segregation, not caring about the cooperation of white leaders. The gulf between the generations was so wide that a Student-Adult Liaison Committee was formed to facilitate communication between the students and the dignified older black leaders. Roy Bell, drawn to his elders by his intellect and savvy, was eventually drawn to the students by his intemperance and impatience. After the disturbing phone call, Bell’s target was Grady Memorial Hospital. Bell was an intellectual, reflective man with a precise command of words, but when his anger pinpointed a target, he moved—fast, rash, alone, even if ridiculed by his peers. His tactic was simply to demand to be heard. Morehouse College student activist Charles Black recalls, “He was one of the few black professionals who was supportive of the students. He knew what he was talking about, but he was very impatient—radical, to say the least. Bell was not of our generation, though he was at least as radical as we were, so he appeared even more radical. . . . His being a dentist identifying with the students was important to us. But he was sometimes not satisfied with [our own slow] pace of things. We had very democratic committees; we’d meet sometimes two or three times a day. There wasn’t a place for a maverick like Bell; he wanted to act quickly and on his own.”3 Jondelle Johnson, a civil rights activist and later director of the Atlanta NAACP, says about Bell, “He had no finesse, at a time when it was dangerous not to. We had problems with the police, the Klan, but he didn’t care. He said what he wanted to say and did what he wanted to do. He jeopardized his family and his practice. Most of us feared for our lives, but he went beyond the limits the rest embraced. He would go anywhere. Everybody said he was crazy. There was a way of doing things so not to alienate the whites, but Roy did it his way. Quite a few blacks didn’t want to associate with him, for fear it would jeopardize what they had.” But Johnson also says about him, respectfully, “He was well-read. He was brilliant. He was one of my heroes. I guess he was ahead of his time.”4 Once Bell determined that Grady Hospital would be desegregated, he was relentless. He might appear anywhere and say anything to bring attention to Grady. He went before the Atlanta City Council and called them killers and murderers for endorsing a policy that discriminated against sick black citizens. He addressed the Georgia legislature, hounded mayoral candidates. He telegrammed the Georgia attorney general, suggesting that, as Emory Hospital was segregated, the attorney general should give an opinion as to whether Emory University’s tax-exempt status should be revoked. Bell wrote many letters: to President Kennedy, President Johnson, the Civil Rights Commission, county, city, and state politicians.5 In August 1961, before the Fulton County commissioners, he gave a logical, statistically well-researched plea. He said Grady’s separate facilities hampered the quality of services for 59
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
all. By maintaining two hospitals in one, Grady cost taxpayers more than necessary. He pointed out that there were no Negroes among the five hundred visiting medical staff. Atlanta, he said, had 4,000 hospital beds, only 680 of them for Negroes. The three private hospitals for Negroes were not fully accredited. Public funds were used to operate two Grady technical schools, neither of which admitted blacks. He appealed to the county commissioners, the Fulton-DeKalb Hospital Authority (FDHA), which oversaw Grady, and “all responsible humane citizens, Negro and white, to do something immediately about these deplorable conditions” without resorting to court action.6 The Atlanta-based regional director of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Pete Page, recognized that Bell’s tactics could be good strategy: “He had a pattern of making some outrageous suggestion about what to do, sometimes making people very angry, which would elicit useful responses from people who would do something a little less explosive and more practical. He was different, but on balance he earned his way. He really did.”7 Bell decided to picket Grady, and for picketers he turned to the restless, energetic black student activists at Atlanta’s historically black colleges. They, however, had heard of the loose cannon Roy Bell and were leery. They were desegregating lunch counters, hotels, restaurants, the state capitol; why include a public hospital in an already hectic schedule—especially if it meant trying to tame Roy Bell? The hesitant students changed their minds when a small boy was hit by a car a half-block from the office of the student-run Committee on the Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR), a ten-minute drive from Grady. They called the Grady ER and were asked the boy’s race. They said Negro and were told there were no Negro ambulances available at the moment. Forty minutes later, an ambulance arrived. The students fumed—and then joined Bell on the Butler Street sidewalks, sometimes picketing eight to ten hours a day, carefully avoiding any interruption of hospital services. More drastic actions were planned but not enacted, such as faking an emergency in the picket line and carrying the black person into the white emergency room. Students visited twenty-five churches to ask for donations and picketers. Charles Black asked Negro citizens to report mistreatment at Grady so they could compile a list for future use, possibly for a lawsuit. In 1961, with demonstrations occurring all over Atlanta in restaurants and public accommodations, picketing at Grady received little press attention, most of it from the Atlanta Inquirer, which was begun by civil rights activists. Bell repeatedly called the Inquirer, requesting a reporter to come down to Grady. He held aloft signs that read, “Disease and Death Know No Race Give the Other One-third an Equal Chance to Live” or “Grady Has 75% Negro Patients, 0% Negro Staff Physicians, 0% Negro Interns, 0% Negro Board Members, Why?”8 Atlanta Constitution columnist Pat Watters interviewed Bell and wrote that Bell wanted someone with power to listen. He said Bell had been before the county commission, who listened but could not tell the FDHA what to do. The FDHA would not grant him a hearing. Uninvited, Bell went to an FDHA meeting to speak. The FDHA said it would appoint a committee to look into his concerns but gave no date for the committee’s report. Thereafter, the entirely white FDHA would respond to questions about desegregating Grady with, “We’re working on it.” Bell threatened to sue. Bell tried to meet with all five (white) mayoral candidates, but only one responded, while another sent a representative.9 Bell also turned to talk radio. For a time he conducted two weekly programs on two blackowned AM stations and occasionally appeared on a talk show called “Open Line” on another. Black and white listeners called and responded to Bell’s provocative rhetoric.10 But inside Grady, the daily, hourly insults of segregation persisted. Former Grady nurse Ernestine Kelsey remembers the resentment she felt when black employees received a letter from the Grady administration announcing, “I am happy to announce that your salary has been increased by five dollars a month.” Kelsey stresses, “Not a week, a month. It wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. He made a big deal in those letters about 60
Putting Black and White Blood on the Same Shelf: The Integration of Grady Hospital
five dollars a month.”11 The author of those insulting letters, the hospital superintendent, Frank Wilson, was a gregarious man, a University of Georgia graduate, teller of hilarious stories, classic southern backslapper, and a wily maneuverer among Atlanta’s powerful whites. Former city councilman, former vice president of a lumber company, member of Druid Hills Baptist Church, he was credited with Grady’s growth and impressive national reputation. He served a term as president of the Georgia Hospital Association. Known to favor white suits, a thin black tie, and white Panama hat, he was overheard by Kelsey saying, “I’ll die and go to hell before Grady Hospital is integrated.” He was politically astute. Joseph Wilber, a white doctor who served his residency at Grady, tells of Wilson once acceding to the black community: “One night Grady was jammed with people, and a black woman with a stroke was brought in. The policy then was that if someone like that could swallow, you could send them home. They told her family to take her home, feed her, clean her, have her move some to keep up her strength. They were shocked. ‘You’re not going to let her stay in the hospital?’ But there were no beds. We got a call from Frank Wilson at midnight. He said to admit her. I told him there were no beds. ‘Find a bed. We don’t turn away school principals,’ and he hung up on me. She was a black school principal with friends in powerful places. He responded to political pressure from somebody.”12 In September 1963 a Negro worker at Grady went to the “colored” laborers’ cafeteria without her meal ticket. The white supervisor called for a security guard, who roughed up the worker for forgetting her ticket. Almost three hundred workers—maids, porters, housekeepers, kitchen helpers—signed a petition saying they would walk out if nothing were done to make amends. They included a list of grievances, including that most of them made fifty cents an hour, less than half the federal minimum wage of $1.15. They were required to use the basement bathroom, and only at specified times. Dr. C. Miles Smith, president of the Atlanta NAACP, presented the petition to Wilson, who agreed to open all restrooms to all workers and to hire a Negro supervisor for the laborers’ cafeteria. Smith reported that Wilson was gracious to him. The security guard was fired. Wilson also said he would submit a pay increase suggestion to the hospital board.13 That “colored laborers’ cafeteria,” which Smith called a “segregated segregated cafeteria,” was a cruel insult. A white cafeteria and a colored cafeteria had respective degrees of higher and lower status; below them both was the colored laborers’ cafeteria. A small, dingy place, it was the only dining area for the lowest-ranked workers in the hospital. Kelsey, who resented the smaller portions on the colored side, says the laborers’ meals were worse: “When they served roast beef, the whites had chunks. We had it thin like sliced bologna. If we got thin roast beef, the laborers’ cafeteria got, maybe, grits and collard greens.” Under Wilson’s administration, black nurses were addressed by title: “Nurse Kelsey.” White nurses were addressed as “Miss,” a small but nagging reminder that one counted more than the other. According to Kelsey, during one week of evaluation by a hospital accreditation agency, switchboard operators were instructed, for that week only, to refer to all nurses, regardless of color, as “Miss.” The hesitant operators were assured the previous policy would be restored after the evaluation.14 A white instructor in the Grady nursing school decided that it was foolish to teach the same class twice, once for white students and again for black students. She combined the two classes, saving time, until two city officials saw the mix of students and demanded that they return to segregated classes.15 The Inquirer listed these reports from Grady personnel: Blacks had to make arm boards out of plywood, while the white side had custom-made boards. Blacks sometimes had to make chucks out of paper padding. They did not have enough blankets. Doctors still called black patients by their first names; whites they called Mr., Mrs., Miss. Blacks had a shortage of 61
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
diapers while the whites had extras. Black patients without ready money, who had to wait on someone to bring money before they went home, were put on stretchers in the halls instead of being placed in empty rooms on the white side. Negro student nurses put their laundry in the chute on one day, whites on another. The Grady blood bank even had a shelf for “black” blood and a shelf for “white” blood. Dr. Joseph Wilber has a gentle voice and a low chuckle. Retired, he lives in the North Georgia mountains, overlooking a small lake. A grad“Conditions on the black side were uate of Harvard Medical School, he began absolutely atrocious,” he recalled his residency training at Grady in 1954. He years later. “The patients were so recalls seeing Negro patients brought their food with only a spoon, no fork or knife. He close together that when they did a saw Negro women asked to undress in a procedure they had to pull the room full of people and asked to sit, unpatient’s bed out into the aisle like clothed, on an exam bed and wait. a file drawer, then push it back.” Local physicians made rounds at Grady each week—a contribution of time that carried some prestige—with the residents presenting cases to them. Wilber began one such round by describing a case to a visiting local doctor: “Mr. Jones here was brought in last night with a headache and nausea.” “What did you say?” the local doctor asked. Wilber repeated himself. Three times the doctor asked him the same question, and three times Wilber answered the same way. “What’s your name?” the doctor asked the Negro patient. “Bill Jones.” “Dr. Wilber, you are no longer in Boston. To you, this man is Bill.” Wilber continued, refusing to disrespect Mr. Jones, “The patient came in last night with headache and nausea.” The doctor glared at him.16 Sometimes insults came in the exclusion of blacks from decisions that affected their lives. In September 1961 the Grady administration announced that a just-completed Negro Grady nursing student dorm would be named “Mississippi Hall.” At a time of intense civil rights activity, the new Negro dorm would be named after the most defiantly segregated state in the country, a state whose murderous backlash against desegregation was once referred to as “special savagery,”17 a state that Martin Luther King Jr.’s friends would later beg him not to visit, for fear of his life. The Grady administration also announced that the already-occupied Negro nursing student dorm would be renamed “Alabama Hall.” Local black doctors protested. Grady officials denied that the dorms had been named yet, but when the NAACP president called the Grady switchboard and asked for Mississippi Hall, he was transferred to the new dorm.18 Grady relented, and the dorms became Piedmont and Armstrong, for the streets next to them. While marchers walked up and down Butler Street, one person watching them from inside the building was the Reverend Charles Gerkin, head of the Grady chaplaincy and later a professor of pastoral theology at Emory’s Candler School of Theology. He had come to Grady in 1957, just before the new building was completed. Gerkin, born and reared in Kansas, asked the search committee if he would be chaplain to the whole hospital, not just the white side. The committee, which included Frank Wilson, assured him that he would minister to all of Grady. Later, Gerkin wished he received that assurance in writing. Soon after Gerkin’s arrival at Grady, Wilson summoned him to his office and said, “Them niggers over there don’t want you. Stay on the white side of the hospital. Let the Negro preachers take care of them.” At that point Grady was still two Gradys, on opposite sides of Butler Street. Ignoring Wilson’s instructions and Grady tradition, Gerkin walked freely to the colored side, ministering to patients as they needed him. “Conditions on the black side were absolutely atrocious,” he recalled years later. “The patients were so close together that when they did a procedure they 62
Putting Black and White Blood on the Same Shelf: The Integration of Grady Hospital
had to pull the patient’s bed out into the aisle like a file drawer, then push it back.”19 Gerkin did agree to segregated worship. “I knew I couldn’t have integrated services. Part of the agreement I made with the committee was that I would conduct services for blacks in the auditorium and whites in the chapel. But Wilson vetoed it and said I had to get black ministers to conduct services for blacks. So I contracted with a young black minister.” Gerkin once met with black nursing students to answer questions about chaplaincy. After several questions, a young student in the back raised her hand. “This was a real honest question,” Gerkin recalled. “She was not a militant girl.” He nodded to her, and she asked, “Do you think we’re inferior?” He replied, “No, you are one of God’s creatures, like everybody else.” Eventually, according to Gerkin, Wilson spoke with some pastors of white churches to see if they could have Gerkin sent back to Kansas. “Fortunately, he approached the wrong ones,” Gerkin said. They said they would not vote to fire him. “Over the years, we learned to have a certain respect for each other,” Gerkin said of Wilson. “We of course disagreed. One day at lunch he said, ‘Chuck, you mean you would like to have these Negroes up here eating in the same dining room as us?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ and he just shook his head. He could not comprehend that.” Gerkin often looked out the window of his office and watched Bell and others marching on Butler Street. His office was furnished with opulent antiques donated by a prominent white Atlanta woman. When Gerkin held meetings with students in that office, an administrator told him he had desecrated the donor’s gifts by allowing students to sit on the antique chairs. Amid his fancy furniture, watching the protesters, Gerkin wondered, Should I be out there? “My conclusion was that I wouldn’t be able to do the job I was brought here to do. And, two, I think I can do more good for integration where I am. I’ve never been absolutely sure about that.” Charles Black and another student eventually arranged a meeting with William Pinkston, assistant director of Grady. They prepared a presentation of their demands and their justifications for them. Pinkston greeted them warmly and welcomed them into his office, where they saw a surprise guest: Daddy King, Martin Luther King Sr. Daddy King was one of the prominent older black leaders whom the student activists deemed too compromising. It was not uncommon for white leaders who were irritated with students to turn to leaders such as Daddy King for help. Black began explaining why they were protesting and what their demands were. They were interrupted by Daddy King, who told them not to kick a man when he’s down. You’re being too hard on Mr. Pinkston, he said. He has shown good faith, and he will do what is right. You need to give him time. Pinkston then called on King to say a word of prayer, which he did. The prayer ended the meeting. “We got nothing accomplished,” Black says. “I blame Daddy King for that.”20 After the meeting many students were demoralized. To push Grady further would require that they regroup and find ways to increase the pressure—in a battle that received little support from the black community and little visibility in the press. Black says, “It was a lonely vigil.” And it was a vigil publicly associated with Roy Bell, the fierce man who might embarrass you if you stood next to him. The students returned to other demonstrations, and, from then on, when Bell picketed in front of Grady, he marched alone. The Inquirer called Bell a “one-man gang,” and “the militant dentist.”21 Grady was not Bell’s only target. The local chapter of the American Dental Association (ADA) was closed to him because of segregation, but membership in the local chapter was a prerequisite to membership in the national body. He and another dentist presented a resolution at the National Dental Association, the association for black dentists, criticizing the granting of federal funds to segregated medical research institutions. They urged nonviolent action at the next ADA national meeting. Black dentists were educated and evaluated by ADA standards while being barred from membership in twelve states. For three years Bell picketed the Hinman Clinic, an annual dentists’ scientific conference held in Atlanta, which did not allow black dentists. He and a group of medical students picketed the meeting of the Georgia Dental Associ63
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
ation. He traveled to Miami and picketed the national ADA meeting. Finally, in June 1962 Roy Bell, working with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, filed suit against Grady Hospital to force Grady to desegregate. Bell filed as a dentist who might potentially practice at Grady. He also put together the team of plaintiffs. One was Dr. Clinton Warner, who asserted he should have the same privileges as other Atlanta MDs. Ruby Doris Smith, a Spelman College student and SNCC activist who had picketed Grady, sued as a potential patient and potential nursing school applicant who would want to attend a nonsegregated school. Five other co-plainIn a move that stunned student tiffs filed as potential patients. They sued not activists, on a Saturday afternoon only Frank Wilson and the FDHA, but also the local and state chapters of the AMA and one hundred black college faculty the ADA for barring black members.22 picketed Grady, and a group of The Grady defendants responded with a doctors and dentists led a march flurry of motions to dismiss the case. The through downtown Atlanta. dental association claimed freedom of association: “Private practices, however discriminatory, however repugnant, do not fall within the Constitutional ban on racial discrimination.” Grady claimed that the lack of black doctors was Emory’s choice, not the hospital’s, for Emory supervised the residency program.23 The medical associations reported that they had already rescinded a category of membership that had been particularly odious to black doctors: scientific membership. This category was created in 1952 to appease black doctors, who wanted membership in local and state associations less than they wanted access to membership in the national AMA, group malpractice insurance rates, and privileges in Atlanta hospitals. Scientific membership involved no dues or voting privileges; it allowed admittance to “scientific” continuing education sessions but not to regular meetings or social gatherings. You may hear a lecture with us, the category communicated, but you may not sit down to a meal with us or make decisions with us. Invitations were mailed to local black doctors; all declined. They wanted full membership or nothing.24 The scientific membership was a branch in a thicket that prevented Atlanta’s black doctors from practicing medicine fully. Without membership in the AMA they could have no hospital privileges. But joining as full members required two endorsement signatures from current members. Finding two white doctors willing to sign was a chore. The local medical societies could truthfully claim that no one had submitted a completed form. Similarly, some hospitals required two letters of recommendation with an application for privileges. Emory Hospital, for instance, required doctors to be currently in a practice that already included Emory Hospital doctors—all of whom were white. Some hospitals required donations to a building program. Some required doctors to practice in a certain area—generally not the parts of Atlanta where black doctors were segregated. In one deposition, Bell was asked if he had spoken with Frank Wilson about hospital privileges. He replied that he had, that Wilson was cordial, but that he said, “Well, let’s be frank with one another. I know what you want. You want to have Negro doctors controlling Grady Hospital, and before I’ll see Negro doctors down here, I’ll die and go to hell.” Bell said, “Well, we’ll see,” and left.25 While the suit was being argued, other related actions were taken around the country. The NAACP picketed the national AMA meeting in Atlantic City and the AMA national office in Chicago. President John Kennedy sent a telegram to the American Hospital Association urging it to address discrimination in hospitals. He also directed the Justice Department to associate itself with the NAACP in suits against federally funded hospitals that discriminated. Some AMA chapters began asking the national AMA to revoke the membership of segregated chapters. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare held an all-day conference on the 64
Putting Black and White Blood on the Same Shelf: The Integration of Grady Hospital
elimination of hospital segregation. In early 1963 the local and state AMA chapters were dropped from the lawsuit. They had amended their bylaws to allow membership without regard to race, and they presented to the judge a list of eleven black doctors, including Warner, who had been accepted as full members. In May, Frank Wilson claimed in a deposition that although Grady Hospital was segregated, no one was discriminated against. About the emergency room, for example, he said the “operation of nondiscriminatory but separate emergency treatment facilities for white patients and Negro patients is in the best interest of the patient care program at Grady Memorial Hospital and designed to preserve said patient care program for the benefit of and in the best interest of the physical and mental health and well being of all patients at Grady Memorial Hospital irrespective of race.” The phrase “nondiscriminatory but separate” appeared throughout depositions given on behalf of Grady. Explaining why the emergency room operator would ask for the race of someone needing an ambulance, he said they often called on private ambulance services when theirs were all in use, and those services were segregated, so the Grady operator would need to know the person’s race in case a private service was called upon.26 Wilson did, after all, have the backing of the national publication of the American Hospital Association. In an issue of Hospitals, an administrator from Gary, Indiana, warned about the risks of desegregating hospitals. The professional staffs, he said, would, of course, cause no problems, because they could be depended on to work with skilled people without prejudice. What about Negro trustees? he asked. Since it was uncommon for Negroes to have the status required to be a trustee, there would probably be only one for any given hospital, and it was probable that any discriminatory decisions would be made in informal meetings when the Negro was not present. Prolonged use of this tactic would undermine the board of trustees, and the Negro trustee might become regarded as an Uncle Tom by the Negro community. So desegregating boards would be a problem. And in a hospital room, he warned, an elderly white woman with heart problems lying in an oxygen tent could be roomed with a Negro, and the white woman’s husband might complain, “She doesn’t like Negroes. She does not live with Negroes, and she does not want to start now. Her emotional condition will be aggravated by the presence of Negroes.” What to do? “To legislate that physicians and hospital staffs,” he wrote, “ignore emotions in patients arising from any cause [would be] to amend the historical right of medicine to make the patient’s well-being its most important concern.”27 In late 1963, upset with slow change in Atlanta, a large group of blacks marched to Hurt Park, where Martin Luther King Jr., James Foreman of SNCC, and others called for better job opportunities, improved schools, a public accommodations law, and desegregation of Grady. The march was coordinated by the Summit Leadership Conference, a coalition of civil rights groups. In spring of 1964, the Summit Leadership Conference organized a “Sacrificial Easter,” urging blacks to buy nothing more than food and medicine during Lent, so that white businesses would get the message that change must come soon. In a move that stunned student activists, on a Saturday afternoon one hundred black college faculty picketed Grady, and a group of doctors and dentists led a march through downtown Atlanta. Judge Frank Hooper ruled against the dental associations’ request to dismiss, which they had based on the right of private association. He cited the role given the two associations by the state of Georgia to nominate members of state agencies that regulated dentists. The associations thus were, in his judgment, “under color of law,” meaning that they were using authority given to them by the state and therefore were not private organizations. The result was that only white dentists did the appointing and only white dentists were appointed. The action of excluding Negro dentists from its membership was state-authorized action and was a violation of the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.28 Atlanta’s “white power structure”—the city’s most prominent business and political deci65
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
sion makers—saw where the case was going. According to Atlanta black politician Leroy Johnson, these white leaders let Grady’s administrators know that theirs was a lost battle.29 Atlanta had made significant changes peacefully; the power structure would not let a charity hospital ruin the city’s image. So Grady began to desegregate piecemeal. First the emergency rooms were made nonracial; a black intern was accepted; black chaplains were accepted; black doctors were accepted to the visiting staff to make rounds with residents; technician training facilities were made nonracial; the chapel became open to all persons at all times; the Grady card application office; then the individual clinics: peThey said changing Emory would diatrics, cardiac, dental, surgery, and so on. create a ripple emanating out to “White” and “Colored” signs were removed other Atlanta hospitals. They noted from all doors. Black and white nurses began to wear the same color uniform and same that Emory had no black interns style cap. out of twenty, no black residents Finally, in February 1965 Judge Hooper out of sixty, no black physicians out ruled that Grady must desegregate every asof four hundred. pect of its operation. Only two components remained segregated: patient rooms and nursing school dormitories. Administrators had held until last those places where whites and blacks might lie in beds near one another. Grady proposed that the dorms desegregate the next fall semester, in September, and that all rooms and wards in the hospital be filled without regard to race by December 31. The plaintiffs accepted the dorms proposal and objected to the wards and rooms proposal. It was finally agreed by all to desegregate the wards and rooms by June 1. When May turned to June, Grady Hospital performed as instructed. Black and white patients were moved so that rooms and wards were no longer segregated. A seminar had been held on how to handle white patients who resisted, but there was little resistance. A few whites checked out, and, one nurse recalls, a female white patient undressed, donned a gown, and, when a black doctor entered the room, screamed and ran down the hall.30 Atlanta Inquirer reporters toured Grady as rooms were desegregated. They observed white and black patients exchanging cordial greetings. They called it “the Tuesday that was” and reported that Pinkston announced, “All phases of Grady are nonracial as of today,” but quoted Bell saying, “Since Mr. Pinkston’s concept of brotherhood is the same as that of a dollar, I will withhold further comment until I can take a personal inspection tour.”31 Later in June, the Inquirer, through its sources inside Grady, reported that some white doctors had problems with integration. One white woman raised a fuss when placed with a Negro woman; she was moved to another room. Later, another Negro woman was placed in her room, and she requested to be moved, was not moved, and checked out. Chaplain Gerkin had his residents circulate the hospital to defuse any conflict. “I remember going to the ER,” he said, “and there were ambulance drivers at a gathering place out there when not out on a call, and I went down to see how they were doing.” He remembered that in earlier conversations with them they talked about the “rhesus factor,” that blacks were “the way they were” because they came from rhesus monkeys. “But the amazing thing, since integration had become the company line, was they dealt with patients by saying well, this is the way it is. I don’t think what they thought privately had changed one iota, but they responded to authority.”32 In July, Bell conducted his inspection and commended Grady for its progress but said the Negro cafeteria was all Negro, and the white cafeteria had only a sprinkle of Negroes. He also reported that many wards were still segregated among the nurses, whites on one side and Negroes on the other. He said Negro doctors were not employed to their full capacity, and Negro patients still had a “C,” for “colored,” on their records. He announced that, given the even more segregated condition of Atlanta’s private hospitals, perhaps it was time for federal pressure to be applied. That, later, would be his next battle.33 66
Putting Black and White Blood on the Same Shelf: The Integration of Grady Hospital
In September the nursing school opened for the fall semester, and the school’s administrators had decided that, since they had to assign rooms nonracially, they would do so alphabetically. They announced the policy to the students and said that after six months the students could change roommates if they wanted to. Bernice Dixon, one of those school administrators, tells this story now and adds, with a tinge of sadness and hurt in her voice and on her face, “A few changed, mostly blacks choosing black roommates. . . . The black students were more disturbed and concerned than the white students. They had a tendency to segregate themselves. We continued the separate graduations and yearbooks for two years, for those already there. The black nurses started the Black Grady Nurse Conclave for alumni, which also granted black scholarships. We worked hard to have one alumni association, but they plain segregated themselves again.”34 Before all that happened, in early 1965—a year and a half before Grady was fully integrated, several months before they began the piecemeal desegregation—Superintendent Frank Wilson, the man who had said he would die and go to hell before Grady would be integrated, had a heart attack and died. Gerkin called Pinkston, the interim Grady superintendent who would become superintendent, and said, “We’re going to have a memorial service for Frank, and I’m not going to have a segregated service.” “There was a good long pause,” Gerkin recalled. “Bill is basically a good guy, raised in South Georgia, a good Presbyterian, and value-wise I think his heart was in the right place. Finally, he said, ‘Do what you want to do.’” Gerkin told him he wanted to have two services, one at each shift change. The service would be announced over the hospital-wide intercom, with nothing said about race. “Again there was a long pause, and he said, ‘Let’s do it.’ And that’s what happened. The blacks and whites came together, in the chapel on the white side of the hospital. I insisted on that. That was the first integrated worship service we had. You’d think they’d come only if they have a certain respect for the man. If he’s dead, there’s no penalty in not coming. I never asked them why they came. I thought that was interesting. “I read scripture and prayed. The key phrase in the prayer, a prayer of thanksgiving, was, ‘We thank Thee for all that was good that came from the life of Frank Wilson.’ And the ones that knew where I stood and had their own negative feelings about him knew exactly what I meant. It went right over the heads of the others.”35 Grady Hospital, the local medical society, and the state medical society all desegregated and were released from the lawsuit. Schools, restaurants, and hotels desegregated. Civil rights laws were passed and enforced. The future, it appeared, was clear. The state and local dental societies fought against integration for a while longer, but they eventually opened their membership to all dentists. Despite these rapid changes, Atlanta’s private hospitals still found ways to deny practicing privileges to black doctors. So a group of black doctors decided to go to Washington, see the folks at HEW and in the Congress, and let them know they were spending federal tax dollars on segregated institutions. The doctors put together the Committee on Implementation, which would encourage the implementation of what civil rights laws said should already be happening in private hospitals. The committee comprised Bell and physicians Otis Smith, Albert M. Davis, and J. B. Ellison. Their coordinator was Xernona Clayton, a longtime civil rights activist who worked closely with Coretta Scott King. In Atlanta the committee helped the regional HEW with spot inspections of hospitals and gathered statistics on black health care and on the limitations black doctors faced when trying to treat patients who needed hospitalization. Hundreds of doctors had their referral patterns tracked to monitor compliance with civil rights laws. Peter Page, regional director of HEW in Atlanta, said, “The in-hospital checks were the only way we could catch the miscreants. Geor67
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
gia Baptist [now called Atlanta Medical Center] was one of our toughest and Emory Hospital was no less so, though more civil than the Baptists were. Georgia Baptist kept saying, ‘It takes time.’” The inspectors would often discover some practice that perpetuated segregation, and the hospital would be told to comply with the law or face loss of federal funds. They found out, for example, of Grady Hospital’s practice, even after officially desegregating, of placing a “C” on the Grady cards of its black patients and a “W” on cards of its white patients.36 The Committee on Implementation also organized a meeting of doctors from around the Southeast. When Bell spoke he said, “Keep the Negro doctor out and you keep the Negro patient out.” He explained that the most common method hospitals used to minimize the presence of blacks was tokenism. After one or two black doctors were accepted, no more would qualify; applications would be misplaced. The doctors heatedly attacked Emory University Hospital, which had received nine applications from black doctors and rejected them all, while Emory received almost as much federal money as all other Atlanta hospitals combined. They said changing Emory would create a ripple emanating out to other Atlanta hospitals. They noted that Emory had no black interns out of twenty, no black residents out of sixty, no black physicians out of four hundred. Bell insisted, “Emory is morally wrong, but the federal government is worse because they disburse the funds that help Emory carry on its program.” Speakers accused HEW of bad faith for certifying hospitals that had not actually desegregated. The doctors at the meeting passed a resolution calling on HEW to fire any staff member who approved a hospital that operated by the guidelines on paper but not in practice. The resolution also called for firing hospital authorities whose governing policies demonstrated hostile attitudes toward admission of Negro doctors to the staff. An HEW representative who was present promised a reevaluation of certified hospitals and pointed out that the law required nondiscrimination but did not require integration.37 Once the team of Clayton and the four doctors had gathered sufficient information and organized it into a compelling presentation of statistics, stories, and observation, they traveled to Washington to confront the men who made policy and either enforced it or didn’t. One public health official disregarded their information and said he would have to review his own records, which, unfortunately, were in Baltimore and would not be available until the next day, when, the official regretted to say, the team would be gone. Clayton, who normally remained silent at their meetings, said they would remain an extra day.38 Later, at the Washington Hilton, after a day of meetings, Clayton blurted to the doctors, “We should see the president. We wrote Johnson a letter, and he never responded.” The doctors chuckled, thinking, That Xernona. She picked up the phone and called the White House. “I want to speak with the president,” she said into the phone. Her call was routed to someone, and she explained who they were, why they were there, and why Johnson should talk to them. Somehow, word of the black doctors talking about civil rights was passed around lower-level White House staff, and someone saw it as an opportunity. Wilbur Cohen, undersecretary of HEW, met with them to assure them the president would personally make sure no hospital receiving federal money would remain segregated. Johnson himself spoke to them for a few moments and said he shared their concerns and would do whatever he could. Most of the group were satisfied with the meeting, but not Bell. He would have a press conference. Before they left, he went to the White House press room, announced their presence, and said they would take questions after their meeting with the president. Stunned at Bell’s audacity, Clayton and the doctors joined him on the podium. The impromptu press conference received national coverage. They told the scribbling reporters that the federal government allowed eighteen Atlanta hospitals to receive federal money without full compliance with the Civil Rights Act. They reported that hospitals continued to keep black doctors out even though most had been ruled in compliance with federal guidelines. They named Emory University as 68
Putting Black and White Blood on the Same Shelf: The Integration of Grady Hospital
a key institution as it worked with five hospitals and had powerful Washington connections. The doctors requested HEW to withhold funds from Atlanta hospitals pending full compliance, that Negroes be included on compliance review boards, and that HEW visit Atlanta hospitals on a tour hosted by the Negro doctors. Smith said unless something were done soon, there would be demonstrations and sit-ins throughout Atlanta.39 When all hospitals had finally desegregated—and segregation was reduced to the sneaky, unspoken manipulations that would plague many institutions and that would perpetuate the privileges ingrained by decades of Jim Crow laws and distorted perceptions of white superiority—the victory was the result of both the local acts of detection and enforcement, and of a much larger act, a new federal program that would change hospitals everywhere: Medicare. Before Medicare was enacted, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights had recommended to Kennedy that he use federal funds to influence hospitals, deny funds to those that discriminated, and predicate acceptance into Medicare on operating without racial discrimination. That recommendation became policy, and in early 1966, before Medicare began that summer, letters and policy statements were mailed from HEW to all hospitals explaining that compliance with the Civil Rights Act was mandatory for acceptance. Hospital administrators counted their elderly patients and concluded big money was at stake. Huge money. Enormous money. That was when they became interested in making sure their 441 forms were filled out and signed. Suddenly, black doctors began receiving polite letters from Atlanta’s private hospitals. One letter was mailed to the black doctors’ association requesting another copy of the association membership list. The letter said the hospital expected to comply with HEW regulations and added it had never excluded any physician from the hospital since its opening in 1954. The administrator said, as a matter of fact, he had served as free consultant for one of Atlanta’s black colleges. He concluded, “We would love to have any member of your association come by and visit our hospital any time.”40 By the end of 1966 there were almost no complaints of discrimination to HEW about Atlanta hospitals, and by the middle of 1967 the issue was resolved. Dr. Smith recalls that as he first walked into one private hospital, low-level black workers pulled him aside and said, “We’re glad you’re here.” The doctors could focus their attention on treating their patients.
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CHAPTER 6
LULLWATER AND THE GREENING OF EMORY Catalyst for a New Environmental Commitment — N AN C Y SEI DEMA N —
Beginning with lush descriptions of the charm and tranquility of Lullwater, “one of the few remaining natural areas on campus,” Nancy Seideman quickly plunges into a broader discussion of the University’s reassessment of its environmental stewardship. Reaching back to 1925, when Walter T. Candler (College 1907) bought the land that would become Lullwater, Seideman traces the history of the natural Emory landscape and the work to foster a sense of responsible stewardship. In her telling of this history for the first time, she focuses on a proposed road as the catalyst for a struggle to define environmental principles for Emory. 71
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L
ULLWATER. THE NAME evokes a sense of peaceful, hazy drift. And that is indeed how you feel, passing through the stone-pillared gateway on noisy Clifton Road into the forested preserve and walking down the gently sloping roadway to the meadow, with the lake just visible on the horizon. The clatter of a kingfisher swooping over the water and cries of red-shouldered hawks gliding above slowly begin to muffle the traffic sounds left at the gate. The seasons bring change: In summer, emerald and ruby-colored hummingbirds flit among the marsh’s jewel-plants. As autumn leaves swirl down, sandhill cranes pass overhead on their way farther south. Gold-leaved beech trees blaze in winter, and the bright sun lures turtles to their favorite rocks even on the most frigid days. The soft spring air conveys the promise of renewal. Tree buds swell, the lavender petals of hepatica lining woodland trails pop open. Dogs strain at their leashes, eager to reach the water. Children struggle out of their strollers to throw loaves of bread at happy geese. The comfort in being in aptly named Lullwater comes partly from the sense that the preserve is a constant, both for the humans who seek its restorative embrace and for its native inhabitants, which depend on the place for survival. Walking along its paths today, it’s difficult to believe that in 1999 Lullwater represented a flash point for the Emory community, as a proposed road along its periphery threatened one of the few remaining natural areas on campus. The resulting controversy was a painful chapter in Emory’s history, but the resolution led to a discovery and reexamination of the University’s environmental legacy, and a renewed commitment to stewardship of Emory’s environmental resources. The story of Lullwater is the story of how a community divided over issues of growth and preservation ultimately found common ground.
Mud and Marble | Preserving natural areas was not an issue in the second decade of the twentieth century, as Emory relocated from rural Oxford to an “urban” setting six miles northeast of downtown Atlanta, in an area of abundant pines and pastures known as Druid Hills. There was way too much nature. As Thomas H. English noted in his 1966 semicentennial history of the University: The primitive conditions encountered on the new campus have long been the subject of amused and rueful reminiscence. Excavation and grading had exposed great areas of red clay, with consequent clouds of dust in dry weather and morasses of mud in wet weather. There were no paved roads until the mid-twenties. . . . Any extended rainy spell closed the area to auto traffic and reduced the community to slogging through the mud for all occasions.1
Community amenities were few, and “For several years it was extremely difficult for the newcomers to realize the conveniences of urban life.”2 Located about a half-mile from the new campus Quadrangle was the tract of land later known as Lullwater. Appropriated from the Creek Indians in 1821 the Piedmont forest in this part of Georgia had been divided into lots, and the land passed through the hands of various settlers and plantation owners throughout the 1800s and early 1900s. In 1925 Walter T. Candler (College 1907), a son of Asa Candler, bought 250 acres of the densely wooded land and named it Lullwater Farms. As Walter Candler went about breeding horses and overseeing a farm of cattle, hogs, and chickens, the nearby University continued to raise marble buildings from the mud fields. Lullwater would remain Candler’s property until 1958, when the University bought it for “breathing room” and to provide a home for Emory’s presidents. Taming the natural environment in the 1920s was not always successful. In 1925, as part of a fund-raising campaign—“Ten Million in Ten Years”—the entire Emory community devoted a day to a student-led project to dredge a proposed Emory Lake in the ground along Peavine Creek, approximately where the Peavine parking deck now stands. Unfortunately the county 72
Lullwater and the Greening of Emory: Catalyst for a New Environmental Commitment
commissioners had not cleared the creek of sewage, as promised, and when it became apparent that the new lake would eventually become a huge cesspool, the project was abandoned. Anyway, why the need for man-made nature, when the new community was surrounded by natural riches, lush ravines filled with mosses and ferns, dense groves of old-growth hardwoods—oaks, tulip poplars, hickories—hillsides covered with native azaleas of every hue, the occasional copperhead snake crawling out of the ravines to race across the Quad? Photographs of outside activities throughout the 1920s and 1930s depict an ever-present ring of trees in the background—slender, towering pines standing in the midst of crowds and seemingly attentive to the ceremonies unfolding before them. The mud and muck were what prompted Woolford B. Baker, who had come to Emory in 1919 as a graduate student, to stay on as a biology professor. He reveled in every ravine, creek, and spring in which he found “every single thing nearly . . . that would attract a biologist. . . . There were small puddles around, and some of the lower sections of the campus now occupied by the athletic fields were always damp and muddy, so that the whole campus was attractive,” he said.3 Although Baker would have a long and distinguished career as a biology professor, then as first director of the Emory Museum, his greatest legacy is a living one that endures in the native hardwoods that grace the Quadrangle, the flowering shrubs that frame the buildings, and the wildflowers that grow in the few remaining ravines. As Baker noted in a reminiscence captured in an oral history in 1980, It did not take me long as a biologist to begin to complain to the President (Harvey Cox) regarding the failure to preserve some of the beautiful things we had. It was not unusual to find somebody, for example, putting in a new telephone line or new light wire or something, to go through the woods and dig a hole and put down a post and there it was, destroying, of course, any of the shrubbery in its path.
Cox, worn down by Baker’s constant complaining, finally told him, “From now on, not a thing will be planted on this campus nor anything taken off the campus, not a tree will be cut nor a path laid out unless you o.k. it.” Thus, with the grand sum of $250 a year, Baker became Emory’s first official landscaper in the early 1920s. Given the abundance of natural areas, Baker focused on planting around the new buildings (noting the difficulty of selecting the right shrubbery for “these flat buildings with the red top roofs and pink marble”), enriching the soil, and landscaping common areas— adding trees, rhododendrons, and hollies at a ferocious clip, trying to keep pace with the loss of greenery to construction. But as fierce a protector of the natural areas as he was, Baker could not stand in the way of “progress.” He recounted what was gained but also what was lost over the years: Of course, through the years several of those trees have had to give way to buildings and so on, and we no longer have the beautiful screen of pine trees that was so attractive. . . . When we had to widen Clifton Road, we lost one of the most beautiful of the English hollies, one with variegated leaves. . . . The little low place down at the entrance to the campus across from the Village was just a little marshy place and the water ran down pretty freely, so I planted a good number of the hollies that grow naturally in swampy places in there. Again, progress demanded that we change the drainage system as we built new roads and changed the whole aspect of the campus, and so most of those are gone. . . . So it has been ever since we started in the development of the campus.
Of course. Nothing—literally—had ever stood in the way of Emory’s relentless growth and expansion in its seven decades in Atlanta. 73
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
John Gladden (Graduate School 1979), Baker’s grandson, recalls, “My grandfather’s opinion carried a lot of weight, but he really was out there alone. There weren’t a whole lot of faculty pushing preservation of the natural environment back then.” Gladden himself was a biology student who did research in Lullwater and even served as a student representative on the Campus Development Committee. “I didn’t win many environmental campaigns,” laughs Gladden, recalling one failed initiative to halt the construction of a parking lot because of erosion concerns.4 In 1980, at the age of eighty-eight, Baker was a special guest at a meeting of the Emory University Senate Campus Development Committee, during which he reflected on his sixty years of watching the University grow and offered several recommendations, including a proposal to develop the grounds of Lullwater as a kind of environmental showplace of both native and nonnative species. Doubtful that the University would be able to preserve much of the natural habitat still left on the campus, Baker made a plea that his beloved ravine south of what is now Carlos Hall be preserved as an “example of what the campus used to be.” The ravine represented for him “the culmination of the growth of materials, undercover plants, as well as tall plants. You can’t build a beech forest like that in under a hundred years.” Although most of Emory’s ravines by now either have been built over or are essentially ecologically dead, the part of the ravine behind Carlos Hall was renamed the Woolford B. Baker Woodlands in the 1980s and has been the site for many community ivy pulls designed to protect the remaining native species.
“Regrettable Loss of Several Large Trees” | What is striking is that in decades of considering environmental issues, the Campus Development Committee apparently had never invited Baker, with his vast expertise, to join its deliberations. From its inception in the 1940s, the committee was charged with overseeing basically anything happening out of doors. The committee, comprising at any one time some twenty faculty members, administrators, and students, oversaw environmental aspects of development, but mostly what could be considered “beautification”—many ambitious and important planting projects, lawn and flower bed maintenance, and overall landscaping aesthetics. Not big fans of outdoor art, the committee customarily cited potential safety hazards as the reason for tucking such objects in corners “framed” by shrubs or obscured by a ravine. Fortunately for future generations the committee’s abundant caution and use of “safety” as a reason for certain recommendations were not always observed—as when a committee member in the early 1960s suggested that certain big trees be removed because they represented a risk from lightning strikes. The relentless growth of the University and its medical complex—the addition of new buildings and constant renovations to old, along with the corresponding need for more and more parking—dominated the committee’s attention. As early as 1962, it was estimated that twenty to fifty cars were turned away daily from campus owing to lack of parking.5 About the same time, in an attempt to give some definition to a campus that had grown rather haphazardly over the years, the University’s trustees drew a perimeter around 620 acres—a northern boundary at Peachtree Creek, with western, southern, and eastern boundaries roughly following Peavine Creek, Oxford Road, North Decatur Road, Clifton Road, and the Seaboard Railroad tracks east to Clairmont Road. Within these boundaries, building and renovations continued unabated for the next four decades. From the early 1960s through the late 1970s alone, Cox Hall, the first nursing school building, Woodruff Library, the first sorority lodges, Yerkes Primate Research Center, Gambrell Hall, the Woodruff Health Sciences Administration Building, White Hall, and the Atwood Chemistry Center all were built. Where formerly the Campus Development Committee had been asked to review single building projects, it now gave its attention to multidimensional complexes that required this volunteer group of employees and faculty (with varying levels of 74
Lullwater and the Greening of Emory: Catalyst for a New Environmental Commitment
development expertise) to assess building design and location, zoning requirements, traffic and parking management, and environmental impact—which at that point still focused heavily on how many trees needed to be cut down. Although tree planting continued on campus, increasingly the committee’s meeting minutes noted the “regrettable loss of several large trees.” The committee clearly felt that something irreplaceable was slipping away from the Emory community, and comments were made about the need to protect the natural beauty of the campus. But in the absence of long-range planning and established environmental principles, decisions with enormous impact on the University’s few remaining natural areas were As early as 1962, it was estimated made on the basis of expediency, or even the request of one individual. that twenty to fifty cars were For example, in 1966 law dean Ben F. turned away daily from campus Johnson Jr. (Law 1939) determined that the owing to lack of parking. new law school building should not be built in the ravine between its former home (now Carlos Hall) and Glenn Memorial, because he “hoped, along with others, that the ravine could be kept in its natural state, from an aesthetic point of view.” Although threatened many years later by expansion of the Carlos Museum, and adversely affected by decades of adjoining construction, that site remains today one of the few wholly natural areas on campus, the Woolford B. Baker Woodlands. The nation’s first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, had a major impact on how the Campus Development Committee viewed its charge. Parking still consumed much of the committee’s time, but now the parade of campus planning and traffic consultants who came before the committee were questioned about air quality, storm-water runoff, and the impact of projected growth on the natural environment and Emory’s character. The committee supported students as they launched recycling and stream cleanup projects. Ecological considerations had emerged as part of the environmental equation. Helped by the addition of biologists and ecologists to its roster—faculty members Robert B. Platt, Larry Ragsdale, and Donald Shure—the committee explored and recommended a number of initiatives throughout the 1970s (including solar panels on the new Rich Building, an idea rejected because of cost), offered eight pages of energy conservation measures for campus buildings, advocated for a pedestrian campus with traffic and parking pushed to the periphery, lobbied heavily for rapid transit to Emory, and suggested carpools and satellite parking lots with a shuttle service to campus. The committee still had to deal with endless laundry lists of new building projects, but it also pressed the University to develop and implement a long-term strategy to address the use of Emory’s natural resources. Acknowledging the need to integrate the ecological perspective into campus planning, Orie Myers, who as vice president for business and director of the Woodruff Medical Center served as the longtime chair of the Campus Development Committee, asked Platt in 1970 to assess the quality of Emory’s natural environment, and to review how these resources were being addressed in the University’s recently completed campus master plan. Platt and eight graduate and undergraduate students in advanced ecology conducted a ten-week study of Emory’s soils, vegetation, water, and air and produced an extraordinary report. It was laden with practical solutions to problems, as well as a prescient assessment of the likely state of the campus’s natural assets twenty years into the future. The report also offered an eloquent reminder: “Our natural environment is a priceless heritage received from past generations, . . . [and] we have the direct responsibility of maintenance and preservation for those generations which follow.” Platt concluded that Emory’s stewardship of natural resources was insufficient to prevent further deterioration, much less restore an earlier, higher quality. Taking a swipe at the 1970 Comprehensive Campus Master Plan, which “frequently referred to” the quality of Emory’s natural environment but gave it “a decidedly subordinate position,” Platt recommended that 75
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
Emory undertake “an intensive study” of its natural resources. “Even though natural areas and green open spaces are shown throughout [the plan], the meticulous planning and importance given to other aspects, such as landscaping, art, and campus graphics, have not extended to the natural resources of the campus,” he wrote. Noting that Emory’s environmental problems were the result of a half-century’s assumption that natural resources were “expendable” and “inexhaustible,” Platt blasted the master plan for perpetuating that assumption. In reality, he wrote, the campus’s “natural setting is not as beautiful as most people want to believe. Its streams and lakes are for the most part ugly and polluted . . . , its two central ravines . . . largely filled and covered, its original tree canopy . . . drastically altered, its irreplaceable trees of venerable age and great beauty . . . disappearing at an alarming rate.” He added that the “highly urbanized” campus was, even then, “one of the major traffic generators in metropolitan Atlanta.” The recently completed Woodruff Library (1969) exemplified the long-term impact of construction. In planning to build the structure in a natural woodland ravine, the University had stipulated that contractors implement ways to minimize the impact on vegetation. Despite these efforts, about half of the sixty-five trees left standing around the project site were dead or dying less than a year later. Of particular concern were the twenty-nine remaining majestic white oaks, of which Platt predicted Emory would lose three-quarters. Where the master plan envisioned a campus covered with hundred-year-old oaks, Platt wondered how many years it would be until actually no trees were left. The report’s assessment of the University’s waterways, soils, and air quality was equally blunt and sobering, but Platt and his students offered comprehensive recommendations under every category—including confirmation of action already recommended by the Campus Development Committee, relatively easy steps that could be incorporated in construction projects, and new guidelines for the use of the University’s natural areas, including Lullwater. Platt himself drafted a “Comprehensive Master Plan for a Quality Natural Environment” that called for “reordering of priorities and value judgments,” and outlined simple steps for enhancing the environment, including development of a long-range maintenance program for natural resources, application of environmental objectives and criteria to new construction, and “appropriate involvement of students, faculty, employees, visitors and other members of the community.” Platt’s message was simple: if we say we treasure something, we—the entire community—need to take care of it. Perhaps most important, Platt’s study drew a strong connection between a healthy natural environment—clean air and water, trees that provide canopy and a pollution filter, forests that offer a peaceful respite from work and study—and the health and well-being of humans. He could not help pointing out the irony of placing parking decks next to health-care facilities. Although the Campus Development Committee endorsed the Platt study, it is not clear that action was taken on most of the recommendations. Still, two years after the study, President Sanford Atwood asked the committee—at the request of the board of trustees—to appoint a subcommittee to give “further counsel and advice designed to assure proper environmental consideration in plans for future physical developments on campus.” Atwood suggested that the subcommittee base its deliberations “upon a mass of background data,” including the Comprehensive Campus Master Plan and the Platt report. The subcommittee produced a one-page document with two recommendations: that the University implement a new traffic plan, and that a land-use zoning plan be adopted for the campus to “ensure that most of the areas of natural beauty that we have will not be violated.” The subcommittee developed a map to help guide future development, dividing the entire campus into areas fitting one of three categories: preserved, limited use, or high density. But in 1975, over the Campus Development Committee’s strenuous objections, Emory sold several acres of preserve-designated Lullwater property to the Veterans Administration Hospital, for 76
Lullwater and the Greening of Emory: Catalyst for a New Environmental Commitment
a surface parking lot. The hospital eventually built a multilevel deck on the land, within feet of South Peachtree Creek. Discussion about environmental issues continued, but the momentum brought about by Earth Day and the Platt study seemed to be spent, as the University moved into the 1980s, straining at its boundaries, with many ambitious plans on the drawing board.
Lullwater | When Emory bought the 185 acres of Walter Candler’s Lullwater estate in 1958, people noted that the University had avoided “land strangulation,” and speculated that Emory would soon expand into the new “breathing room.” Although various campus plans over the next decades mentioned the possibility of building along Lullwater’s borders—and DeKalb County road proposals presented occasional threats—the property remained undisturbed by construction within its boundaries. Lullwater House, the Elizabethan-style mansion on a hill above the creek at the back of the estate, became the University president’s official residence, beginning with the Atwood family in 1963. Despite the need to preserve the privacy of the home itself, the University generously opened the grounds to a delighted Emory community and to the public. Pretty much from dawn to dusk, the expansive grounds below and around the hill were busy with people enjoying a break from work, athletes jogging along the dirt trails, and patients and visitors from the nearby health-care facilities seeking solace amid rolling hillsides, forests, and lake. On weekends Lullwater was filled with picnickers, dog walkers, and Frisbee enthusiasts. In less-trafficked areas, faculty and students used the land and waterways as a living laboratory, studying the rich ecosystem, the wildlife inhabitants, and the diverse vegetation, so much of it unique to the region. After barely a decade of opening Lullwater’s gates to all, the Emory community began to express concern about the deterioration of the property unless protective measures were taken. In the 1970s the Lullwater Study Committee—a subcommittee of the Campus Development Committee prompted by the Emory Student Government Association, among other community members—issued specific recommendations to protect the land, including a prohibition against vehicular traffic and discouragement of adjacent property owners from polluting streams that flowed into Candler Lake. By this time the tremendous development along Clifton and Clairmont roads, with accompanying increases in population, traffic, air pollution, and storm-water runoff, was placing greater stress on Lullwater’s ecological health. In 1986 Candler Lake was dredged, and the silt was dumped behind an artificial dam on the hill south of the lake. Unfortunately the dam breached, sending tons of the silt flowing back down the hill, through the woods, and into the lake and the biology research pond. In the mid1990s, in a well-publicized cleanup of hazardous materials, the University retrieved toxic chemicals that had been buried in Lullwater twenty years before by the Chemistry Department. The dredging of the lake—and the sale of five acres of the northeast corner of Lullwater forest to the Southern Association of College and Schools for its new headquarters—led biology professors William Murdy and Eloise Carter to study the dimensions and quality of the “Emory Forest.” An additional outcome of these incidents was the formation of the University Senate Committee on the Environment (COE), which for the first time separated environmental campus issues from the purview of the Campus Development Committee. The Murdy-Carter report, titled “A Report on the Status of Forested Land of Emory University,” is a concise, beautifully written narrative that provided an inventory of Emory’s “unique, near-pristine hardwood forests with rare and diverse species.” Teachers to the core, Murdy and Carter extolled the exceptional learning opportunities the forestland offers to students, noting that “understanding natural systems is essential to the liberal education of those citizens who will make critical societal decisions in the future.”6 The objective of their report, wrote Murdy and Carter, was to provide information for University administrators who would be called upon to make decisions as stewards of Emory’s 77
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
natural resources. Suggesting a land-use policy, Murdy and Carter proposed that those parts of Emory’s hardwood forest that were nearly pristine “should be preserved undisturbed, because they represent a unique and valuable natural resource of scientific, educational and aesthetic value.” They also recommended careful environmental assessment of other, mature hardwood forested areas before development. “Mature forests like those at Emory are selfperpetuating, complex associations of living species, the products of millions of years of evolution, and are virtually impossible to replace or re-create if lost.” The COE used the Murdy-Carter report as the basis for its position statement on forest use in 1992, and continued to develop policies and procedures designed to integrate environmental concerns into early stages of campus planning.7 With construction of research and teaching space steaming ahead, the University was needing to plan carefully how to build on
The biology research pond in Lullwater, circa 1970.
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Lullwater and the Greening of Emory: Catalyst for a New Environmental Commitment
its remaining land, and it was clear to those who cared for and understood the value of natural ecosystems that any land that could be imagined as a site for buildings was in jeopardy of being cleared—even Lullwater. Despite successful environmental partnerships and progress in many areas of the University’s operation, debate over land use intensified. In August 1994, when Emory’s new president, William Chace, stepped into his office for the first time, one of the issues waiting on his desk was an environmental matter. The University had been planning to build a wellness center in the Harwood-Yerkes forest, along Gatewood Road between Harwood Condominiums and the Yerkes Primate Research Center. But the Murdy-Carter report had recommended that this area be preserved as a protected area. After opposition from COE and other groups, Chace instructed the administration to choose another site for the wellness center. The next year, a proposed shuttle road through Lullwater, linking the VA Hospital on Clairmont Road with Clifton Road, was rejected by the COE, along with a plan to locate the new Hope Lodge—a facility for long-term cancer recovery—within Lullwater’s forest. The COE decision was appealed to the full University Senate, which unanimously supported the committee. In addition to the hazards to the environment posed by Hope Lodge and the shuttle road, one other issue had caused alarm among campus environmentalists. Neither the proposed road nor the Hope Lodge site had involved any consultation. An announcement about the road had been made to the community before the COE had been consulted, and the Hope Lodge site had been presented to the committee as a done deal. After nearly three decades of reports, policies, and procedures produced by Emory-based, national authorities—all of which were endorsed by University presidents, governing committees, and top administrators—this disconnect between stated commitment and actual outcome was discouraging and puzzling for campus environmentalists—indeed for anyone who understood that quality of life was directly connected to the overall health of the environment. Now, prompted by concerns about the need for additional construction and a movement to avoid some of the architectural mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s, Emory was about to embark on another comprehensive campus master-planning process. With a renewed focus on environmental concerns, the plan would spark another shuttle road controversy, which itself would represent a turning point in the University’s history and a challenge to the community to provide environmental stewardship in both word and action.
The Road through Lullwater | The first sign of controversy was the chalked message that began to appear on sidewalks throughout campus and along Clifton Road in early 1999: “Stop Construction Thru Lullwater.” Students from the Emory chapter of the Student Environmental Action Coalition had organized a vigorous protest against a proposed road along the edge of Lullwater. The quarter-mile road was intended as a conduit for shuttle buses from a new parking deck on the Clairmont campus to the core campus; it would skirt the southern edge of Lullwater, following the CSX rail line from the old University Apartments to a new bridge across the tracks behind Druid Hills High School. Highly visible protests to proposed construction rarely occurred in Emory’s history, but this time was different. Lullwater was at risk. The perceived threat to Lullwater’s future galvanized the community in a way that the Committee on the Environment—and the Campus Development Committee before it—had not been able to do. Whether students, alumni, faculty, or staff—all cherished the many gifts that Lullwater provided. They realized that the community was on the verge of losing not only something tangible in the sense of forest and waterways, wildlife and rare vegetation, but also a vital part of Emory’s identity—perhaps even its heart. Once it was gone, it would be gone forever. “We are all caretakers of campus resources and what we do will set a precedent,” said COE chair and geology professor William Size, whose committee members had decided to take a public stand. 79
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
But the debate was not easily divided into us vs. them. The proposed road was part of a new campus master plan rolled out to the community in a series of town hall meetings the year before. The process had involved discussions with more than three thousand students, faculty, staff, and neighbors. The building program was ambitious, calling for a new cancer center, a performing arts center, a new building for the nursing school, a 350,000-square-foot biomedical research building, and new classrooms and laboratories for physical sciences. The Clairmont campus itself would undergo a tremendous transformation, with the demolition of the decades-old University Apartments and construction of new student apartments, an athletics and activities center, tennis courts and an Olympic-size swimming pool, a new day-care center, and a parking deck for eighteen hundred cars. The parking deck heightened controversy over the shuttle road, because the deck would be sited in a wooded area and over a stream. But this 1998 campus plan also had an environmental focus. It not only aimed to create a pedestrian campus connecting new open spaces with green walkways, but also eliminated vehicular traffic and street parking at the core of the campus, pushing parking to the periphery. A key element in traffic control would be the new Clairmont deck, which would allow students and employees to park more than a mile away and be transported by alternatively fueled vehicles along the new road, which would be open only to shuttles, pedestrians, and bicyclists. An unprecedented community dialogue on the importance of Emory’s natural areas started. President Chace engaged with faculty, staff, and students in a public forum. The Emory Wheel, Emory Report, and local newspapers covered the debate in news articles and editorials. More than a thousand students, faculty, and staff signed petitions opposing the shuttle road. Those in favor of the road countered by noting that it would significantly cut down traffic on North Decatur Road and reduce both commuting time and pollution. After what Chace termed a thorough and “healthy debate,” the University Cabinet decided to recommend to the board of trustees construction of the shuttle road. Summing up the decision, Chace wrote a letter to the community: Lullwater, of course, is our most precious green space. For this reason, as president, I must find a balance between conserving a hallowed area while at the same time doing something that will benefit the community as a whole. . . . Let us remember that Lullwater is not protected by a [dome]—it is being polluted by car exhaust every single day. We must get cars stopped and off the roads. . . . I am also convinced that Lullwater needs to be protected. I have heard your concerns loud and clear: One of them is this: Will the shuttle road just be the beginning of our encroachment on Lullwater?
The shuttle road was opposed by the COE, but supported by other University Senate committees, and ultimately by a slim majority of the full Senate. But no one involved in the issue— environmentalists or the campus planners tasked with building the road—felt any sense of victory. The head of campus planning and construction, Vice President Bob Hascall, had recently arrived from a California institution that had invested in electric vehicles. He did not find Emory at all unified in its approach to environmental concerns. “We came away from the shuttle road experience with the feeling that this just wasn’t the way to get things done.” COE members, of course, had felt that way for a long time. John Wegner, lecturer in human and natural ecology, who also had recently joined the University, had been a leader in opposing the road. But now that the project was moving forward, he was determined that environmental standards be maintained every step of the way. The road and bridge design was modified by the COE to help avoid old-growth forest to a greater degree than originally planned, and to mitigate damage caused by the road, since it was known that such an abrupt fragmentation of the natural ecosystem would have a harmful impact on the forests’ inhabitants for some distance from the edge of the disturbance. 80
Lullwater and the Greening of Emory: Catalyst for a New Environmental Commitment
“Environmental principles moved up quite a few notches after the shuttle road,” said Size. Where developers used to “listen politely to what sounded like nice, cozy sentiments, then went ahead and did their own thing, after the road, they acknowledged the value of our contributions, and the importance of healthy ecological systems.” Under Wegner’s leadership, the COE and campus planners collaborated to the point of serving on each other’s committees, so that planning could be approached holistically rather than project by project. Ideas converged, collaborations formed. At the urging of anthropology professor Peggy Barlett, Hascall and University architect Jen Fabrick attended a Second Nature conference in 2000 that persuaded them to pursue a green building program. In partnership with COE, Hascall won trustee support for seeking Leadership in EnThe perceived threat to Lullwater’s ergy and Environmental Design (LEED) cerfuture galvanized the community in tification for all future buildings. Emory a way that the Committee on the received silver LEED certification for the first building in the Southeast so designated—the Environment—and the Campus Whitehead Research Building. Development Committee before it— In 2001 the University Senate adopted a had not been able to do. mission statement affirming the University’s commitment to the environment and appointed a University task force to implement that vision, which led to Wegner’s appointment as Emory’s first chief environmental officer.8 The construction of the shuttle road—now called Starvine Way, for a rare plant that grows in Lullwater—and the campus conversation about Lullwater’s future was the beginning of a recommitment to environmental stewardship and led directly to inclusion of ecological principles in Emory’s current vision statement and strategic priorities. Environmental stewardship takes many forms—recycling, energy conservation, food gardening, alternative transportation. Emory has made a substantial commitment to all of these. Perhaps the most important manifestation of this commitment, from the perspective of the generations who have cared for and studied and enjoyed the University’s forests, has been the commitment that grew out of the Lullwater shuttle road controversy. In supporting the road, President Chace had voiced the community’s biggest fear—was this step just the beginning of a nibbling at Emory’s forests until none were left? Chace himself responded to this question by appointing a Lullwater Management Task Force, charged with developing a comprehensive management plan for Lullwater, now referred to as a preserve. A policy of no net tree loss was developed and implemented. With the recommendation of President James Wagner and Executive Vice President Michael Mandl, the board of trustees in November 2005 approved a land-use classification plan designating all University property as either preserved, conserved, restricted, managed, or open to development. More than 50 percent of the University’s land now was designated as protected.
The Legacy | It is difficult to review Emory’s history without feeling a sense of loss, not only for its natural resources, but also for missed opportunities in making the best use of the University’s human resources. An enduring environmental ethic has been passed on through Emory’s generations, from Woolford Baker and Robert Platt to Larry Ragsdale and Don Shure, and on to Bill Murdy, Eloise Carter, and John Wegner. This legacy is the conviction that forests give us life, and that we owe them something in return. The collective voice of these environmental stewards now, finally, resonates throughout Emory’s vision statements and—perhaps even more important—in development proposals that have a potential impact on the University’s natural resources. Emory has stepped up to its responsibility, says Eloise Carter. “Emory’s practice now matches its environmental values. We have a shared vision for making decisions for the land, the natural environment, for the common good.” 81
CHAPTER 7
SHAPED BY A CRUCIBLE EXPERIENCE The Center for Women at Emory — A L I P. C R O W N a nd J A N G LEA S ON —
Tracing the establishment and growth of the Center for Women at Emory, Ali Crown and Jan Gleason detail the events and campus climate that brought women’s issues to the fore at Emory in the 1970s and the 1980s. Following two serious campus incidents of violence against women, students and others soon called for a women’s center. Crown and Gleason describe the progress—sometimes slow and often frustrating—toward creating a “resource for services and programs to support women throughout the University.” 83
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
A
SERIES OF CONTROVERSIAL events involving race and gender in the late 1980s tested Emory to its core and pushed the University to a new understanding of itself as a diverse community. Having expended considerable effort in opening the path to parity in the numbers of women and minorities, Emory now was forced to find ways for them to be supported, heard, valued, and included as full members of the community. These events served as crucible experiences for Emory and led to the creation of the Center for Women at Emory. By the late 1980s some three and a half decades had passed since women had first been admitted to Emory College as residential students, and the number of women faculty members and students was growing. The Women’s Caucus had formed in the early 1970s, and by 1976 its work led President Sanford S. Atwood to establish formally the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW). By the late 1970s the PCSW’s annual reports were primarily concerned with Emory’s hiring more women as faculty and staff, so that their sheer numbers would increase Emory’s attention to their particular issues. The late 1980s also saw increasing activity among women students. Undergraduates formed a feminist group, CHOICES, in 1986, which raised concerns about sexual harassment and was particularly vocal in 1988 about a lewd and graphic T-shirt for a fraternity fundraiser. A Division of Campus Life task force on sexual assault organized Coalition Against Rape at Emory (CARE) in 1990, a group whose student members were trained by professional staff to educate the campus about sexual assault. By the late 1980s minority students also had been enrolled for a quarter of a century, and their numbers had increased dramatically. Several painful racial incidents had occurred in the 1980s including both students and faculty that, according to historian Stuart Gulley, “called into question the University’s commitment to racial equality.”1 In the same year that students were raising issues about racial intolerance, Dr. Sondra O’Neale, a female African American faculty member, charged that Emory’s denial of her tenure had been based on racism. Rage about discrimination peaked in the spring of 1990 when Sabrina Collins, a freshman, claimed that she was receiving harassing letters and death threats. Although investigation later showed that Collins created the letters and threats herself, concerns about racism at Emory did not diminish. The presence of large numbers of women and minorities on campus meant that they had achieved a parity of sorts within the traditionally white, male university, but questions continued to surface about the support and processes for their full inclusion in the community. By 1989 the PCSW had monitored the progress of women at Emory for more than a decade, and that year the commission published an extensive report that raised concerns about the status of women. These concerns found expression in two major recommendations: first, that Emory hire and promote women staff and faculty with an even more vigorous affirmativeaction program; and, second, that Emory develop a comprehensive leave policy to include paid parental leave for faculty and staff. The report, published in a September 1989 issue of Campus Report, included President James T. Laney’s response: “The report makes a persuasive case that the concerns of the staff of the University are not adequately heard at the highest levels of the various divisions and of the University. It reminds us that women are underrepresented on the faculty.” That same month, the University Priorities Committee, a body of faculty members chaired by Provost Billy E. Frye, laid the foundation for an anticipated fund-raising campaign. The committee noted that a decade of positive development had been under way since the gift of $105 million to Emory by Robert and George Woodruff in 1979: facilities had been expanded; faculty had grown in size and scholarly productivity; sponsored research had increased, and so had student selectivity. The committee’s report observed that “Emory has moved quickly from the status of a fine regional university with notable points of distinction to that of an institution poised on the threshold of achieving national and international distinction across the broad spectrum of its programs.” 84
Shaped by a Crucible Experience: The Center for Women at Emory
Emory’s development of the 1980s had created an ambitious intellectual agenda for the University, but in September 1989 Laney pointed out some of the tensions inherent in this agenda, when he addressed the faculty. “The very growth of the eighties has put strains on our community,” he said. Taking stock of Emory’s progress, Laney asked a pivotal question: “What kind of university do we want to become? . . . How do we keep Emory humane?” In answer, he pointed to the “moral authority” in teaching, an endeavor through which “one invests in another life. . . . We want Emory to be a place of intellectual ferment, . . . where the encounter with ideas challenges our most fundamental presuppositions and makes us question our own biases.”2
The Fire under the Crucible | In a foreshadowing of issues to come, Ali P. Crown— then-chair of the PCSW—wrote on January 23, 1990, to President Laney expressing several concerns: “Among the most pressing concerns we [the PCSW] expressed . . . was our wish to see the University make a strong statement against sexual assault and acquaintance rape. For example, many institutions have a published policy in their handbooks and conduct codes clearly stating their unwillingness to tolerate such offensive behavior.” On February 7, 1990, the front page of the Emory Wheel reported on incidents that would become the spark for the creation of the Women’s Center: “Two rapes reported on campus,” proclaimed the headline; “one student arrested.” According to the Wheel, both of the alleged rapes had occurred on Fraternity Row [now Eagle Row] on the previous Saturday at two different locations. In both cases, Chief of Police Ed Medlin said the victims were “acquainted” with their attackers, but the circumstances were different. The twenty-one-year-old student who was arrested was charged with raping a woman who did not attend Emory. Medlin said it was a “classic case in which the suspect prevented his victim from leaving the room.” The other incident, involving a nineteen-year-old Emory student, was described as “less violent, but nonconsensual.” As a result of legal confidentiality requirements, additional factual details about the assaults were not made public at that time. In an editorial in the same issue, the Wheel wrote, “Time to clean up the row . . . . Rape. DUI. Maybe, just maybe, two public drunkenness arrests could have gone without notice. However the problems of Fraternity Row are no longer as simple as people getting drunk and acting stupid. Students are now getting drunk and acting dangerously.”3 The two rapes set off a tumult of campus activism and activity. President Laney read a statement at a subsequent press briefing announcing that a “special task force” would be appointed “to examine comprehensively the way that the abuse of alcohol and drugs, as well as violent or discriminatory behavior toward individuals and groups, work together to undermine our University community.”4 Later that month, a group of graduate students weighed in on the issue. In a letter to Laney and William H. Fox, dean of Campus Life, they reiterated the need for immediate action by the administration to “improve our common life,” and pressed for the creation of a women’s center. The students underscored the need for “more alternative social spaces to accommodate the diverse needs and interests of our community,” and they envisioned a women’s center “as a locus for information, dialogue, and learning for all members of the Emory community.” Administratively and physically independent of women’s studies, the center would meet “educational, social, political, and cultural needs” not being met through existing structures. By early March, Laney had appointed twenty-five faculty and staff members, students, and alumni to serve on the Task Force on Security and Responsibility, chaired by Barbara A. B. “Bobbi” Patterson (then associate chaplain, later senior lecturer in religion). Charging the group to find ways to “improve security and ensure responsibility in community life by recognizing and honoring diversity,” Laney suggested eight topics for particular focus, including “sensitivity to gender and ethnic diversity.” 85
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
The task force’s report, published in the April 27, 1990, issue of Emory Report, covered a broad range of community life. One of the report’s twenty-four recommendations called for “Creation of a Women’s Resource Center to address women’s concerns through social, educational, and support programs for both men and women.” The administration responded positively to many of the recommendations, including the proposal to create a women’s center. In a May 16, 1990, address to the Board of Visitors, Laney reported, The tumult on campus this spring has suggested that the old coordinates by which we measured our life in this community are no longer adequate. . . . I have to confess that, for a long time, in my own kind of simple-minded way, I thought that numbers were what this sort of place was about. You opened the gates of admission to new students and faculty and staff, you increased the numbers of women, increased the numbers of minorities, recruited more international students—and, lo and behold, it all would come together, and you would have the new university. Not so. . . . The leadership that is perceptive and visionary enough to understand the new world aborning has got to be shaped in the crucible of experiences like those that happened this spring at Emory.
Out of the Crucible | With this new personal and institutional understanding that additional support structures would be needed for the full participation of women and minorities in the Emory community, work began to create the women’s center. In a July 1990 letter, Patterson wrote to Jan Gleason, the new chair of the PCSW, suggesting that the PCSW take responsibility for creating the center and emphasizing that it not “become ‘ghettoized’ into a particular interpretive model of feminism.” Patterson called for input by a group of diverse individuals to “explore and develop goals and objectives for such a center.” Thus began the PCSW’s early role in the creation of the women’s center. Paula Washington, one of the Emory’s first PhD recipients in women’s studies, who graduated in 1995, shared her knowledge of women’s centers and suggested resources regarding women’s centers at the October 4, 1990, PCSW meeting. She urged the commission to review models of women’s centers and think carefully about what Emory needed in a center. As a group of volunteers, however, PCSW members were concerned that they lacked expertise to carry out the responsibility of creating the center. Gleason wrote to Laney later that month to report the commission’s recommendation that the University hire a consultant to assist in the development of the center. She added that the commission was anxious to see an advisory committee appointed by the end of October. As the community became clearer about its vision, it also grew impatient with the slow pace of creating the center. According to the November 20, 1990, Wheel, the undergraduate student group CHOICES presented a petition with 672 signatures to Secretary of the University Thomas Bertrand, demanding that a committee to create the center be named immediately. Later that month, Bertrand received another missive, from the PCSW Faculty Concerns Committee, signed by 31 women and men, also expressing urgency. Having gathered input at a series of open forums, they observed, A women’s center could provide a focal point for addressing ongoing problems, such as violence, in a way that is neither fragmented nor simply reactive. Of equal importance is the center’s ability to enrich the campus’s intellectual and social life. Attentiveness to women’s cultural, aesthetic, intellectual, and social contributions could be greatly expanded by a women’s center. Finally, such a center could provide a context for Emory’s women to find resources they need because of the peculiar problems they face in the academy and in the world as women.
The letter went on to say that the center should include all of the constituencies of women on campus; provide a central meeting place for women with diverse interests; develop programs 86
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in diverse areas, including those focused on health; house a library and resource center; and welcome men. Consensus was clearly developing about a model for a center that would best serve the entire community. The Annual Report of the President published in the January 28, 1991, issue of Campus Report contained a summation of the transformation that Emory had undergone the previous year: All of this discussion [through the previous spring] showed, among other things, that a University must find appropriate ways to air and deal with conflict. We learned not that the fabric of our common life was in danger of being rent by discord or suspicion, but that the warp and woof of our tapestry was strong. . . . Emory can hold safely in its midst the conflicts typical of close-knit communities. What is more, Emory can transcend these conflicts in creative ways. In a society as pluralistic as the America of the late-twentieth century, we can expect more such tests. American universities must explore new avenues for defining and resolving conflict, and Emory means to lead in this endeavor.
As the spring semester unfolded, progress on the center gained speed. In February, Laney appointed an advisory committee, chaired by Ali P. Crown, associate director of executive programs in the Business School. She had come to Emory in 1980 to direct the move of the Law and Economics Center from the University of Miami to Emory, and quickly had become involved in women’s issues. She chaired the PCSW in 1989–90. The advisory committee, charged with studying and formally recommending a model for a women’s center, included undergraduate and graduate students, staff, faculty, and ex officio members representing the President’s Office, the PCSW, the Task Force on Security and Responsibility, and the Division of Campus Life. Maria Luisa “Papusa” Molina, director of the Women’s Resource and Action Center at the University of Iowa, visited campus on February 21 and led a retreat for the PCSW and the advisory committee. She noted that a women’s center, in order to be effective, must be structured and developed to profit from and promote positive relationships with the central administration and other women’s constituencies. Further discussions ensued, often in open forums, sponsored by the advisory committee. Along the way, the advisory committee developed a mission statement for the Emory Women’s Center, whose “purpose . . . is to provide resources and support for women as they empower themselves and each other in the pursuit of their individual and collective goals. The center strives to create an atmosphere in which all persons are free to affirm and celebrate their differences.” The committee envisioned the center as a resource for services and programs to support women throughout the University, as an advocate for “the full participation of women in the community,” as a promoter of freedom and openness, and as “a forum for women’s cultural, spiritual, aesthetic, intellectual and social life.”
The Center Opens | After nearly another year of planning, study, and a national search, the Emory Women’s Center opened in September 1992. President Laney appointed Ali Crown as its first director. The origin of the Emory Women’s Center, traced to the two 1990 campus date rapes, mirrored the origins of many women’s centers. Nationally, their establishment began in the late sixties and early seventies with a growing awareness that the academy had been designed to accommodate men, and that women’s particular needs were largely unmet. Frequently, a rape or a legal action by a woman faculty member was the catalyst for a center’s creation. Centers were often established to raise awareness about the need for equity and safety and to help women see that the power of their numbers could lead to institutional change. By 1990 there were several hundred women’s centers on college campuses in the United States. Today there are more than five hundred, and new ones continue to be established. Their network is strong. 87
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
Because Emory’s center was designed to represent a wide constituency and a variety of issues, the early plan called for the director to report to the President’s Office. But the center’s initial physical location was less than presidential. A September 28, 1992, Wheel headline announced, “Center opens to empower Emory women”; it was accompanied by a photo of a trailer that would become the center’s home, delivered on a flatbed truck and set down behind the Dobbs University Center loading dock, where it remained for the next twelve years. While the trailer was euphemistically referred to as a “modular unit,” the center and its staff were frequently referred to as “two women in a trailer.” Inside the front door of the trailer, however, visitors found themselves transformed by its warm, comfortable ambience. Women’s poster art filled the walls. The trailer housed two offices, a library, a spacious meeting room, “Every good university guarantees a kitchen, and a small “quiet room,” which its members that certain basic, eventually served many purposes, including use as a lactation space. Students and staff enabling conditions of work will be at the center worked with University met and certain fundamental archivists to create a wall of photos that told academic values will be honored.” the story of significant events in the lives of Emory women, predominantly since the College had become coeducational. Though not appealing on the outside, and by no means majestic within, the trailer became a haven for students, faculty, and staff. By the time the center opened, the reporting line was changed to the Provost’s Office. During its first twelve years, its full-time staff included the director and a succession of support persons—almost all of whom were recent Emory College graduates taking a hiatus between college and graduate school. While this was an ideal mentoring model, the practical side of this arrangement, based in slim resources, meant that in the center’s first fourteen years, eleven women filled this support position before the center obtained funding for a second careertrack person, who eventually became an assistant director for programs. This long-awaited growth of the staff occurred simultaneously with the center’s 2004 move to newly renovated space on the third floor of Cox Hall, in the hub of the campus. Before the opening of the center, its advisory committee had developed a five-year plan, and the center’s staff focused energy on following that plan. Along with visits to other women’s centers, Crown drew upon constant community input. This community engagement became a notable feature of the center, as the staff worked hard to develop partners for the center and to establish it as an integral part of the Emory community. As the women’s center developed a full complement of programs, it provided a formal mechanism to support women and to let their voices be heard. Emory was listening to those voices and began creating programs and resources in response. But needs change over time, and the center needed to continue evolving. One early feature, however, remained constant: the center did not duplicate services offered elsewhere on campus. Instead, it worked in partnership with other resources to strengthen everybody. Early programs emphasized safety, for example, and the center worked with the director of sexual assault services, also a fairly new position, and the Coalition Against Rape at Emory (CARE), a student group, to develop strong resources. When it became clear that graduate students, postdocs, and staff had no place but bathroom stalls to pump their breasts for infant feeding, the center adapted its quiet room into a lactation space. When nursing moms entered, they put a sign on the doorknob identifying the room as the “nursing nest.” For many years it was the only dedicated lactation space on campus and was in constant use. In 2005 Crown suggested to Susan Carini, a staff member in the Division of Communications and Marketing who was then chairing the PCSW’s Staff Concerns Committee, that they work together to seek additional lactation spaces. Carini enthusiastically took on the 88
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task. Soon afterward, under the leadership of Lisa Newbern, a committee member from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, the PCSW developed a lactation policy that the University administration endorsed. Today the campus has thirteen nursing rooms, most adapted from existing spaces, and every new building has a private space for this purpose included in its design. Students from Goizueta Business School, setting the stage for a 2000 external review of the school, conducted a class project in 1998 to evaluate the center and its need for resources. Their report, quoting a 1994 Emory planning document, “Choices and Responsibility,” stated, “Every good university guarantees its members that certain basic, enabling conditions of work will be met and certain fundamental academic values will be honored. . . . Emory’s Women’s Center has exemplified this vision by overcoming adversity to outperform other schools. . . . By rewarding hard work and bringing the community closer together, Emory has the power to enhance its future.” When Emory developed a new vision statement in 2004 and a strategic plan in 2005 to execute that vision, the Long-Term Planning Committee of the center’s advisory board developed a new strategic plan for the center in 2006. The goals and initiatives of the center’s strategic plan were focused to state explicitly its contributions to one of Emory’s overarching goals: to create a community-engaging society. The plan was informed by the University’s Vision Statement but reflected the board’s particular passion for women, stating, “During the next decade, the Center for Women at Emory will become a change agent for the University so that women are fully integrated as equal participants in all aspects of University life.” Bridgette Young, senior associate dean of the chapel and religious life, and chair of the advisory board in 2006–07, remarked, “While some refer to the present as ‘postfeminist,’ we still need the CWE for advocacy, community, and celebration.” She continued, “Discrimination may be less blatant and intentional, yet we still must keep our community aware that women’s voices, ideas, and contributions are essential. And while Emory has come a long way in terms of representation of women in higher levels of the institution, there are still opportunities to do even more.” After sixteen years of center leadership, Crown retired in August 2008, and Dona Yarbrough, director of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center at Tufts University, was named the new director. Ambitious plans are in place to ensure that women will be heard, and that a welcoming community that addresses women’s concerns thrives for generations of women who have yet to arrive at Emory.5
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SECTION 2 Building a Community of Scholars
CHAPTER 8
Atlanta skyline over the Administration Building, early 1980s.
CATCHING UP The Advance of Emory since World War II — N AN C Y DIA M OND —
Emory University—which had started strongly in Atlanta in 1915 but soon fell behind its southern counterparts in developing as a research university—took off in the last quarter of the twentieth century and achieved membership in the Association of American Universities before the century expired. Nancy Diamond, a distinguished historian of higher education and research associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Vermont, examines the impediments to Emory’s research enterprise in the first half of the century, the steps that prepared the way for transformation, and the difficult decisions and hard work that led to acceleration into a higher orbit of research.1 93
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
T
HE GROWTH OF the American research university system since the Second World War is a recognized success story, one that includes the advance of a new group of rising institutions.2 In the context of postwar population growth, economic prosperity, and the national expansion of higher education enrollments, many campuses launched ambitious drives to position themselves among the top-ranked research universities. Southern universities, late entrants into the world of graduate education and research, faced unique challenges. This chapter documents the transformation of Emory University and explains the circumstances and decisions that advanced campus research capacity and status in the halfcentury following the war. At the beginning of World War II, Emory was a small Methodist university enrolling mostly southern students. In the early 1940s, when Yale historian Howard Lamar was an Emory undergraduate from Tuskegee, Alabama, his classmates were primarily “boys from cities of Savannah and Atlanta as well as small Georgia towns.”3 John Palms, an Emory graduate student in 1959, and later Emory’s vice president for academic affairs before becoming president of the University of South Carolina, remembers Emory faculty for their dedication to teaching rather than to research.4 During the early 1960s an external consultant compared Emory to “a southern Oberlin or Amherst rather than a southern university.”5 Yet, less than thirty years later, Emory had become one of the nation’s most respected universities, a major producer of research, and a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU). What were the circumstances and strategies that led to Emory’s rapid advance? The most often quoted explanation argues that in 1979, Emory received a monumental bequest of Coca-Cola stock with substantial annual earnings that enabled the campus to attract a new group of renowned faculty and talented students. This story is well known and entrenched in campus history as well as national higher-education lore. In fact, however, although the $105 million Woodruff gift was a major factor in Emory’s progress, the campus transformation is better explained by the dynamic interaction of external trends and circumstances and internal decisions, policies, and strategies. The post-Sputnik national expansion of research and graduate education, the migration of population and industry to Sunbelt regions, and the growth of Atlanta as a metropolitan area were important factors, but campus leadership was crucial to Emory’s advancement.
Emory’s Southern Legacy and the Growth of Atlanta | The historical difficulty experienced by the predominantly rural South in establishing major research universities has been well documented.6 Southern universities developed later than their counterparts around the nation, and comparisons with other regions reflected an insurmountable gap. Prior to 1900 only six of forty-four American doctorate-granting universities were in the South, with fewer than 100 southern doctorates awarded by 1915.7 By 1925, of nearly 17,000 doctorates awarded in the United States, the eleven doctorate-granting southern universities had produced only 225, half of them from the University of Virginia.8 Following the Depression, despite a crucial need for university research to address the region’s rural problems and stimulate industrial development, southern universities were plagued by a brain drain of scientific talent to other regions and remained far behind in research capacity and achievement. Unless this negative trend were reversed, it was argued, the South would be “forever doom[ed] to mediocrity.”9 While southern campuses generally recognized their obligation to provide graduate research and professional training, “Such ambition called for larger resources than an existing institution alone [could] command.”10 To address these circumstances, the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board (GEB) supported development of strategically located schools and colleges and, in 1938, chose Atlanta as one of five southern centers for research and graduate education.11 Identified by President Franklin Roosevelt as “the nation’s number one economic problem,” the South remained in the early 1940s “a rural, agrarian region in the midst of an urban 94
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nation.”12 But World War II brought dramatic changes—the mechanical revolution in southern agriculture, the migration from rural regions to metropolitan areas, and a large infusion of funding as the federal government spent more than one-third of the national military budget on southern facilities.13 Southern universities, where G.I. Bill recipients rapidly expanded enrollments, experienced many of the postwar changes that affected higher education nationally. Like schools in other regions, many southern campuses without appropriate resources instituted doctoral programs, with the result that Recognizing that change was graduate education was spread too thinly inevitable, Tulane, Rice, Emory, 14 across too many institutions. Many feared Duke, and Vanderbilt joined their that southern higher education might be public counterparts from Chapel “fr[ozen] in a pattern of continuing mediocrity or worse for the next several decades.” Hill, Austin, and Charlottesville The region needed “not one great university in 1952 to create the Council of . . . but three or perhaps four.”15 Southern Universities for improvIn the years following Sputnik, the relaing higher education in the South. tive lack of scientific personnel in the South remained “a major stumbling block.”16 As a result, southern campuses could not take full advantage of higher education’s so-called golden age, when federal support of university research increased multifold. During the early 1960s southeastern states, with about 21 percent of the population, employed only 11 percent of the nation’s scientists and engineers, 13 percent of life scientists, 12 percent of earth scientists, and 9 percent of physical scientists.17 Nearly half of the thirty-five doctorate-granting southern universities had awarded their first PhD after 1945. The average salary of full professors at southern universities was almost 20 percent below the national average, an extreme statistic even in light of a lower cost of living, and salaries at private universities were especially low.18 Southern campuses were also far below those in other regions in educational and general expenditures per student.19 Only 15 percent of the free-choice Woodrow Wilson, National Science Foundation (NSF), and National Defense Education Act (NDEA) fellowship recipients chose to attend selected southern schools.20 Not surprisingly, Hayward Keniston’s 1959 study of the nation’s twenty leading graduate schools did not include a single southern institution. Princeton, the smallest campus in Keniston’s study, awarded 227 doctorates a year, nearly three times the number granted by Duke or the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.21 Nor did southern universities figure prominently in the top categories in Bernard Berelson’s influential 1960 study of graduate education.22 This lack of recognition created problems with respect to federal funding as the National Science Foundation’s commitment to a “best science” criterion generally ignored most southern universities.23 In a series of influential reports, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) lobbied for development of research activity at southern universities. “Only where university teaching and research . . . have achieved excellence can there be hope for effective research centers geared to industrial development,” one study argued.24 The SREB called for southern campuses to “cast away forever the traditional double standard according to which Southern institutions are compared only with others in the region,” and argued for judging these campuses according to national standards of excellence.25 Furthermore, the region’s entrenched tradition of segregation “seriously threatened . . . the public school base vital to the development of great southern universities,” and served as an obstacle to attracting superior faculties.26 Legal challenges to the prevailing separate-but-equal doctrine in higher education had been under way since the 1930s, long before the U.S. Supreme Court’s momentous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and by 1951 federal courts had compelled the law schools of state universities in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Virginia to admit black students.27 These decisions, which eventually would lead to the end of Jim Crow arrangements in public institutions, also put private campuses on 95
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
notice.28 Recognizing that change was inevitable, Tulane, Rice, Emory, Duke, and Vanderbilt joined their public counterparts from Chapel Hill, Austin, and Charlottesville in 1952 to create the Council of Southern Universities for improving higher education in the South. These schools discussed future enrollment of Negroes at graduate and professional schools but issued no joint declaration.29 With desegregation under way by the 1960s, southern universities began to profit from federal programs that supported centers of graduate education and better regional balance for the nation’s research economy. In fact, the South was the leading regional beneficiary of the NSF’s University Science Development Fund, which awarded funds to thirteen southern schools.30 In their race to catch up with universities in other regions, southern campuses increased PhD production tenfold and graduated more physicians and lawyers.31 The development of higher education was an important part of the region’s success, but by the 1970s the South also experienced other important economic and social advances. An international energy crisis, increased leisure time, and more adequate retirement income accelerated migration to Sunbelt regions. In the thirty years following World War II, southern states enjoyed a population growth rate that outdistanced that of the rest of the nation, with Georgia one of the fastest growing states. The gap between southern and national incomes also decreased; by 1976, average income in the South was 90 percent of the national income.32 These changes accompanied a shift in southern attitudes and lifestyle toward national rather than regional norms, with the “Americanization of Dixie” most evident in cities like Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Charlotte, and Atlanta. As a federal administrative center, Atlanta received a boost during and after World War II, when federal patronage of the Bell bomber plant, Coca-Cola, and other industries brought significant profits. By 1959 Atlanta’s population had reached 1 million, and by 1970 more than 80 percent of its commercial funding came from outside the South.33 In just a decade, the city changed from “a somewhat sluggish regional distribution center to a . . . truly national [city].”34 To enhance Atlanta’s growth and productivity, political and business leaders recognized that great benefit would derive from developing a major health center and university in their midst.
Origins of Emory University | Emory’s early history, discussed in detail by Henry Morton Bullock, dates from 1834, when the Georgia Methodist Conference established a manual labor school, and from 1836, when the Georgia legislature granted the Emory College charter.35 The establishment of Emory University seventy-five years later is traced to a 1914 lawsuit that severed ties between Vanderbilt University and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.36 When the church sought to establish two new universities, one east and one west of the Mississippi, Southern Methodist University in Dallas was chosen as the western campus. Asa Candler, owner of The Coca-Cola Company and brother of Methodist Bishop Warren Candler, pledged $1 million and a tract of land to bring to Atlanta the type of education that would “be definitely directed to the advancement of sound learning and pure religion.”37 The Methodists accepted Candler’s offer. On August 14, 1914, a site northeast of the city, in Druid Hills, was selected for the campus, and Emory College trustees approved a plan to join the new university. To ensure continued training of candidates for ministry, the Methodists opened the Candler School of Theology in downtown Atlanta. The University’s new charter, granted six months later, on January 25, 1915, explicitly stated that “the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, is and shall be always regarded and held as the founder of the university.”38 Board members had to be confirmed by the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, which also had the power to remove them. In 1915, Asa Candler, who had served since 1906 as chair of the Emory College board, was named chair of the Emory University board, and his brother Warren was named chancel96
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lor, the title that Vanderbilt had given to its chief executive. That year, the Schools of Medicine and Law were established. Four years later, as Emory College relocated to Druid Hills, the Graduate School and a School of Economics and Business were founded, to be joined in 1922 by Wesley Memorial Hospital, later renamed Emory Hospital, and its nursing school. The original campus continued as a preparatory academy until 1929, when Oxford College was constituted as a two-year division of the University. The years following World War I were significant for the new university. The Coca-Cola Company was sold in 1919 to a group of Atlanta businessmen headed by Ernest Woodruff, whose son Robert later would guide the company. During the 1920s Emory continued to develop and change. Harvey Warren Cox, a Harvard-educated philosopher and former dean of the University of Florida Teachers College, began in 1920 his twenty-two-year tenure as Emory’s president. When Asa Candler died in 1929, his oldest son, Emory graduate Charles Howard Candler, succeeded him as chair of the University board, a position he would hold for almost thirty years. Before the end of the decade, a Phi Beta Kappa chapter was established.39 An important and lasting relationship was strengthened when, in 1935, Robert Woodruff accepted an appointment as an Emory trustee, making formal an existing relationship between Emory, The Coca-Cola Company, and Trust Company Bank, founded by family patriarch Ernest Woodruff, Robert’s father. The University was a significant shareholder of Coca-Cola stock, and the bank provided financial services to both the company and the campus. In 1937 Woodruff made his first major gift to Emory to found a clinic for the study of neoplastic diseases, a euphemism at the time for cancer.40
Becoming Emory University | Emory’s development during the years surrounding World War II was influenced by the need for a first-rate university in the Deep South, the expansion of federal support for research and graduate education, the growth of Atlanta, and the University’s own aspirations and goals.41 Before the war, the munificence of Emory’s benefactors had created the image of the institution as the private domain of Methodists and a few wealthy Atlanta families. But wartime changes, especially the influx of veterans, made expansion possible. A wartime navy training program and the G.I. Bill brought students from other sections of the country, and veterans expanded enrollment from 2,045 in the spring of 1946 to almost 3,600 by the fall.42 The need for a professionally educated labor force in the South led to establishment or expansion of professional programs.43 In 1944, the Southern Dental College became Emory’s School of Dentistry, and the Hospital’s School of Nursing was elevated to collegiate rank. To support the medical complex, brothers Robert and George Woodruff established the Ernest and Emily Woodruff Foundation with the estates of their parents (Emily had died in 1938 and Ernest in 1944); the foundation’s funds would provide nearly four hundred thousand dollars annually, and by 1953 the family had committed $5 million to Emory’s health sciences.44 The federal government’s 1947 decision to locate the Centers for Disease Control adjacent to Emory provided further opportunity. Cox’s successor, Goodrich C. White, served from 1942 to 1957, and when he retired, he served as chancellor (a largely advisory position by this time) from 1957 until his death in 1979. White, an Emory College alumnus (1908), had been recruited by Cox as dean of Emory College and then dean of the Graduate School. White recognized the value of expanding graduate education. He asked Emory graduate (College 1910) and Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone to analyze campus options for developing graduate studies. Malone responded with an enthusiastic report that claimed, “in the whole tier of states beginning with South Carolina and stretching to the Gulf and the Mississippi,” Emory was the most likely to become a university of the highest quality.45 Research and graduate studies, he advised, should emerge from Emory’s strengths, rather than be “superimposed.”46 Malone found that the chemistry and 97
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
biology departments were sufficiently strong to begin doctoral work. All the same, Malone noted, “The mere restoration of the faculty to prewar strength [would] be a formidable task,” especially in humanities.47 To attract first-rate faculty, Emory would need adequate laboratory and library facilities, a more reasonable teaching load, and research funds and leaves of absence for those who demonstrated scholarly ability. Malone emphasized the importance of establishing arts and sciences graduate programs of equal strength to those at the School of Medicine, limiting the number of graduate fields, and emphasizing balance in academic pursuits. Following Malone’s recommendations, Emory’s first PhD in chemistry was conferred in June 1948, almost thirty years after the Graduate School was established. A timely chance to expand graduate education came in 1951, when the General Education Board (GEB) promised Emory $7 million in matching funds in order “to create a [southern] university of the first rank . . . by national The campus endowment standards.” More than any other institution in the Southeast, the GEB argued, Emory increased from $390,000 in 1944 “seem[ed] capable of acquiring the resources 1954. in million to $1.8 and providing the leadership necessary for a university of national stature and influence.”48 Emory ranked below Duke, Vanderbilt, and Tulane, but the GEB believed that Emory was making serious effort. The University had strengthened the faculty, raised salaries, and avoided distractions like intercollegiate football. To receive the GEB funds, Emory was required to secure $33 million from other sources, of which $25 million would be for graduate education. As it turned out, Emory officials did not share the view that the campus was ready to be transformed into an important regional graduate center. Responding to the GEB offer, President White asked instead for one-third of the grant to support Emory’s professional schools, and two-thirds for undergraduate instruction. Although the GEB was willing to compromise, Emory could not secure the matching funds by December 1957, the date set by the pledge, and the campus formally surrendered hope of receiving all but $2 million. The 1950s nevertheless brought consolidation and achievement for Emory. Educational and general expenditures increased from just over $1 million in 1944–45 to $4.5 million a decade later.49 Major construction during White’s presidency meant that at the time of his retirement, about half the University had been erected during his administration. Enrollment grew from seven hundred to seventeen hundred. In 1953 a new policy of coeducation stabilized declining enrollment during the Korean War and increased the size, quality, and geographical diversity of the student body, balancing the predominantly male enrollment in preprofessional education with female enrollment in the liberal arts.50 The campus endowment increased from $390,000 in 1944 to $1.8 million in 1954.51 Ties with the Methodist Church were strengthened when Emory trustees created the Committee of One Hundred, an advisory group representing the nine-state Southeastern Jurisdiction. Under a Jurisdictional One Percent Fund for Ministerial Education, established in 1955, the School of Theology would receive one-third of the annual funds donated by Methodist congregations for ministerial training.52 The campus medical complex grew as Emory moved the medical school from downtown to Druid Hills, expanded its clinical services through acquisition of the Crawford Long Memorial Hospital (now Emory University Hospital Midtown), and the creation of the Emory Clinic in 1952; a new clinic building, made possible through Robert Woodruff’s gift of $1 million, opened two years later.53 A $6 million grant from the Woodruff Foundation in 1954 for the first time allowed the School of Medicine to operate without a deficit. Biomedical research was enhanced when Emory agreed to assume ownership and administrative responsibility for Yale University’s Florida-based Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Biology in 1956.54 That year, Emory also received a $3.9 million Ford Foundation Challenge Grant, of which more than 98
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half was allocated to the medical school and the hospitals.55 When Goodrich White announced in March 1956 that he would retire after the next academic year, the trustees searched for a new president. They sought a candidate who was “dedicated wholeheartedly to the Christian interpretation of God and Man as manifested in Jesus Christ.”56 Opposed by the faculty but with strong support from the board, Sidney Walter Martin, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia, was selected as the president who would lead Emory into the golden age that had already begun.57
Slow but Steady Progress in the “Golden Age” | The “golden age” (1958–68) was a time of historic expansion in American higher education, growth fueled by what seemed an unlimited supply of students, generous federal research support, and strong public belief in the value of scientific research.58 By the time Sputnik circled the earth, Emory was a regional Methodist university with aspirations that dovetailed with federal intent to expand the nation’s research capacity. The plan was to become a good academic institution measured by national standards with a special responsibility to the Methodist Church, and to continue a commitment of service to the Southeast.59 Emory planned “to move more actively into the community,” providing graduate and professional programs that would help meet the region’s need for business and professional leadership.60 Unfortunately, University resources did not match University aspirations. In the early 1960s, the Emory faculty was “good but undistinguished.”61 There were no winners of Nobel or Pulitzer prizes or comparable awards, and no officers of national or international professional organizations. Nor did the faculty demonstrate the “uniform and omnipresent dedication to research . . . characteristic of truly great universities.”62 With only a “score of individuals” accounting for the bulk of publications and honors, Emory faculty had achieved academic recognition at a level “just below the top.”63 They were competitive with other southern faculties, but not with great national faculties. There were serious deterrents to developing a research ethos. During the 1950s President White and the trustees had balanced the budget by increasing the student-faculty ratio, paying low salaries, and “stinting the academic program.”64 In effect, they had imposed the obligations of graduate instruction and scholarship without a corresponding increase in faculty size to support first-rate graduate programs. Outside evaluators from prestigious universities noted that Emory faculty were still operating under a workload that had been appropriate when there was no graduate school.65 Faculty in English taught three classes per quarter and averaged twenty-seven students per class.66 The Biology Department was “singularly understaffed.”67 In physics, teaching responsibilities “simply [did] not permit” faculty to compete successfully for research funding.68 In comparison with faculty salaries at fourteen public and private southern campuses, Emory ranked near the bottom.69 The School of Medicine, however, continued to receive generous federal funds for sponsored research. In 1956–57 biomedical researchers gained support of about $1.2 million, 16 percent of the total campus operating expenses; four years later, they won about $3.5 million, or 31 percent of Emory’s total. Southern reluctance to move toward integration of higher education, and the specific threat in the early 1960s that Georgia public schools would be closed, further inhibited Emory’s ability to recruit and retain top faculty talent. At the same time, circumstances in Atlanta, “a city too busy to hate,” produced different results from those in Birmingham and Little Rock.70 Corporate leaders, including Robert Woodruff, recognized that attracting new dollars and industry to Atlanta depended on the peaceful integration of public schools.71 Atlanta’s influential citizens thus supported integration.72 Although its charter and bylaws had never excluded students on the basis of race, Emory held to an all-white admissions policy in order to comply with state legislation that would revoke the 99
Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University
Thomas P. Johnston (College 1940, Graduate 1941) received Emory’s first PhD degree (in biochemistry) in 1948.
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tax exemption of any institution that taught whites and blacks together. In 1961 the trustees declared their intent to admit qualified students “without regard to race, color or creed,” pending clarification of state laws with respect to the tax exemption of the University.73 The next year, the Georgia Supreme Court declared unconstitutional all provisions in the state constitution and statutes that denied tax exemption to private campuses that integrated their student bodies. Emory enrolled its first two full-time African American students in the School of Nursing in January 1963, and each received a master’s degrees the following December. With Rockefeller Foundation support, eighteen African Americans were enrolled in four divisions during the next year.74 Since then, Emory has consistently ranked at or near the top in student diversity, with the largest percentage of black students among the nation’s top twenty-five highest-ranked universities.75 All the same, Emory was at a crossroads. Significant and immediate increases for faculty salaries and funds for plant maintenance were “imperative” at a time when the University was operating at a deficit.76 In order to compete on a national level, the University had to “diversify its portfolio [and] broaden its base of support.” No longer able to rely on the generosity of one or two prominent Atlanta families, Emory would have to “project the image of a public servant to several new constituencies, professional groups, the Methodist Church, alumni, [and the] business and industrial community.”77 As the University confronted these challenges, President Martin, whose tenure was marred by continuing budget deficits, was pressured to resign after five years of service.78 During the next year, the University operated without a president, governed instead by a “troika” (the Administration Building had been dubbed “the Kremlin”), comprising Emory insiders Henry Bowden, board chair; Judson “Jake” Ward, vice president and dean of the faculties; and Goodrich White. Although Emory urgently needed additional funds to augment faculty salaries and improve facilities, this was hardly the time to begin a major fund-raising campaign. Such an event would have to wait for a new president, one who could provide leadership for Emory’s entrance into the big leagues. The July 19, 1963, issue of Time magazine heralded the news. “Atlanta’s ambitious Emory University, which had searched for a year for a new president, last week snagged just the man.”79 Like other southern universities trying to establish national reputations, Emory reached outside the region to hire Sanford S. Atwood, a University of Wisconsin–trained botanist and former Cornell provost, who could further Emory’s national aspirations.80 A radical departure from his predecessors, Atwood—a Yankee, a layman, and a Presbyterian—was unanimously elected by the trustees on July 8, 1963.81 With enthusiastic assistance from Graduate School dean Charles Lester, Judson Ward, and Henry Bowden, Atwood set out to improve Emory’s reach and reputation. Atwood believed that Emory had “the greatest potential of any private university in the country.”82 Finding faculty morale unspeakably low, he offered a dose of self-esteem: “You people are twice as good as you think you are, whereas Harvard faculty think they are twice as good as they really are.”83 During his presidency, the faculty was strengthened, growing “slowly in size and significantly in quality and prestige.”84 By 1965 the full-time College faculty had increased to 273 (up from 178 ten years earlier), with graduates of Yale, Chicago, and Harvard making up a high percentage of new recruits.85 Atwood recognized that to improve campus quality, he first had to establish financial solvency. In 1962–63, basic educational expenditures were almost $7 million, and the campus endowment was $2.2 million.86 “Dr. Atwood’s insistence on fiscal soundness is what helped [Emory] grow,” recalled Henry Bowden.87 Atwood would never accept a budget deficit, and soon paid off the cumulative debt he inherited. He linked admissions policy to the larger goal of securing a place for Emory among the nation’s top universities, and raised tuition, which had the perhaps unanticipated consequence of attracting undergraduate applicants from northeastern states, where tuition at private institutions was already high. During Atwood’s tenure, Emory’s reputation greatly improved. His style and sophistication 101
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also helped to recruit faculty from top universities in other regions.88 To change the perception that Emory was a small-time Methodist school, Atwood and his wife Betty spent considerable time entertaining Atlanta’s social and business elite at Lullwater House, the president’s campus residence. But the adjustment of Emory’s socially conservative trustees to the new president was not smooth. When they learned that the Atwoods had served wine at a lunch honoring Lady Bird Johnson, the Methodist constituency “went into orbit.”89 Despite their criticism, and confident in his own vision, in October 1965 Atwood inaugurated the University’s MERIT (Mobilizing Educational Resources and Ideas for Tomorrow) Campaign with a goal of $25 million, the largest in the school’s history and among southern universities. Positive publicity came unexpectedly from Atwood’s 1965 stance in a controversy involving Thomas J. J. Altizer, a young faculty member in the Religion Department and a vocal proponent of the “God is dead” movement.90 Despite enormous pressure to condemn Altizer’s views, the Emory president stood firm in defense of academic freedom. When board members criticized him, Atwood argued that having granted tenure to Altizer, the trustees were obligated to protect his academic freedom. The Altizer incident was one of the major turning points in Emory’s evolution from a regional college with satellite and professional schools to a university of national stature. An article in Time identified Atwood and three other southern university presidents who were part of “a real educational renaissance [and who] refused to keep old Southern traditions at the cost of academic quality.”91 When a New York Times notice brought further attention to the Altizer controversy, the Ford Foundation, which had previously rejected Emory’s application, awarded the University a $6 million Challenge Grant, which set the MERIT campaign off to a dramatic start and spearheaded an expansion of voluntary support. Nevertheless, during these years Emory did not exhibit the rapid advancement typical of more established campuses. Instead the mid-1960s were characterized by slow movement “from its position as a strong university to an institution of first quality as measured by the most exacting national standards.”92 As at many second-tier universities, expansion of graduate education enhanced institutional stature and access to new revenues. Research support in the amount of $6.8 million came through the NSF’s Science Development Program.93 Funds from the NDEA supported math and physics and, later, new PhD programs across the academic spectrum.94 More than two hundred doctorates were awarded between 1957 and 1965, compared to a total of twenty-seven before 1957.95 During these years, Emory ranked forty-eighth nationally in the number of students with free-choice Woodrow Wilson and NSF fellowships.96 The School of Medicine continued to attract significant federal research support. The school’s operating budget in 1963–64 was $6 million (of a total campus budget of $25 million), almost two-thirds of it from federal funds.97 That year, the Woodruff Endowment for Medical Education—with assets of more than $11 million—was transferred to full University control. Of the $9 million in federal support awarded to the campus during the mid-1960s, more than $7 million came from the Public Health Service (PHS).98 Dramatic advances in research potential also came in 1965, when the federally funded Yerkes Primate Research Center was moved from Florida to the Emory campus.99 The American Council on Education 1966 Cartter Report offered positive recognition for faculty and graduate programs in six areas (biochemistry, English, history, microbiology, pharmacology, and physiology).100 Despite these accolades, Emory’s progress at mid-decade perhaps was characterized best by Thomas English’s 1965 assessment: “If Emory has not yet achieved the highest rank among America’s institutions of learning,” English wrote, “it has at least made fair progress toward the ultimate goal of usefulness and distinction.”101
Supporting Research during the Stagnant Years | Sanford Atwood’s early years as president of Emory corresponded to a time of historic growth for American higher education. 102
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By 1968, however, abrupt changes in the nation’s economy, the redirection of federal research funding to applied projects, and erosion of public trust created a vastly different climate.102 For southern universities especially, inflation and recurring recessions of the early 1970s threatened progress. Even in the South, “The projection of substantial surpluses of potential faculty had significant consequences for graduate programs [and] for the management of institutions.”103 Although not exempt from student protests against the war in Vietnam and the harsh economic conditions that confronted the nation’s campuses, Emory was able to avoid the disasters that plagued many private institutions.104 Limited finances during the early Facing the first budget deficit of his presi1970s virtually eliminated the posdency in 1969–70, Atwood initiated a series sibility of new senior appointments, of stopgap measures, including a salary freeze and a moratorium on hiring. Faculty vacanand departing faculty, often those cies were filled either at lower levels or not at with national reputations, were all.105 Campus officials prepared a balanced replaced by recent PhDs or not budget for the next year by increasing tuition replaced at all. and again eliminating faculty salary increases. This decision, risky in terms of faculty retention and recruitment, was seen as a better alternative to closing programs or operating at a deficit.106 Integration of the faculty continued, however, as Emory hired its first two black faculty members in 1971: Grant S. Shockley, professor of Christian education at the Candler School, and Delores Aldridge, the first black faculty member in Emory’s College.107 At the same time, 1971 was a record year for private donations, as $47 million placed Emory first in the nation in total gifts received. While other universities suffered retrenchment, these gifts included $17 million from the Woodruff Foundation that made possible necessary renovation and construction of campus science facilities.108 Although there were no accumulated reserves at the end of 1972, Emory did not face the large deficits that confronted other private campuses. Where declining enrollments and budget deficits were the national norm, Emory enjoyed a record enrollment and operated in the black.109 Yet Emory leaders faced difficult decisions. Although the College enrollment had increased by almost 30 percent, the full-time faculty had grown by only 5 percent.110 As at many other universities, the administration during the 1960s had made few strategic decisions about expansion. New positions were authorized to meet undergraduate enrollment needs, rather than to strengthen graduate or research programs.111 Limited finances during the early 1970s virtually eliminated the possibility of new senior appointments, and departing faculty, often those with national reputations, were replaced by recent PhDs or not replaced at all. This strategy, though perhaps necessary, gradually eroded faculty strength.112 Lacking infrastructure and salaries to attract the best candidates, Emory could barely compete for qualified faculty. Compared to selected Council of Southern Universities campuses, Emory ranked next-to-last in average salaries.113 Deteriorating facilities and poor library resources continued as major deterrents. A growing proportion of tenured faculty inhibited recruitment of new talent.114 Nevertheless, President Atwood argued, with more selective hiring and promotion policies, the Emory faculty could grow in quality. A faculty Committee on Promotion and Tenure, the campus’s first, was a crucial addition in 1971. The committee determined that “no member of the faculty [would] be promoted to full professor unless he ha[d] become a leading scholar in his field.”115 The president professed a commitment to “training individuals at the highest levels,” but graduate-school deficits produced serious concerns.116 A Committee on the Graduate Faculty polled faculty opinion about continuing the graduate program. Three-fourths of the respondents claimed that they would not have accepted Emory appointments had there been no graduate program, and almost 90 percent indicated that they would be receptive to offers from elsewhere 103
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if graduate programs were abandoned.117 The committee concluded that the high-quality programs in biology, chemistry, English, history, mathematics, psychology, and religion must be preserved, but weak programs in classics, geology, and German could be terminated.118 Complementing their endorsement of graduate education, increased numbers of Emory faculty demonstrated higher levels of research. More than half had received external research grants, and a third had won postdoctoral research fellowships. The 1970 ACE Roose-Andersen evaluation rated thirteen Emory programs at the high end of the scale, compared to six in the 1966 Cartter report; pharmacology ranked eleventh nationally.119 With campus research activity centered in biomedical fields, Emory was not adversely affected by changing patterns of federal support during the 1970s. In 1971 almost 90 percent of the basic health sciences faculty received external research funding.120 Between 1963 and 1972 federal support for biomedical research had produced a 12 percent increase in Emory’s share of total federal research funding.121 However, declining federal support for graduate fellowships caused concern, especially in the basic health sciences, where almost 80 percent of students were supported by external funds.122 During the mid-1970s, Emory exhibited what one observer of higher education has called the “social capability to capitalize on distinct conditions of the period.”123 President Atwood believed that Emory had to adjust to difficult conditions rather than be consumed by them. He argued that “a university with a clear set of objectives and a plan of operation . . . had a special advantage in times of uncertainty.”124 Atwood’s Five-Year Planning Report submitted to the trustees in November 1976 reflected financial realities. Proposing small increases in enrollment and tuition and a substantial improvement in facilities, the report concluded, “Emory could continue to provide distinctive, privately supported education of the highest caliber, and fulfill its commitment to prepare leadership for metropolitan Atlanta, the state, the region, and the nation.”125 There remained major questions about how the necessary costs would be financed.
Achieving Success in the New Era | The period encompassing the late 1970s to the 1990s has been called “a new era” for American research universities.126 At Emory, these years were inaugurated with a search for a new president. Sanford Atwood had been candid about his intention to retire at age sixty-five, and in 1977 the trustees began a search for his successor, “a person who would relate effectively to various constituencies, including the Methodist Church.” Interested candidates were told, “The search for values must continue to be an important function of this institution.”127 On March 17, 1977, the trustees announced that Emory’s next president would be forty-nine-year-old James T. Laney, dean of Emory’s Candler School of Theology.128 An ordained minister with degrees in economics and divinity from Yale, Laney had been recruited to Candler from Vanderbilt in 1969. The new president “combine[d] the abilities of a first-rate scholar with those of a deeply dedicated Christian churchman.”129 As Candler’s dean, Laney had led Emory’s successful effort to purchase the valuable Hartford Seminary library “right out from under the noses of the prestigious seminaries in the Northeast.”130 At his first trustees’ meeting, Laney articulated several goals: to restore Emory’s traditional southern base in the student body and to reclaim Emory’s heritage in relation to the church, to enrich the undergraduate experience, and to build graduate programs of distinction.131 Laney argued that Emory could “make some very real advances if we find ourselves hospitable to research.”132 The new president recognized that the late 1970s was not an auspicious time to launch a major research effort; however, anticipating the Carter administration’s growing support of basic research, he convened a University-wide council to address research issues.133 Persistent inflation and uncertainty about key federal student aid programs produced a sober challenge for private universities during these years.134 In the context of troubling finan104
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cial realities, Laney’s early tenure as president was characterized by deliberate reassessment and reorganization, and a continuation of the prudent fiscal approach chartered by Atwood. Like his predecessor, Laney was committed to making Emory “one of the principal universities in this country, one of this society’s unassailably distinctive resources.”135 To achieve this goal, Emory needed to enhance its graduate program with “solid research, a top faculty, and the best students.” The liberal arts were “very weak” relative to other parts of the University, and there was “no conceivable way to have a great university without a great liberal arts program.”136 Recognizing that his great ambition could not be realized without considerable effort and expense, Laney asked for and received trustee approval for a five-year, $160 million Campaign for Emory.137 Unlike many universities that had instituted capital campaigns to meet existing commitments, Emory, with no significant encumbrance, could use the campaign to move ahead. Waiting in the wings, Trustee Emeritus George Woodruff read a letter from his brother Robert that announced a major gift. “Gratified by Emory’s progress, its demonstrated capacity to manage its affairs, and its continued commitment to excellence and service to society,” the letter stated, assets from the Emily and Ernest Woodruff Fund in excess of $100 million would be transferred to Emory.138 While Atwood had accomplished a great deal to strengthen the campus, balance the budget, and establish Emory’s reputation, it was Laney who secured the spectacular gift. Presidents Martin and Atwood had visited Robert Woodruff occasionally, but Laney actively cultivated his friendship and became his spiritual adviser.139 Laney also ensured that the gift was made unrestricted to the University rather than to the medical school, which historically had been the Woodruffs’ principal interest. The largest single donation to an educational institution at the time, the gift thrust Emory into the national spotlight. Its major impact came as much from its psychological lift as from its monetary contribution. (In 1979 Emory’s $175 million endowment was already sixteenthlargest in the nation. The bequest raised the total to $280 million and thirteenth-largest.) “The fact is,” Laney later recalled, “the endowment made it possible to begin long-range planning and serious building in a way that was almost unprecedented, certainly at Emory.”140 When the Woodruff Fund was received, the College was in a dismal state. The budget was “pathetic,” and the College was accepting nearly 90 percent of its applicants.141 To avoid having the gift absorbed into the operating budget, the Woodruff funds were kept as a separate endowment. A prudent rule for allocation was announced: the principal was to remain untouched, except by a two-thirds vote of the trustees. The endowment would be committed to Emory’s academic programs at the rate of $1 million a year until 60 percent of the net income was being used for that purpose. The remaining 40 percent, earmarked for capital needs, enabled Emory to retire bonds or to leverage future facilities, thus permitting the campus to combat enormous inflationary pressures.142 Delaying use of the income provided a substantial reserve for much-needed capital improvements. During the next two years, Laney further tightened financial controls and hired an administrative team that could “bring to Emory an aspiration to be nationally prominent, and at the same time, the experience with which to help measure progress and help set priorities.”143 John Palms was promoted from Emory College dean to vice president for academic affairs.144 David Minter, a respected English professor from Rice, was appointed dean of the College and vice president for arts and sciences. Billy E. Frye, the Michigan provost who had earned an Emory PhD in biology, returned to become graduate dean in 1986 and, in 1988, Emory’s first provost.145 President Laney believed that Emory “must husband [the Woodruff] resources with great care and choose our priorities wisely if we are to sustain steady growth in the face of negative indicators in the outside society.”146 To allow time for thoughtful review, the 1980–81 budget 105
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was prepared without recourse to the new endowment, and every academic division was directed to undertake a thorough assessment of its programs.147 The resulting self-studies revealed continuing impediments to development of campus research capacity. In Emory College, for example, an increase in the student-faculty ratio (from about 10-to-1 in 1970–71 to 13-to-1 in 1979–80) imposed teaching responsibilities incompatible with advancement of research.148 With the exception of the highly ranked pharmacology program, Emory science faculty demonstrated significantly lower per-capita extramural grants than “model” departments at MIT, Johns Hopkins, and others.149 Even the School of Medicine needed improvement. Outside evaluators agreed that “biomedical research at Emory [was] simply inadequate,” owing to deteriorating facilities, an emphasis on clinical service, and an institutional structure that separated medicine from the rest of the University.150 Social science departments, where teaching loads were excessively high, were “undistinguished by most of the accepted standards of academic excellence.”151 Humanities faculty, hit hard by elimination of twenty-seven positions during the early 1970s, expressed concern that they were hidden in the shadow of the professional schools.152 All the same, Laney believed that Emory was “perhaps the last private university in the United States to have adequate resources to set a new course for graduate education.”153 Favored by geography, climate, and demographic shifts, Emory seemed to be in a position similar to that of Stanford twenty-five years earlier.154 By the early 1980s, the general health of the University was strong, and faculty in seven divisions were recognized by the 1982 National Research Council (NRC) assessment as important contributors to the advancement of knowledge.155 To guide allocation of income from the Woodruff Fund, Laney asked Emory College alumnus (1945, Honorary 1975) and Yale dean Howard Lamar to chair the Emory Visiting Committee for the Arts and Sciences.156 Using the Woodruff gift–inspired self-studies as a guide, Lamar and a group of prominent faculty from five elite universities endorsed a plan that would influence planning for the next decade. By enlisting participation of faculty with national reputations, Emory both gained recognition in the scholarly community and received sound advice on how to become a university of the first rank. The Lamar Committee emphasized that “Emory [was] not a multiversity and should not become one,” and that the campus should not try to be “a second-rate replica of the ‘model’ schools.”157 Nevertheless, a concerted effort to improve graduate training and research was “the best present emphasis for [Emory’s] expanded opportunities, and the best way to improve all aspects of the University.”158 Perhaps most importantly, the group proposed that the president be given responsibility for distributing the Woodruff funds. This recommendation gave Laney the flexibility and power to shape the institution according to his own priorities, and to centralize decision making within the administration. The Lamar Committee found that Emory had “remained steadfast to the goal of becoming a truly distinguished national university.”159 The English and history departments provided distinction, and chemistry was “the most likely to achieve national prominence.”160 The Institute of Liberal Arts (ILA), founded in the 1950s, was the key to the development of an interdisciplinary [humanities] focus.161 At the same time, deteriorating equipment and facilities in biology and physics would have to be upgraded for the departments to advance. The social sciences had the longest way to go to achieve national visibility. Library collections, inadequate for graduate education, would have to be expanded dramatically.162 Committee members also endorsed specific proposals. They recommended recruiting the most promising young assistant and associate professors, who “over the long haul . . . [would] carry Emory to its high goals.”163 They urged an interdisciplinary division of biological sciences to “strengthen the graduate school and College rather than starve them, and complement the clinical work of the Medical School rather than be subsumed into it.”164 They 106
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identified for development three new areas based on existing University strengths that matched federal funding priorities: a neurosciences division, an immunobiology program, and a comprehensive cancer center. Despite optimism generated by the Woodruff gift and the Lamar Committee recommendations, in 1983 a candid Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) accreditation report found that Emory was “suffer[ing] from an irony of riches and mood of deflation born of unrealistic expectations.”165 The SACS reBy 1984 more than half of the fiftyport concluded that Emory’s high ambitions four new appointments in Emory could only be realized by “a marked imCollege had been made at the senprovement” in the faculty through more stringent hiring and promotion procedures ior ranks, and salary increases that were “ruthlessly enforced.” Echoing the placed Emory ahead of Vanderbilt, Lamar report, the SACS team observed that well above Tulane, and only theology, English, history, philosophy, chemslightly behind Duke. istry, and biology should be emphasized as “towers of excellence,” while weaker departments should be expanded to meet undergraduate enrollment needs and to offer master’s-level programs. A Woodruff chair in molecular biology would support a field “that must be developed rapidly if Emory is to catch up with its peers.”166 Attention to Emory’s “seriously deficient” management information and planning systems was identified as necessary for future success.167 The SACS assessment complemented Dean David Minter’s aggressive effort to raise faculty quality in the arts and sciences. Minter lobbied successfully for higher salaries that would attract more accomplished faculty, implemented new tenure guidelines that emphasized scholarship as well as teaching and service, and recruited new faculty chairs across the board. He also convinced Laney to increase dramatically the undergraduate scholarship budget, an effort that produced a 400 percent increase during the early 1980s, which in turn stabilized enrollment, increased student quality, and established a predictable tuition income.168 Fueled with income from the Woodruff gift and continuing medical research support, Emory’s advance as a national research university truly began around 1984. That year Laney reported to the trustees about increased support for undergraduate and graduate students, the enhancement of libraries, and the creation of interdisciplinary research centers.169 In particular, Laney noted new senior faculty. By 1984 more than half of the fifty-four new appointments in Emory College had been made at the senior ranks, and salary increases placed Emory ahead of Vanderbilt, well above Tulane, and only slightly behind Duke.170 A major coup was the appointment of former U.S. president Jimmy Carter as University Distinguished Professor and formal affiliation between Emory and the Carter Center.171 The School of Medicine continued to win support from the coffers of the NIH. Of Emory’s external funding, 85 percent, primarily from the NIH, was awarded to the School of Medicine.172 As a result, Emory demonstrated steady growth in federal R&D awards and moved in the national rankings from sixty-ninth in 1982 to forty-ninth in 1987.173 Nevertheless, a continuing problem resulted from Emory’s historic decentralization that had “allowed the activities of some constituent schools to obscure the public perception of the whole.”174 The Emory Clinic and hospitals had become financial powerhouses, and, like academic health centers at campuses around the nation, independent from the rest of the University.175 Medical doctors with Emory clinical appointments treated patients in Emory offices, but paid only a modest fee to the University. Laney addressed this situation by negotiating a controversial formula that would increase the University share of revenues from professional services.176 These revenues supported a new Graduate Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, which combined the resources of basic health sciences departments throughout the University. This consolidation “was crucial” for recruitment of research faculty and more active involve107
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ment of the medical school in graduate education.177 Despite significant progress, Emory officials learned just how long it takes—and how difficult it is—to join the ranks of the nation’s elite. When Howard Lamar addressed a trustee retreat in 1987, he reported that Emory was “being talked about as a new Hopkins or a new Chicago.”178 However, actual comparisons with prestigious campuses suggested more measured progress. When judged against six other schools in the University Athletic Association (UAA) (Carnegie Mellon, Case Western Reserve, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Rochester, and Washington University) and four private southern institutions (Vanderbilt, Duke, Tulane, and Miami), Emory was near the bottom in most categories.179 Of this group, Emory ranked next to last (and eighty-sixth nationally) in federal R&D obligations, fifth in alumni gifts, and tenth in the number of doctorates awarded.180 As would be expected, Emory fared better in the endowment category. While Emory did not have the largest endowment, ranking third behind UAA members Chicago and Rochester, Emory was first with annual endowment income (more than $42 million). In 1987 Emory moved into eighth place in R&D expenditures, ahead of Vanderbilt and Tulane.181 Emory’s disappointing comparative assessment led Laney to restate an earlier goal: Emory should become one of the nation’s dozen “truly distinguished private institutions.”182 He found it particularly irritating that research support in the South still lagged behind that of other regions.183 To facilitate Emory’s advance to national research status, Laney proposed specific numerical goals to be achieved by the year 2000. The campus would aim to double its research base from $50 million to $100 million, triple gift support from $30 million to $90 million, and increase PhDs awarded from fifty or sixty to one hundred per year. Laney further proposed that Emory place two graduate programs and two professional programs (specifically theology and medicine) in the top ten, and two (law and business) in the top twenty.184 To capitalize on strength in the biomedical sciences, Laney and Vice President for Health Affairs Charles Hatcher determined to expand the medical school faculty with appointees whose primary function would be research. As a result the medical faculty grew from 671 in 1984 to 883 in 1992.185 The arts and sciences faculty also increased, from 236 to 328 between 1984 and 1992, with 36 positions supported by the Woodruff endowment.186 Laney understood that the heart of the University was arts and sciences.187 He was committed to strengthening the liberal arts even if it meant purchasing a department outright. In a highly publicized move, during the late 1980s Emory successfully recruited the entire French department from Johns Hopkins. This action brought “one of the country’s most highly regarded [departments] and . . . helped Emory vault overnight into the front rank of American universities in French literature studies.”188 Another sign of progress was the attempted raiding of Emory faculty by distinguished universities. Dean Minter recalled spending considerable time “trying to persuade faculty that in the long run they [were] better off here than at Stanford or UCLA or Berkeley or Northwestern.”189 All the same, the cost of advancement was enormous. In 1989, only five years after the end of the previous fund-raising campaign, Emory embarked on another campaign to raise $400 million.190 In the early 1990s Emory officials endorsed important structural changes that included the establishment of one school and the closing of another. Accompanying the growth of medical research faculty was a tripling of research space in a new $41 million Rollins Research Center.191 To build on collaborative relationships with the neighboring U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Cancer Society, the medical school’s public health offerings were reorganized into a separate Rollins School of Public Health.192 The School of Dentistry faced a different fate. When the quality and number of its students declined and increasing University support was required to maintain what was considered an average program, campus officials decided to close the school.193 With its late entrance into research and graduate education, Emory’s goal of achieving 108
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status as a premier research university was not realized until the late 1980s and 1990s. The campus budget underwent a major transformation between 1977 and 1992. Total current expenditures increased from $153 million to more than $890 million; basic educational and general expenditures grew from $71 to $419 million. The student aid budget—increased dramatically during the 1980s—was raised from just over $6 million to more than $95 million, with 70 percent of Emory students receiving some financial assistance. The endowment grew to $1.8 billion in 1992, the sixth largest in the nation.194 Despite endowment strength, Emory’s revenue base was expanded as much by the huge increase in income from tuition and fees as it was by endowment revenue.195 Between 1987 and 1995 Emory’s sponsored research increased more than 144 percent to almost $132 million, with federal support (including $76 million from the NIH) providing more than $96 million, or more than 70 percent of the total.196 In 1997, nine academic departments, most conducting health-related research, each generated at least $5 million in grants.197 By the mid-1990s researchers at the Yerkes Primate Research Center and the new Rollins School of Public Health were winning more than $20 million annually.198 Despite strength in biomedical fields, efforts were taken to ensure that “in case federal funding trends change [Emory could] diversify its research funding portfolio through partnerships with industry.”199 By 1995 the University was generating about $2 million annually through technology transfer projects, and this revenue was expected to increase as faculty and researchers secured additional patents.200 Corporate-sponsored funding in 1996 provided some $18 million, or 11 percent of the total, and private funding grew to $15 million—7 percent of the total—up from $8 million one year earlier.201
Explaining Emory’s Advance | While focusing on the changes that enabled Emory to advance, one must not underestimate the forces of continuity that prevail at any institution. A tradition of balanced budgets, a strong program of medical research, the continued support of a major donor, location in a Sunbelt city that was growing in population, economics, and stature—these factors all contributed to Emory’s transformation. At the same time, the University expanded its research capacity despite inherent impediments—the later development of research agendas at southern universities, entrenched racial segregation in the region, a conservative Methodist influence, and a resource-consuming commitment to regional service. The $105 million Woodruff gift provided the means for advancement, but other factors produced growth and innovation. Since the mid-1940s, when Dumas Malone evaluated campus options for graduate and research development, campus officials were determined to achieve national status as a research university. Emory’s journey toward national recognition and research excellence stumbled in the 1950s, developed steadily through the 1960s, experienced setbacks in the 1970s, was sustained through the mid-1980s, and advanced beginning in the mid-1980s and continuing through the 1990s. During these latter years, when other universities were forced to cut back on graduate programs, Emory was able to hire top faculty and expand graduate fields. When other campuses were burdened by a surplus of tenured professors, Emory could make cluster appointments of research faculty to build a critical mass of excellence. When other universities were experimenting with innovative programs to attract new audiences, Emory was able to strengthen its commitment to the liberal arts in the College and the Graduate School. Emory officials expanded faculty and associated resources in areas that were already strong. Emory benefited from effective presidential leadership that moved the campus toward research university status. The process began in the early postwar years with Goodrich White, a former graduate dean, who understood the importance of extending graduate education. With help from an inherited group of dedicated senior administrators, Sanford Atwood elevated Emory faculty and programs to the next level. Believing that Emory could become one of the 109
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nation’s best universities, Atwood spearheaded an effort to strengthen the faculty and recruit high-quality students. Based on his courageous support of academic freedom during the mid1960s, Emory won positive national attention as well as Ford Foundation dollars. During his tenure, as one campus official recalled, “We did all we could with what was available.”202 It fell to James Laney to realize the goals established by his predecessors. Laney hired experienced senior administrators, who recruited with high salaries and bold strategies strong faculty and talented students to the College and Graduate School. Among his most important contributions, Laney cultivated a close personal relationship with Robert Woodruff, Emory’s principal benefactor, and convinced him to donate assets without restriction. Laney’s efforts also produced a more equitable distribution of clinical fees. Emory’s ties with Atlanta’s business community were strengthened as Laney served on the boards of Coca-Cola and the Trust Company Bank, and the CEOs of these two companies served as Emory trustees. While the tradition of American research universities had been to jettison religious ties as they advanced in the secular world of research and graduate education, Laney continued to argue that Emory could “play in the big leagues while sustaining a commitment to values.”203 Emory’s success also was grounded in moderate expansion and careful fiscal management during an era when American higher education generally was experiencing rapid, unplanned growth. Adopting a practice of slower growth and a goal of staying relatively small through the late 1970s, trustees insisted on, and presidents from White to Laney were able to produce, balanced budgets even in times of financial constraint. When many campuses faced perilous deficits during the early 1970s, Emory avoided disaster, risking gains and reputation to stay financially solvent. When the value of university endowments declined, the board’s investment committee continued to manage the campus portfolio with success. The continuing strength of its biomedical research was a major factor in Emory’s advance. Even before World War II, the School of Medicine was the best-known and most respected Emory division, and the uninterrupted federal support of biomedical research after World War II only enhanced the school’s prestige. Yerkes brought increased federal support and recognition. Historically, biomedical research received between two-thirds and three-fourths of the federal R&D funds awarded to the campus, and 85 percent of Emory’s external funding came through the medical school. At the same time, the growth and success of the medical complex produced a strained relationship with Emory’s other schools and an ambiguous identity in the mission and character of the University. Emory is one of a number of schools, including Chicago and Rochester, that derived financial support from a primary benefactor. While the Woodruff donation in 1979 enabled Emory to expand research faculty and augment a scholarship budget that attracted talented students, advancement as a result of a major gift was not an isolated circumstance in the campus’s history. A generous donation from Coca-Cola founder Asa Candler in 1915 signaled the beginning of Emory’s transformation from college to university, and Candler continued to give munificently to Emory until his death. Following World War II, the Woodruff family used increased Coca-Cola earnings to support the growth of Emory’s medical complex. Contributions continued throughout the postwar years, and in 1975, trustees of the Emily and Ernest Woodruff Foundation rechartered it to form the Emily and Ernest Woodruff Fund; under the Fund’s new charter, 40 percent of the net annual income would be granted to Emory. The 1979 Woodruff gift thus represented the culmination of almost a half-century of Woodruff support of the medical complex and, later, the University. The unprecedented gift, prudently invested, enabled Emory to hire senior faculty, to offer generous financial aid to undergraduates and competitive stipends to graduate students, and to build a research infrastructure. With these resources, Emory was able to mount an effort to elevate the stature of the arts and sciences to that of the medical school. Finally, there were intangible elements that characterized Emory’s advancement. Among 110
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the most important was the role of dedicated and loyal Emory alumni and friends in Atlanta. Through the 1960s Emory graduates served as campus leaders and trustees, stepping in to fill a presidential leadership void when circumstances required it. Others, including respected academics and alumni (Dumas Malone in the 1940s and Howard Lamar in the 1980s), volunteered their experienced service. Billy Frye, provost at Michigan, returned to his graduate alma mater to serve as the University’s chief academic officer and, later, Emory’s acting president. Some with no prior association seemed committed to Emory’s success. The efforts of Georgia native Jimmy Carter also extended Emory’s academic programs and stature. Writing about turn-of-the-twentieth-century southern progressivism, Dewey Grantham found that “the machinery for social amelioration [in the South] is to a large extent educational.”204 Grantham’s assessment of these earlier years might also characterize the post–World War II era, when southern universities found themselves at the center of a southern renaissance. Emory’s remarkable advance as a research university thus must be assessed in the context of exceptional development of the South, rather than through a comparison with more traditional elite institutions that developed earlier and under other circumstances. All the same, it must be recognized that Emory has attained national research university status with a very concentrated effort, in a very short period of time.
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CHAPTER 9
HOW IT CAME TO PASS Oral History of a Half-Century in Emory Arts and Sciences The View from the Office of the First Emory Provost: An Interview with Billy E. Frye (MS 1954, PhD 1956) Considered by some to have been the best academic administrator in America in his day, Billy E. Frye had journeyed far from his Georgia mountain boyhood home to become provost at the University of Michigan before returning to his native state and Emory in 1986. On his retirement as Emory’s provost—he was the first person to hold that position—he received the University’s Thomas Jefferson Award, the highest honor bestowed on someone who has spent a significant portion of his or her career at Emory. In this interview conducted by Gary Hauk and Sally Wolff King, recorded on October 24, 2008, he ranges from his student days in the 1950s to the challenges facing Emory in the 1980s to advance its research programs. 113
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You came to Emory to work on a PhD in biology when the graduate program was still quite young. What was that experience like? The experience I had as a graduate student at Emory in the fifties was just extraordinary, and the reason for that had to do in part with where I was in my life. I had finished undergraduate college at Piedmont, quite young, and gone off to graduate school at the University of Illinois. I was eighteen or nineteen. I had never been away from home, quite literally, in my life, so by the middle of my first semester there I was so homesick that I was literally sick. About Thanksgiving, I just left and came home. My Piedmont biology professor, who had gotten me into several graduate schools—including Emory—discovered that I had left Illinois, and she came to our house with fire in her eyes. But she took one look at me and forgave me after a brief scolding and came down to Emory and had me readmitted. So I came in the middle of the year. I’ve always thought she must have told Bill Burbank, who was the chair of biology at the time, something about my experience and my immaturity. Whatever the reason, the whole department, the faculty and the students, embraced me and built a protective fence around me. I was extraordinarily shy and immature, but under their protection I flourished academically and socially. Whatever the reasons for that, it was a wonderful experience. It was also wonderful because the faculty were really quite exceptional. We tend to think of Emory at that time as a sort of sleepy, aristocratic, southern institution that has emerged into research prominence only in recent years. But in fact there were a considerable number of faculty in biology and in some other departments, such as biochemistry, that had quite prominent research programs funded through the National Science Foundation and so forth. Half to two-thirds of the faculty in biology were active as publishing scholars. But they were also devoted teachers in the way that we’re so proud of at Emory. The courses I took were small, and I was a bottomless pit of learning. The culture of the department was one of community, in the finest sense. At that time, there may have been two dozen graduate students, including both master’s and PhD candidates, and about half that many faculty members. The faculty all seemed to have very good relationships with one another. They were youthful mostly, in their late thirties and forties. Dr. Woolford Baker was by far the oldest member. Almost without exception they were wonderful teachers, devoted to learning and to the scholarly life. That attitude spilled over onto the students. I don’t know whether that was characteristic of the whole University then, but there were certainly pockets like that. Chemistry had it, biochemistry and anatomy, religion. There was a self-perception by the faculty that they were among the best in the South, and their intention was to build a strong, respectable department. Not that anyone had any illusions that we were Harvard or Michigan, but in every way it was a fine experience. I finished my degree, unfortunately, in two and a half years, so I was just in my early twenties when I graduated. I say unfortunately, because I didn’t learn enough, didn’t do enough— I wasn’t deep enough. You started your career at Piedmont College, and then the University of Virginia. I had been deferred by my local draft board throughout my studies, from the time I was old enough to be drafted. They deferred me to go to graduate school and then deferred me again, somewhat reluctantly, to do postdoctoral studies at Princeton for a year. I promised them that the next year I would go do my duty in serving our nation. I was up at Woods Hole Biological Station the final summer of the year I spent at Princeton, and I received a call from the president of Piedmont, James Walters, saying that the college’s biology professor—my mentor—had resigned abruptly. He called me, desperate to find a replacement in late summer. I said, “Well, my draft board is expecting me. If you can get them to defer me again, I’ll come and teach for you.” So he called them, and they deferred me, and 114
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that’s how I came to teach there for a year. That year I managed to get permanently deferred from the draft because I had to have part of a lung removed. After that my draft board gave up on me! I also started looking for another job. I never intended to stay at Piedmont. I had gotten the bug for research, so my Emory mentors helped me get into Virginia, where I went for a stint in a program called the National Science Foundation Academic Year Institute. The program allowed high school teachers to return to college for renewal and some advanced study, and I taught the biology courses for that group of students, about twenty or so middle-aged teachers. I did that for three years, then, since it was a temporary position, and the department didn’t have an open slot in my field. I began looking for jobs elsewhere. In those days most universities were still growing rapidly because of the expansion that occurred after World War II. I received a call from the University of Michigan asking if I would be interested in applying for a job. My first reaction was not enthusiastic because I always thought I wanted to be in a small college, and I never expected to live north of the MasonDixon Line. I called Dr. Anthony Clement at Emory, one of the most distinguished members of the faculty, who had become a close friend. I said I’d had this call from Michigan and that I didn’t know anything about Michigan—should I go interview for the job? There was silence on the phone. He was a man of enormous grace and decorum, but after a minute, he exploded, “Frye, you damned fool! The University of Michigan is one of the top five universities in biology in this country. Of course you shall go to the University of Michigan!” So I did, and thankfully I took that job and moved to Michigan. I didn’t think I would be there very long, imagining that after four or five years I would return to the South. But the University of Michigan, and Ann Arbor, turned out to be a wonderful place, and my wife, Elisa, and I stayed for twentyfive years.
You eventually became provost at Michigan. I became dean of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts in 1973 and served in that role for six years, after which I was named provost, and held that position until 1986, when I left to come to Emory. How did your move to Emory come about? Did Jim Laney seek you out? In a way he did. After I had been dean and provost at Michigan for a dozen years, I was feeling burned out and began to think I couldn’t do it much longer. I also felt that I couldn’t go back into the classroom; I had let my research slip and didn’t know whether I could pick up the thread of it and rebuild a credible research program. To be immodest about it, I had been reasonably successful in the administration at Michigan, but I was 115
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concerned about burning out and becoming a deadweight. My parents were getting older, and over the years I had responded to a few job inquiries from southern institutions that would have enabled us to live closer to them. But I ended up always feeling that I could not bear to leave Michigan. In fact, during that period, Jim Laney offered me a job as dean of Emory College. I gave that extraordinarily serious consideration, but again, I just couldn’t leave Michigan. That was how in love I was with the place. At that time Michigan was a huge, wonderful community. The pride we had in the institution! I couldn’t imagine giving up the friends I had there, or the institution. So with some embarrassment I finally called Dr. Laney and declined the offer. I thought I would probably never hear from him again. But a few years later I reached this burnout stage, and I began to make discreet inquiries about jobs in the Southeast. Because of my elderly parents and the notion of possibly coming back to northeast Georgia, I even started looking at some of the small colleges there. Although I had never wanted to be a president, I actually applied for the presidency of one. I didn’t get picked, and the head of the search firm called me up one day, and said simply, you scared them; they’re not ready for you. I think they thought I would come and try to turn them into a research university. Anyway, there was a trustee of that school who had some connection to Jim Laney and told Jim about my candidacy there. Jim, of course, remembered me, and I received a phone call from him. He says, I hear that you might actually be considering leaving Michigan now. I said, well, yeah. I was embarrassed because I thought he had caught me out. He said, well, I don’t have anything available right now except the deanship of the Graduate School. Would you come for that? I said I sure would. I’ve often wondered what he said to the search committee, but he intervened in some way, and they invited me down for an interview, and in the end I was hired for that job. I didn’t have the slightest idea at the time that this might lead to the provostship. But a couple of years later he called me into his office and looked at me with those penetrating eyes. He wanted me to take the job of academic vice president and provost.
You were the first person at Emory to have the title “provost,” were you not? Yes. I don’t recall why Jim decided to change it from simply “vice president for academic affairs” to “provost and vice president for academic affairs.” I may have suggested that because that was what the position was called at Michigan; if I was going to be the vice president for academic affairs, I wanted to have clear budget authority over the academic program—not financial, but budget authority—as I did at Michigan. To my mind, that was the chief distinction between a vice president for academic affairs and a provost. In the short two years that you were the graduate dean, what issues and challenges did you confront? Emory was not, at that time, very strong in graduate education in most fields. We had few nationally ranked programs. [Emory College dean] David Minter still had more to do in bringing the undergraduate program to the fore, especially in building faculty. But that goal of building graduate programs proved to be entirely compatible, so I always felt a tremendous complementarity in our respective goals. My relationship with David was wonderful. He knew as well as I did that any university with the aspirations of Emory had to be strong in graduate education. In an intellectual sense, the graduate school sets the tone of the institution. What was your priority as dean of the Graduate School? The first challenge was to make Emory more attractive to top graduate students. The financial support for graduate students was poor, comparatively speaking. We put together a budget 116
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that showed what we thought we would really need. I remember meeting with the trustees’ executive committee and telling them what it would take to bring Emory to the next step, and it was just an astounding number. Well, Jim Laney made the commitment and accomplished it, by golly! Within a very few years, we began to compete for the best students and to rise in the national rankings. We were able to do this because University revenues were still growing, mainly through growth in undergraduate tuition income, as well as the great Woodruff gift.
So in some ways, the income from the College paid for the growth and strengthening of the Graduate School. Yes, but most of the benefit flowed back to the College, too. Strong graduate programs are essential to recruit and retain strong faculty, and that redounds to the benefit of the independent programs and to the reputation of the University. In the College discussions about building the graduate programs, I don’t recall any resistance, just skepticism that we could really do it. But we did it. The other big challenge in developing the Graduate School was administrative. Until I became provost, Emory had not distinguished “budget” from “finance.” The chief financial officer had more influence over academic priorities than I thought was appropriate, and he was not very enthusiastic about the Graduate School. Later we changed things to make it clear that the provost has primary responsibility for academic priorities, but it took an enormous amount of time and effort to overcome that resistance. The Graduate School still needed a lot more support, but other opportunities in professional and graduate education needed attention, most obviously the Business School and the aboutto-emerge School of Public Health. Why we didn’t have a public health school here many years before we did is a mystery to me, given the presence of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Emory’s doorstep. Bill Foege [Presidential Distinguished Professor Emeritus and former CDC director] was very helpful in pushing that through. Likewise, the business school, because of the strength of the Atlanta business community, was way overdue to move up to the next step. What was the budget-setting practice when you became provost, and how did it change? President Laney or [Executive Vice President] John Temple had already established a series of annual budget conferences, in which each dean would present his or her budget. I started working with the deans to evaluate and eventually approve their proposed budgets before they were brought to the University Budget Committee, and hopefully thereby have some influence on them. After that, I began scheduling and chairing an annual budget conference with each dean. It was about that time that I also set up the University Priorities Committee of faculty, because I wanted the faculty to feel more engaged in decision making. I made it a practice to present the budget to them every year and let them react to it before it was final. In this way, the budget setting became a more open process. This grew out of my experience at the University of Michigan, where I created a committee called the Budget Priorities Committee, which played a major role in helping me evaluate all of the schools and colleges for the purpose of cutting budgets in response to state funding cuts. In some ways I learned that it’s easier to cut and set priorities during a budget crisis than it is during perceived plenty, when nobody sees why you need to take from them and give to someone else. You once said that right after the Woodruff gift, in the early 1980s, you could have spread money just about anywhere at Emory and made a positive difference. At a certain point, though, you need to begin making more selective advances, because the pool of money won’t spread as deep and far. How did you begin to sort that out, so that in time 117
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it became clear that the Geology Department and the Library School needed to be phased out? What led to the selective strengthening or, in some cases, selective elimination of programs? No university—not even the wealthiest—can afford to do everything and do it well. While Emory’s fortunes were rising dramatically, we were far from the wealthiest! By the time I became provost, the budget was already not growing fast enough to meet the legitimate needs of the schools, especially in the arts and sciences. That included the Graduate School and certain other units, particularly the University libraries. Although our theology library had jumped into the top ranks because of Jim Laney’s acquisition of the Hartford Seminary Collection, the Woodruff Library at that point was hardly more than a good liberal arts college library in most areas, surely not a first-class university library. So we had to invest a lot more there. In addition we were on the threshold of having to invest a lot in academic computing, and in the development of some of the professional schools. It was clear that if we were going to continue to develop in the arts and sciences in the way we wanted, we were going to have to give up some things. We knew we could not excel in everything, and would need to cut back on some areas in order to improve others. So, after careful review, we decided to eliminate the Division of Library Sciences. It was not a bad program. But having been heavily involved in library affairs nationally, I knew something about library schools and knew what it was going to take to become competitive. It was obvious that Emory would never be nationally distinguished in this field unless we invested at least three or four times what we were already investing in that program, and that was not in the cards, given all of our other, higher-priority needs. The same judgment was reached about geology. It is a very important basic science, and we have to have an undergraduate program in it. But it would have taken a large injection of new funds to make that department competitive nationally. What led to your involvement in the libraries on a national level? A clever librarian. When I became provost at Michigan, Harold Shapiro, the president, who had preceded me as provost, wanted me to continue his involvement with a library consortium that included Harvard, Yale, Michigan, and Stanford. It comprised librarians and presidents of these and some other major universities, who tried to find ways of cooperating and sharing the cost of things that were rapidly escalating beyond the means of any individual institution. About the same time, the librarian at Michigan, Dick Daugherty, nominated me for a couple of national boards and committees, and I was appointed to them. Later he confided that he did that with malice aforethought, because he felt the more I knew about the libraries, the better off he would be, and he was quite right! I sometimes think that my work with libraries was the most significant work I did in my whole career, because initially I was among the very few academic officers working with librarians to try to bring about collaboration among them. For reasons that are complicated, they could not make much progress in this regard without the support of their provosts and presidents. I knew, and still know, little or nothing about the actual operations of libraries, but I was able to help keep the potential benefits of collaboration continually before these groups, and perhaps to reassure them that they were not in this alone. I became “Little Johnny-OneNote,” repeating on every possible occasion, “We have to share, we must collaborate, we can’t go on, each trying to buy all the books in the world.” Faculties of great universities are very jealous of their libraries, and change is often resisted and can imperil the careers of librarians. But gradually, things have changed. When I came to Emory I was on two or three national boards, among them the Commission on Preservation, which I chaired for ten years. The commission successfully lobbied Congress to authorize funding to microfilm one copy of each of a large fraction of the books held in our libraries, which were rapidly crumbling into dust because they had been printed on acidic 118
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paper. We also lobbied for a shift to the use of acid-free paper in future publication. Very soon, the emphasis shifted to computers and digital information rather than paper.
Your personal investment and your willingness to invest institutional resources in some ways pushed Emory ahead in the library world. When I came, I recruited a new head of the libraries, Joan Gotwals. As soon as she came from Penn, I asked her to get involved, and that put us into the council of these elite institutions that I had been involved with. That connection proved to be invaluable, and together with Jim Laney’s large investment in the library and later Bill Chace’s continued investments, that opened doors and brought us national recognition. Our ability to move ahead in the library was a consequence of several factors. Foremost, of course, was the outstanding leadership of Joan, the strong connections with the academic library community, and our ability to provide her with adequate funding at a time when others were experiencing major declines in purchasing power. Second, being less burdened with traditional “baggage,” such as a commitment to huge purchasing budgets, we were able to invest more in academic computing as a means of accessing information, then were able to move ahead gradually while others were struggling just to keep afloat. After Jim Laney became the United States ambassador to South Korea, you served for a year as interim president and then continued as provost for part of Bill Chace’s presidency. When I came to Emory my rather vague “plan” was to work for about five years and then retire and go trout fishing! But when Bill Chace came as president, I did not want to walk out and leave him in the lurch, so to speak. Perhaps that sounds a bit arrogant, but I did not want to leave until he had been there a while and had had an opportunity to build his own administrative staff. So, when he asked me to stay on, I agreed, but told him of my intentions to retire soon. After that, for a couple of years I kept reminding him of this occasionally, but he kept asking me to stay on a while. This was flattering, of course, but eventually I wrote him a formal letter of resignation. I was completely taken by surprise when Bill responded by offering me the position of chancellor. My understanding is that this offer came about because he asked Joe Crooks, then Emory’s general counsel, to come up with an arrangement that would give me the option of staying on in an advisory capacity part-time. Joe remembered that the University bylaws contained a provision for the position of chancellor, which had been created by the board of trustees in 1915. After that, the title remained on the books, though it was rarely used [only for retired University presidents like Harvey Cox and Goodrich White]. Joe suggested to Bill that I be named chancellor, and Bill in turn proposed it to the trustees, who approved it. The gesture was exceedingly kind and generous, and I continue to feel grateful for it. I was never made to feel that it was done as a way of putting me out to pasture (which would have been unnecessary in any case, since I was the one who was insisting upon retiring!), and it gave me the chance to continue to be engaged in University affairs, on a more limited, lower-pressure basis. Perhaps it was useful for Emory and President Chace, too, insofar as it gave him a way of using me in an advisory capacity, but I cannot be the judge of that. In any case it was a kind thing to do, and I appreciated it deeply. But if I am completely honest I have to say that however well intended, I think perhaps it was a mistake in some ways. Among universities, the titles of president and chancellor are sometimes used synonymously, or nearly so, and I felt that the use of both titles at Emory would inevitably result in some confusion, especially on the part of people who were not familiar with our particular history. Since the duties of the position of chancellor are nowhere spelled out, there is an inherent and potentially confusing ambiguity about just what the role of the chancellor is. There really is not a clear job there, and since above all I wanted in no manner to get in the way of the president, it 119
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sometimes felt a bit awkward to me. But Bill was always gracious and never gave me any reason for that feeling. We met at least weekly to discuss whatever issues were weighing most heavily on his mind. He asked me to undertake special projects from time to time. For example, one year I wrote a paper on the pros and cons of affirmative action for him. Another time I chaired the planning committee for “The Year of Reconciliation” on behalf of Provost Rebecca Chopp, and I also began having weekly meetings with her after she was appointed to that position. And thus it went. I formed the impression that for both Bill and Rebecca the most useful part of my job as chancellor was our weekly meetings and discussions— perhaps the opportunity to talk through troublesome issues freely and off the record.
You wrote “Choices and Responsibility,” a rather substantial pamphlet subtitled “Shaping Emory’s Future,” and published in 1994. This turned out to get considerable traction among the community as a statement of the values of the University—balancing teaching and research; building stronger community; encouraging interdisciplinary scholarship; keeping pace with infrastructure needs; and enhancing Emory’s external relationships. When you wrote that, were you still provost? I was acting president. That year, as I recall, I started the faculty discussions that led to “Choices and Responsibility.” That year, 1993–1994, you were acting president as well as provost. Right. As I told people, if they were looking for the provost I was the president, and if they were looking for the president I was the provost. It worked pretty well. What was the impetus for “Choices and Responsibility”? Where did it get its genesis? Jim Laney had become ambassador to Korea and was gone, and with that his strong leadership. We were in a holding pattern, and I felt that we needed to have some sense of direction, lest we go adrift. I also had the strong feeling that we needed to evolve toward greater faculty participation in University governance. Those two things led to this initiative. The lunchtime conversations that you had with various faculty groups that year provided the fodder. It was the best way I could think of to get some sense of the faculty’s needs and aspiration. At the same time, it seemed to be an opportunity to begin to meld the very disparate, almost factionalized faculty into a more coherent community and promote some sense of shared goals. This process was set up to help us start to see what we next needed at Emory to build on the remarkable Laney years, and for the University to make the whole flourish more. The piece that followed it, “A Vision for Emory,” is a values piece, really. I still firmly believe that the right way to plan is not merely to set budgeting parameters. That kind of plan never lasts. The future is just too uncertain. But what you can decide is what matters most, and then you can have all your deans and department chairs begin to make decisions based upon these understandings. One of the most important things about “Choices and Responsibility,” in my mind, was that the deans all voluntarily signed a letter stating that they were party to it. I think people began to get a certain sense of shared purpose. You can push that only so far, of course. But I think it’s important and has an impact. It did seem that the campus picked up the language of “Choices and Responsibility” and began to use it constructively. It sure did, and thanks should go to Bill Chace for that. He never lost an opportunity to refer to that document. It was just incredible how consistently he did that. He could have squelched it. He did quite the opposite, and I was enormously grateful to him. 120
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It had been a while since the Woodruff gift and the priorities that were set following it, and people were starting to talk about what should come next. Did you have a sense as provost that the University needed not only to reaffirm its values and direction but also to get another financial shot in the arm? Was this document of yours the foundation for a campaign? I cannot recall whether a capital campaign was a specific part of the motivation behind “Choices and Responsibility.” It may have been, because we always need more money, and you have to start your next campaign before the last one is done. But leading a campaign was the remotest thing from my mind. When you look back on “Choices and Responsibility” and “A Vision for Emory,” do you see particular successes that have evolved from them, or particular gaps where the University didn’t follow through? I had a sense that the ideas were being picked up rather widely, but I can’t tell you what the actual impact was. At the time I felt very positive about how willingly people seemed to pick it up. I knew there were skeptics who had their doubts about the merit of the exercise. Nonetheless, a lot of people were far more positive and far more hopeful as a result of it. One last question: The teacher who came to your home to get you—did she live long enough to see you become chancellor of Emory? Unfortunately, no. Her name was Elizabeth Sawyer. She was a New Englander from Maine, and I sometimes thought she must have come South as a missionary! She received her PhD at the University of Missouri and came to Piedmont the same year I did, almost as if sent by Providence. Her attitude, her outlook, her standards were the very ones I found when I got to fine universities. It was under her tutelage that I learned to think in a scientific way. She didn’t just deliver information. She worked through problems, formed and tested hypotheses. She was a wonderful person and a mentor, a motherly figure to me. She died of breast cancer while I was at the University of Virginia. She was a rare lady to whom I have felt indebted all my life. It’s funny how one little thing sets your path, but without her, I never would have pursued this career. Before her, I vaguely thought I wanted to be a horticulturist or a high school teacher. I went to Truett McConnell College in Cleveland, Georgia, as a freshman and sophomore, and came to Piedmont as a junior. A few weeks into classes she called me in and said, “You have to go to graduate school.” I had never heard of graduate school. “Have you had French?” “No.” “Have you had German?” “No.” The little colleges that I attended were just struggling to survive, and to be honest the curricula at that time were very spotty and weak. So she quickly set up a two-year plan to fill in as many gaps in my background as possible, so I could be admitted to some graduate school. Then, in my senior year, she told me to pick some places where I would be interested in doing graduate work, and she would start writing letters. She got me into several, including, as I recall, Cornell and the University of Illinois, as well as Emory. Eventually, after the false start at Illinois, I chose Emory, and I’ve never regretted the choice!
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David Minter Reflects on Years of Growth and Change in Emory College David Minter served as dean of Emory College and vice president for arts and sciences from 1980 until 1990. Before coming to Emory at the invitation of President James Laney, Minter completed his doctorate at Yale and was professor of English at Rice University. His area of academic specialty is American literature. Sally Wolff King interviewed him on December 5, 2008, at his home in Houston, Texas.1
Before coming to Emory you had established a career as scholar, teacher, and highly respected member of the Rice University community in your home state of Texas. What attracted you to the deanship of Emory College? I wanted to go where I could make a difference. I thought I could do some good at Emory, and I liked Emory immediately. Emory was not a pretentious place but a very inviting one. I had been at other places where they talked big and did little, but Emory was not like that. Caroline and I felt at home there; I have never regretted the decision. How were you recruited? Tom Bertrand [J. Thomas Bertrand, secretary of the University from 1978 to 1991] was the first person to mention me to Jim [Laney]. Jim had been at Yale Divinity School when Caroline and I were there as I was finishing my PhD at Yale. We also had personal connections to Emory. [Former associate dean] Garland Richmond had been at North Texas State University, where I had finished my undergraduate degree. Caroline’s father had been born in Georgia, so she had some roots here. Jim came to Houston and took us to dinner. He was very persuasive! He was determined to make Emory a very fine place, and I felt convinced that he was going to do it. I wanted to be a part of what he was trying to do. Ultimately he gave me a chance to do things I wanted to do but never thought I would do, and that’s very inviting.2 You spent years at Yale and Rice. Did those institutions, which have strong residential college traditions, provide you with collegiate models when you were building Emory College? Yale had a lot to do with forming me and meant a lot to me, but no, I did not have those schools as models in my mind at that time.
David Minter
How did you work with President Laney and other members of his senior staff? It’s not always easy for very strong-minded people to work cordially and effectively together, unless they have a lot in common. Jim Laney seemed to have almost immediate respect for and confidence in me. Almost from the start, we understood each other; we found it easy to work together. I learned a lot from him and am proud of what we accomplished. He is maybe the finest person I have ever known in my life. 122
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Jim wanted to do as much as he possibly could do. I learned from him to think about things I wanted to undertake, plan how I would want them done, and know what should be done to accomplish them. Then I would go to him. He listened and was always open-minded. Sometimes we modified the plans.
What did you and Jim Laney have in common? Faith. That made a lot of difference. By faith, I mean—some of it is religious. My father was a Methodist minister. That made it easier for Jim and me; we spoke the same language. We did not always see eye to eye on everything, but I respected him enormously, and I felt blessed to be working with him overall. Were there instances in which you and the president disagreed about priorities or directions, and if so, did you try to persuade him to take a different tack? He was always responsive to the suggestions I made. Of course, I didn’t tell him what to do—ever—but he paid attention. He listened to me carefully and respected me. He never made promises he didn’t keep. What was the administrative and governance relationship of the College and the Graduate School? Did you do anything to change it? We did a lot to change and improve it. Jim and I were on the same wavelength about it. I think we made a lot of progress. Both the College and the Graduate School were the stronger for it. Emory was a local place when I arrived; it was a more national university later. The Woodruff money made it possible for us to do things that we had not done before. What faculty appointments are you the most proud of? James Flannery in theater. Bradd Shore in anthropology. Dennis Liotta in chemistry. He’s always full of energy and good to work with. His recent accomplishments in helping to discover and patent the leading HIV drug, Emtriva, are remarkable, but I’m not surprised to learn of them. I also hired Betsey Fox-Genovese [the founding director of women’s studies] and am proud of that hire and was sorry to learn of her death. I also hired Don Verene [now Candler Professor of Philosophy] and recruited [former Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Chemistry] Isiah Warner from Texas A&M. You were the first dean to be named vice president for arts and sciences. That title was not given to me when I first came there. Jim gave that title to me after I had done good work on several matters. What steps did you take to strengthen Emory College? I gave deliberate attention to two areas. The first was the scholarships fund, which was rebuilt to help redefine the student body. Massive infusions of funds into scholarships enabled Emory College to recruit more diverse and more talented students in an intensely competitive market. We strengthened the regional identity of the College, which then drew 50 percent of its students from the Southeast, and at the same time diversified, with nearly 10 percent of its students from each of the other five regions of the country. Achieving greater ethnic diversity was more difficult, and I could tell that it would require further initiative. What faculty improvements came about during your tenure as dean? The College faculty grew by more than a hundred positions.3 The faculty became more and more able, ambitious, and centered on what they were doing. While I could see that we still had considerable room for growth and improvement, the College when I left it was on the 123
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verge of having a faculty of national distinction. Several small departments had achieved distinctiveness, and some of the large departments held a major place nationally.
What other initiatives do you recall from the 1980s? We upgraded the computer technology of the College from a few dedicated word processors to hundreds of terminals and several labs, all linked by cable network. We established the Freshman Seminar Program [later called Freshman Advising and Mentoring at Emory, or FAME] and instituted new academic programs in women’s studies, classical studies, Latin American and Caribbean studies, Soviet and East European studies (now the Center for Russian and East European Studies), film and writing, a new Department of Theater Studies, and the African Studies Institute. We received major grants from the Luce, Hughes, Mellon, and Dana foundations for faculty and program development. Major funding dedicated by the University for program enhancement in the College resulted in enhancement of the Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Program, support of new programs in the arts, and equipping major research laboratories in physics and chemistry. The College also assembled some of the strongest faculty in the nation in southern studies.4 What was your impression of the students at the time of your departure as dean? I felt proud of the students. We worked for and saw a rapid rise in Emory’s recruiting better and better students. They, in turn, worked harder and harder. They excelled academically. They won forty national fellowships in the last five years of my time at Emory. The graduates took a new pride in the College. What challenges did you see ahead of Emory at the time of your departure? First of all, Emory needed to fuel further growth to retain the quality of both faculty and students and to fulfill the promise that faculty had come to expect. Second, Emory College faced difficult choices in establishing priorities for the budget because it needed to decrease dependency on tuition income and establish new sources of income. Third, the University needed to find ways of building the arts and sciences in a coherent way, so that neither the College nor the Graduate School would succeed at the expense of the other, and priorities would be weighed judiciously. The risk was that the College would lose economic viability and institutional integrity. Why did you decide to leave Emory? After a time, I felt I had done everything I could do there. [And] I felt uncomfortable teaching there after the deanship.
Wearing Two Hats in the Arts and Sciences: Interview with George H. Jones George H. Jones joined the Emory faculty in 1989 as dean of the Graduate School and vice president for research. Previously he had served as dean of the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan. During the 1990–91 academic year he served also as interim dean of Emory College. He has also served as chair of the Biology Department and currently holds the position of Goodrich C. White Professor of Biology. His research interests include the biochemistry and evolution of RNA processes.5
Your first year as dean of the Graduate School and vice president for research was also David Minter’s last year as dean of Emory College, and the following year you were 124
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asked to serve simultaneously as interim dean of the College while a search was on for a new College dean. How did you manage that double load? I would spend three days one week in the College and two days in the Graduate School, and then two days the next week in the College and three days in the Graduate School. I did that for a year. I was also vice president for research during that time. That was a new position. It was. I really was the vice president for research in the arts and sciences, because I had very little contact with or influence over the medical school or any of the other professional schools. So to the extent that I was vice president for research, it primarily was the College and Graduate School that I had responsibility for. What was that responsibility? One of the major responsibilities was that the Office of Sponsored Programs, some of whose activities included the medical school, was under my oversight. One thing we were clearly trying to do during that time was to increase Emory’s research capacity, primarily in garnering additional extramural funding. It was during those years that we first topped the $100 million mark in extramural resources. That was one of the targets established by President Laney in his “Emory 2000” address of 1987. That’s right, and we actually reached that landmark well before 2000. What did you see as your charge and your goals in that interim year as College dean? There were several things apparent to me. As you say, there had been tremendous growth in the College, but there was also a fair amount of anxiety among many College faculty because of what they perceived as a change in the mission of the College, away from primarily teaching, to teaching and research. A number of people felt they had been brought here under one set of conditions and now were expected to meet a different set of criteria. So one thing that I felt I needed to do during that year was allay some of those concerns and to try to make people feel that they were valued for their contributions—that in fact the environment might be changing, but that didn’t mean that they were any less important to the College and to their departments. One way that I tried to do that was by a series of luncheons that brought people together from across departments in the College, so that they could talk to each other and get some sense of their shared anxieties, their shared aspirations, some sense that we valued what they were doing. It was also an opportunity for them to sound out to you, because you were part of the luncheon conversations. That’s right, I was. One of the other major things that we did during that year was primarily with the assistance of Irwin Hyatt and Rosemary Magee. We started to take a hard look at faculty salaries, and it was reasonably clear that there were some significant inequities. Although we weren’t able to address all of those within that year, we began to make some significant headway. 125
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Were they gender inequities, rank inequities, inequities among disciplines, or salaries below the market? Essentially all of the above. There were problems within departments, there were problems across departments; faculty who had been at the University for the same period of time, had essentially the same records qualitatively, who were making significantly more or less than someone in another department who looked the same. We tried to deal with some of those issues during that year, and I think we made some progress. One year is a very quick time to make that up, but from your perspective as graduate dean for another five years or so, did you see some of those inequities begin to close? I think so. David Bright continued to address those issues once he became dean. One of the other strong supporters for doing those things was Billy Frye. Billy was very interested in what was going on in the College. When I first came to Emory I wanted to meet with the faculty in every department in the Graduate School. Billy went with me to most of those meetings, and that was the first time he had met with faculty in some departments. I remember very clearly when we met with theater studies, and Billy knew those people—Alice Benston and Jim Flannery and others—but he had never really met with them as a faculty. Billy came away from that meeting with a much more positive feeling for the quality of the people in the department, the quality of their program, and the quality of the contribution they were making to the College. That translated into support from Billy when I came to him as dean of the College and said we need to do something to bring up faculty salaries in theater studies. Did you have leverage or authority as interim dean of the College that you wouldn’t have had as graduate dean solely? Yes, because, of course, as graduate dean I didn’t hire or fire any faculty. Even as interim dean of the College I was in position to make decisions on faculty hiring. The year that I was interim dean we hired something like twenty or twenty-five new faculty. Any hires you are particularly proud of? If I remember correctly, our first shot at Walter Melion was during my year as interim dean. Another strong hire during that year was Carlos Alonso, in Spanish. Was there any anxiety among the faculty about having the dean of the Graduate School serve as interim dean of the College? I don’t remember any anxiety about my wearing both hats. I tried to communicate to all of the constituencies that I was going to try to be as fair as possible, whichever hat I might be wearing at the time. What there was anxiety about was the simple issue of what was going to happen with regard to leadership in the College. There were times when I needed to make decisions when faculty felt that maybe those decisions should be postponed until there was somebody in position who didn’t have “interim” in front of their name. My feeling was that as long as I was dean of the College, I was supposed to be able to do whatever a dean needed to do in those circumstances. For example, one of the things I had to do during that year was to remove at least one person from a chair’s position. That was a responsibility I had as dean of the College, interim or not. At no point did I feel that I was just a caretaker. Of course, until the ultimate decision was made, there was always at least the formal possibility that I might have become a candidate for the position permanently. If you had done that, do you imagine that the president and the provost might have considered bringing the two arts and sciences deanships into one? 126
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There was never any discussion of that, interestingly enough, despite the fact that I wore both hats for a year. I would have opposed combining the deanships permanently then, I think, in the same way that I opposed it subsequently. I would have been concerned that even a wellmeaning “super dean” would not have been able to give the Graduate School the kind of attention it needed if it was going to grow and develop.
In your year of interim deanship, did you bring the two staffs together at any time? We did. We would meet together, maybe once or twice a month. It was as much as anything so that people could know what was happening on the other side of the plaza. But we didn’t really accomplish very much in terms of integration of the College and the Graduate School as a result of trying to do that. What was your mode of setting priorities, establishing the goals during that interim year, and communicating with the faculty? It was my sense that we needed to make some strategic choices in building departments and programs. That wouldn’t necessarily mean that we wouldn’t have a department of underwater basket weaving, but it would mean that it would not get the same sort of attention that English would get, or biology or chemistry. That has to be true where the size of the pie is finite. Not everybody will or should get the same-size slice. There was concern in some people that they weren’t going to get anything at all, that they basically were going to be just left to flounder, and if they succeeded by using their own devices, that would be fine, but if they didn’t, nobody really cared. I had to try to allay people’s fears that at least during the time I was at the helm, that wasn’t going to be the case. To give you an example, we had a chairs retreat, and at the end of it I asked people to pick three departments into which they would invest resources, but they couldn’t choose their own department. This was after they had actually heard the reports of the other chairs. It was really gratifying to see the chairs respond in ways that at least suggested that, based upon the kind of information that they had been given, they were able to appreciate the contributions that other departments, sometimes departments very different from theirs, could make to the College. Did that help to inform the way you actually constructed the budget? It did. What I tried to do, again, was, within our constraints, to provide the kind of resources that would help people feel they were making a valuable contribution to the College while we also invested in areas where we had the best chance of growing to national stature. Were there any programs you started in the College during that interim year? We started our first Asian languages class—I think it was Japanese. That was something we needed to do. Any things that you’re particularly proud of in terms of both of your deanships? I’m very proud of starting the TATTO program6 as graduate dean. One thing I was able to do during the year I was wearing both hats was to learn a lot not only about Emory but about how universities work. So one thing I think I was able to do, during that year and thereafter, was to foster the growth of departments and programs in terms of their undergraduate mission and in terms of graduate education. People were valued not only for their undergraduate teaching but also for their contributions to graduate education, and those contributions were going to pay dividends in an increase in quality of the graduate programs and their ability to attract very strong graduate students. They were also going add visibility to Emory as a locus for intellectual activities. We were able, as a result, to do some things that 127
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led to achieving those objectives. For example, one of the factors that contributed to Emory being elected to the Association of American Universities was the increase in the quality and visibility of our graduate programs. I never felt that graduate and undergraduate education were in conflict, but I had a better sense of the ways in which both the Graduate School and the College needed to act and react to the departments and programs to make sure that they didn’t feel that way either.
Did your experience in that year inform your later work with David Bright? David and I had a very good working relationship. There were certainly issues that came up during his time as dean of the College and my time as dean of the Graduate School where our cooperation was not only desirable but absolutely necessary. Can you give an example? One was a situation in women’s studies that arose from some conflicts in terms of leadership. Women’s studies was a College department, but I had made some appointments in women’s studies using resources in the Graduate School. So the issue needed to be resolved by both deans. And while not everybody agreed with our resolution, we ultimately did resolve the situation in a fashion that I think left people reasonably unscarred. At the same time you were dean, you were a vice president and therefore part of the president’s senior staff. Did that inform your perspective? It certainly did, but I think the most important outcome of my being a vice president and being able to sit with the president’s staff was that I was able to keep the interests of the Graduate School on the table. Although Jim Laney and Billy Frye were committed to the growth and development of graduate education at Emory, I’m not sure that there were a whole lot of other people who shared that vision, at least not without some additional prodding. Over time, other people around the table did come to share it. Charlie Hatcher [executive vice president for health affairs], for example. That really helped in terms of our being able to get the kind of resources, both human and fiscal, that were necessary to move the Graduate School forward. One anecdote to support that notion, on one of the trustees’ retreats Coleman Budd [Business 1950, former alumni trustee] asked all of the deans to name something that didn’t cost money that the trustees could do to assist the deans in discharging our responsibilities. I remember clearly that I wasn’t prepared for that question, and I didn’t answer it very effectively, but the year that I stepped down as dean, I asked Bill Chace to allow me to meet with the Executive Committee of the board, and I told that story. I said, I’m prepared to give you a better answer now. The answer is that the value of the Graduate School at Emory needs to continue to be appreciated by all in the community, including the board of trustees. And graduate education, as an enterprise that contributes to the quality of this intellectual environment, needs to continue to be high on the list of Emory’s priorities. Since 1990 the scope of PhD programs has grown well beyond arts and sciences, into nursing, public health, and business. As the Graduate School grew and developed during your deanship, did the staff in the graduate school keep pace, or did you feel stretched? Were the resources there to build administratively? I think that we had more than a reasonable number of staff to do the kinds of things that we needed to do in the Graduate School, particularly in terms of the deanery. During all my time as dean there were at least three assistant or associate deans, and I was able, therefore, to divide the various responsibilities among those people in ways that allowed us to get all the day-to-day administrative things done but also allowed us to do some of the more intellectual kinds of things that I thought we were primarily to be about as a graduate school: things like 128
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organizing workshops and symposia. Putting TATTO together, for example, was a responsibility shared by essentially all the people in the deanery at that point. All of those things I was able to do because of both the quality and the quantity of the staff that I had.
Is there any way in which your perspective on your deanship has deepened or been enriched after going back into the College as a regular faculty member? It is certainly the case, beyond a shadow of a questionable doubt, that my time as a faculty member, my time as chair of biology, was made easier as a result of the knowledge I gained during my time in the College and Graduate School administration. I learned a lot about how not only Emory but other universities work, and that has been extremely helpful to me as both a faculty member and a chair. Knowing what buttons to push, but also knowing what buttons not to push. We lived in an environment for a number of years when, if you wanted something as a faculty member, you went to the top, to the president. That’s just not the way you do it, and I think you have to understand, in order to be successful ultimately, not only what buttons to push but also what buttons not to push. Overall, what is your impression of the progress of the College at this point? I’m very pleased about where we appear to be right now. I think we have a reasonable and viable vision for the University. Nevertheless, I am concerned that within the last decade or so we missed some opportunities and, having missed those, are not as far along as a university, as a college, or a graduate school, as we might be. We should have started another capital campaign a long time ago, as soon as we finished the previous one in 1995. Have we missed intellectual opportunities apart from what might have been possible with additional funding? Are there people we missed out on hiring, or programs that we should have gotten under way sooner, partnerships that we let slip? We certainly missed some hiring opportunities; as to whether or not, had we been able to attract those people, it would have made a significant difference, it’s hard to know. There are probably a lot of other institutions that are going to say the same thing, so I’m not sure that that makes us any worse off than anybody else. On the other hand, we’ve made some fairly spectacular hires as well, so that’s something we can be proud of and gratified by. To give you just an anecdote, my first year as chair of biology, the dean authorized two searches, one in computational neuroscience and the other in evolutionary genetics. I was happy that he was willing to do that, so we went through the regular search process and advertised and beat the bushes and brought people in. We have a stunning—absolutely stunning—set of candidates, so that out of the half dozen or so people we brought in, we would have been thrilled to have gotten any one of them. I called the dean and said we have a real chance to move forward; you’ve authorized us to fill two positions, one in each area; I’d like to bring in two people in each of those areas. He said yes. Unfortunately, we were only able to bring in two in one of those two areas, but those two people were Astrid Prince and Robert Liu, both of whom have gotten off to a running start. I’m happy that we have taken another look at the curriculum. Unlike many other faculty who hoped that we would chisel those rules in stone and never have to look at them again, my feeling was that it was not only desirable to look at them again, it was necessary. As times change, our curriculum is going to have to change, too, and we’re going to have to revisit these changes every few years. I’m also very pleased that the University has continued to provide the resources to allow the College faculty to grow. It has been the case for a number of years that our faculty was too small to accomplish all the things we needed to accomplish to be a top-twenty-five university. Continued faculty growth is tremendous and exactly the thing that we need. 129
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But let me tell you something that I’m concerned about in terms of the College. I made the argument over a decade ago that Emory was, probably unconsciously, committed to becoming a more diverse institution primarily by becoming more international. I think we continue to see evidence of that, so I am concerned that there are as few minority faculty as there are in Emory College, and that there are as few minority undergraduates as there are in Emory College. That’s something I think we still have a ways to go to address. We still don’t have Division I basketball, but there’s nothing I can do about that.
Bright Years David F. Bright is professor of classics and comparative literature, emeritus. A native of Canada, he earned a BA degree from the University of Manitoba in 1962 and completed his MA (1963) and PhD (1967) at the University of Cincinnati. An award-winning teacher and classics scholar, he came to Emory with more than a decade of administrative experience and served as vice president for arts and sciences and dean of Emory College for six years. After concluding his work as dean, he returned to the classroom but later stepped back into his administrative harness for terms as chair of the Department of Classics and codirector of the Comparative Literature Program. In 2006 Emory awarded him the George P. Cuttino Medal for Distinction in Mentoring.
You arrived at Emory in 1991, as vice president of arts and sciences and dean of Emory College. At that point, George Jones, who was dean of the Graduate School, also had been acting dean of the College for the second year of the search. Yes. He and I were the Bobbsey twins of arts and sciences for those first few years. I had been at the University of Illinois for nearly two decades, and in my last year there I had been the interim dean of arts and sciences on the Urbana-Champaign campus. Then in 1989 I became dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State and served there until I came to Atlanta in 1991. So a lot of your career before coming to Emory had been at state institutions. That’s correct. I did my graduate work at the University of Cincinnati. I taught at Williams College for three years, so my career had been at four very different sorts of places, in both size and mission. The transition to Emory from the perspective of both size and resources must have been an inviting challenge. It was. The scale of the campus is just about a third the size of the Urbana campus. But on the other hand, there were still resources available to be deployed, whereas in the giant public institutions, the crunch had already begun. Then, too, so much of the scientific side of the Urbana campus is distinguished. There was great pressure to preserve eminence rather than either achieve it for the first time or regain it where it had slipped. So that left a very delicate balancing act in terms of where we could put resources. On the other hand, it gave me a much clearer idea of what an emergency looks like, and that turned out to be helpful in several ways. So when I came to Emory, the scale of the operation was smaller and the sense of ambition was quite strong, but the definition of that ambition was very hazy. It was a bit like a general Olympic motto: higher, faster, stronger. But in what? And with what? Everything that David Minter had achieved in the eighties, which was the Sutter’s Mill moment of the University, had changed the landscape and the rules, so I wasn’t stepping into the job he had had. But it was not yet clear what job I was stepping into. Part of 130
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the job was to define it and then do it. I had to set my own exam and then take it and do well in both setting and taking, which really did make it an enormously attractive prospect. Into that mix, the personal involvement of President Laney and his sense of the role of the arts and sciences as the heart of the institution meant that there was an appreciation of the importance of getting things done. That fit into both a sense of responsibility and, within limits, a sense of empowerment. Billy Frye shared that notion of where the arts and sciences were going.
You had the title of vice president for arts and sciences as well as dean of the College. Did that make any difference in your relationship to the Graduate School or in what you felt empowered to do? Not really. There was one advantage to it, which was that I sat in on meetings of the trustees and in some cases contributed to those meetings, which meant that I was perhaps more conversant with what was happening, and why. It gave a context in which to assess a problem or opportunity. The other very valuable thing under Jim Laney was the Arts and Sciences Council, which met every week or two—the president, the provost, the dean of the College, and the dean of the Graduate School. That meant that I could meet with the president regularly and shape, refine, and define where the arts and sciences were in terms of institutional intentions and the view from the top. When you came, there had been tremendous growth—many faculty appointments, a larger student body. That’s correct. And the issue of faculty growth and assignment of resources was one of the key issues in the time I was dean. How did you establish priorities and determine where the areas of development and strengthening would be and why? The Arts and Sciences Council was certainly a place to which I would take ideas on a large scale. Within the College, there were at least three sources of advice. One was the senior staff of the College, that is, the three associate deans and three assistant deans. They were able to give perspectives on size, the faculty, the curriculum, and the students. One key question that emerged was the quality of advising, which in some departments was hindered because of too many majors for the number of faculty. One solution to that supply-and-demand problem is to take fewer majors, and the other one is get more faculty. You can imagine which the faculty opted for. From the faculty point of view, there was a real shift, as the definition of faculty responsibility focused more and more on published research. That has always been a piece of the expectation, but the center of gravity shifted quite strikingly in those years. As one faculty member famously said to me, how am I supposed to get anything done if I have to talk to students? Of course that translates into issues of research leave and teaching load. The teaching expectations were still felt to have been inherited from a simpler time, when teaching was job one and research job two. Now those David F. Bright 131
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roles had essentially been reversed in terms of selecting whom to recruit and where merit raises went, and how departments were assessed. It’s not that faculty don’t want to teach. Most faculty do want to teach. That’s the problem. One of the best teachers on this entire campus was due for some time off. I said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll reduce you to one course in the spring, and you’ll have the fall off, and that’s close to a year off.” She said, “Don’t do that; if I have one course, I’m a teacher, and I will put twice as much energy into that single course because I’m teaching. I love teaching, but I need time free to work on research.” So the yin and yang of teaching and research really was a tussle. In some departments— religion, history, psychology, for instance—research was an established fact and had been for a while. But they realized that the horizon is constantly receding, and so they needed to put more into it. But those are three great teaching departments as well. So they didn’t want to give up on the one, but they had to do the other, and it was just agonizing. It was even harder in departments entirely populated by faculty who had come in with 80 percent teaching, 19 percent student advising, and 1 percent research. They weren’t large enough to justify giving them more faculty lines at the expense of political science, where they were getting sixty students in their 400-level seminars. This was the resource problem: do we pull a weak department up to strength, or do we protect at whatever cost the premier departments of the college? We don’t have enough to do both. In the eighties at Emory, there were enough resources that you could play both games at once; in the nineties, there weren’t. That shift had already occurred when I arrived here. So setting priorities became trickier from day one. Faculty were mixed in their view of how it should happen and who should decide. So to come back to your question, one source of advice was the dean’s staff, one was the department chairs, and one—when I was feeling particularly in the mood for a bruising—were the faculty meetings. There was also the executive committee of the College. But it had reshaped its bylaws just the year before I arrived there, for a post-Minter world, to make sure that the dean did not have any effective power over the governance of the College from the faculty’s point of view. For example, it rested with the faculty and not with the dean to set the agenda for faculty meetings. I could call a meeting, but I could not set the agenda. They were quite open that the reason they had done this was that Dean Minter had had a rather more autocratic style for reasons that I can perfectly understand. His charge was, “Make a difference, make it now.” If it takes ten years to get change approved at all the levels of the community, you will not make that difference.
After you had gathered advice, how did you set priorities and implement them? I sat down with my associate deans and said, okay, you have feedback on your respective areas, you know everything that’s out there as well as I do, you are yourselves among the senior faculty. Here’s what you think we should do, here’s what I think we should do, and when we found common ground, that’s what went into the strategies and the budget. When the smoke clears and the dust settles, the dean has to send something to the president with his or her signature on it. That meant, of course, that the more opinions you invite, the more people’s opinions will not eventually be followed, and that has consequences as well. An interview of you appeared in Emory Magazine a year after you had come. In it you outlined three areas of development you felt Emory College needed: internationalization, the fine arts and performing arts, and environmental studies. Those certainly were on the short list. A fourth area was curricular reform. The General Education Requirements [GERs] loomed from the day I arrived here, and one of the things I took most satisfaction in was getting a reform of the GERs. Ironically, it is also the one thing that has caused most problems since then, because of the way everything else has evolved and 132
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because of the way it finally was shaped up by faculty governance. But that the faculty moved at all was very gratifying.
The curriculum recently has been refined again. Right. You wear the shoes for a while and find out where they hurt. Most of the curricular changes moved along fine. There was a real crunch on resources, though, and with relatively few courses that would meet the GERs, the faculty were finding themselves teaching courses they didn’t really want to teach. But the students had to take them. It is the constant evolution of expectations and possibilities, but that’s true of every college. Berkeley a few years ago announced that it was almost impossible for a student to graduate in four years, because the courses they would need for almost any major wouldn’t all be given in any given fouryear period. We had other kinds of difficulties, some related to more aggressive and successful pursuit of external support, which took people out on research leave. Even if you had a replacement, the chances that they would be able to do your specialty course might be small. So it was a stronger faculty, a more diversified faculty, a more active faculty, but a more pressed faculty in terms of playing the traditional role of strong undergraduate education and accessibility to students. Any faculty hires that you’re particularly proud of? A lot. Frances Foster [in English] comes to mind as maybe the franchise player of those that came and stayed. David Lynn [in chemistry]. Rudolph Byrd [in African American studies] was a significant arrival in matching the direction and fortunes of the College. As, for that matter, was Dwight Andrews [in music]. So much of that depended on the acuity, the geniality, the reliability, the perceptions of [Associate Dean] Irwin Hyatt, because his was the office to which all the candidates came. I talked to them if they were a final prospect for tenure, but he devoted a chunk of his time every year to French candidate number three, physics candidate number eleven, and so on. To come back to those three priorities—internationalization. One of the acorns that I was able to stick in the ground that has come out rather nicely was the whole study-abroad enterprise. When I arrived here, there was essentially nothing available during the year, and only a couple of programs over the summer, and while we thought it was a fine idea, most students didn’t feel either permitted or really encouraged to spend a semester away. A lot of course paths were sequential—fall and spring semester—so students ended up going during the summers, which really was not what they wanted. Or they went under the aegis of other institutions of varying quality and reliability, from which they received only the haziest of credit. So developing institutional allies out there, where you can use your passport and get credit back home for this course, solved this issue. Now the number of students abroad in a given year is many times what it was when we first started the Center for International Programs Abroad. Was there a need to shore up or redefine area studies programs—Latin American and Caribbean studies, for instance, and Russian and East European studies? That was an area of fairly intense tussling, because spending a semester in a location is not the same thing as being a major in a field related to the location. You may go to London because it’s the easiest way for you to do Japanese studies in a language you understand. If you go to Rome, you might work at John Cabot University in modern Italian, but it’s not the same thing as the Italian studies program here. Our area studies programs wanted to be able to redefine their mission to be driven by or drive the activities of the students who went to that country. Students, though, just wanted to get on a plane and go to Rome and not come back to discover that it doesn’t count toward graduation. CIPA was able to divorce those two 133
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questions in a way that we hadn’t been able to do before. The other impact that internationalization had was a sharp increase in the number of faculty members whose portfolio was international and multidisciplinary—so, not just someone who teaches French literature, but someone like Geoff Bennington, who teaches French thought and spills over into comp lit and philosophy and history and so on. It drove the diversity of the faculty. This meant, however, that when the History Department received an appointment, it didn’t necessarily give them four more courses in history, traditionally defined; it gave them a really exciting colleague, part of whose attention was in another part of the College. That sets up more interesting dynamics. So part of the growth of the faculty went into people who didn’t fit the usual verticalities of a department. They went into the horizontal linkage that took you across departments. They still were located vertically, but the students didn’t understand—and for good reason don’t appreciate—the verticality. A twenty-first-century student does not want a university whose departments are named after books by Aristotle: physics, poetics, politics. That’s not how the world is working. Don’t give me departments. Give me an education. That turned out to be the largest single question that was started while I was dean, but it had to get resolved by subsequent deans.
Was that move toward horizontal connections deliberate or something that you just found developing? A bit of both. The faculty whom we interviewed tended to be coming out of premier programs where that’s the way the world was working. We were behind the curve in academic structure and course definition. We were still a traditionally shaped institution hiring people from places that had turned that corner already. Another factor was that I became increasingly involved over the decade in the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences, the national organization of deans in the arts and sciences. That was where you went to hear what’s out there. It was tremendously helpful to hear why some places were struggling and others were doing well. It gave me a better idea of which way the train was headed, and I could bring that back. As with curricular reform, so with intellectual mapping—there was a real tussle from the traditionalists. The short form of the advice I received was, don’t bring in untenured people with untraditional portfolios, because they’re not going to get tenure. You will have wasted the appointment and their time. I think we’re over that hump now. We want that kind of diversity and linkage now. The three most inherently “multi” programs in the College were women’s studies, African American studies, and comparative literature, all now departments. So we’ve solved it by agreeing that it wasn’t a problem after all, rather than finding a clever solution. We discovered you could have a committee deciding tenure with people from three different departments representing those specialties. It was seen at the time as a watering down of quality control, but now it is seen as an asset. The priority of environmental studies, again, was the same. It was very timely. There was only halting progress on that while I was dean. The College was very fortunate that it was one of Steve Sanderson’s central interests when he followed me as dean. He had the gravitas, coming out of political science and political policy and, therefore, what other people used as the point of entry. He was the right dean at the right time. What about the arts? Fine and performing arts were an instance of going from “not there” to “there” to a spectacular failure to trying again. It cost us $5 million to make the mistake of planning an aborted arts center designed by Peter Eisenman in the early 1990s. What would the next mistake cost? One member of the board of trustees said the Eisenman model looked like an aerial view of a crash between two semis on I-285. He had a point. The role that Rosemary Magee played in salvaging that is incalculable. We needed more time to rethink and redefine the challenge, and 134
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if there’s a Nobel Prize in making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, she should get it. But it was not just a matter of developing a center; the programs needed work as well. Yes. For example, the first person ever to get tenure in the College in the performing arts was Sally Radell, in dance. You may do theater studies, but you also come up as a book-writing type. But how do you adjudicate a performing art? How do you document it? Are you willing to say this is an academic pursuit for which we give the same kind of status, seniority, credit that we do in political science or chemistry? You had to make the case that the academy is where you not only define the limits of temerity but also provide the support to do something that is worth doing for someone who does it very well. Tenure isn’t just First Amendment protection. Tenure is an academic commitment, a positive rather than a protective thing. The same was true of African American studies or women’s studies, particularly when most of the faculty who came in those days received their PhD in English or political science or history. Why don’t they then just do that? Why do they have to do something else in which they don’t have a PhD? So it was part and parcel of arguing for academic evolution.
After you left the deanship, the administration was reorganized and the vice presidency for arts and sciences eliminated. What has been the effect of that change? One regrettable feature was that the health sciences side continued its access and its role with the trustees, while the arts and sciences have not had that. The shift, symbolic though it was, had practical results. A representation of the arts and sciences in that next level of discussion and planning remains a good idea. Can the provost carry that responsibility? Yes, but if the next provost is out of the health sciences, you really would not have that voice from arts and sciences. In fact, the sciences within the arts and sciences felt a little left out when everybody above their department heads was someone in the humanities. We had a College dean from the ILA, a provost from theology, and a president in English; the scientists wondered whether anybody up there understood what scientists were talking about. Would you reflect on the relationship between the College and the Division of Campus Life? I would say that the College administration saw itself as engaged in the academic enterprise, and saw Campus Life as responsible for the other-than-academic dimensions of students, preponderantly for undergraduates. It really boiled down to the distinction between “academic” and “other-than-academic.” My former colleague Frances Lucas-Tauchar, who was vice president for Campus Life at the time, certainly thought the distinction was overrated. She rejected the term “extracurricular,” because in her view nothing is outside the student’s reason for being here to study. The term she liked was “cocurricular.” But in reality, from Campus Life’s perspective there was in the classroom, and then everything else, and they thought of themselves as running everything else. So the interaction between those two offices was difficult and became more so. Did you teach while you were deaning? I did not, except single performances. There has been an enormous shift in the job description of a dean from the eighties to the nineties to this decade. There used to be room for the dean to do that, when the dean was a senior academic person. The dean is now a corporate dean, and job one is administrative. So there really wasn’t room for teaching, let alone—most particularly—guaranteeing that I could be available at 10 o’clock Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Did you spend a lot of time in fund-raising? That curve was rising very sharply at the end of my term. When I started, there were 135
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deans who would grumble that fund-raising was using up sometimes as much as 25 percent of their time. Today a dean would kill to have it occupy only 50 percent of her time. That obviously has an impact on who wants to be a dean and whom you will most want to be the dean. That also has implications for the organizational structure of the College and University administration. I’m struck by the evolution of the job. In my ten years as dean at three different colleges, the notion of what a dean was evolved dramatically. In those early days deans were senior scholars, operating out of a sense of noblesse oblige, from within the ranks. If you had your druthers, you would pick somebody who was ready for the job on day one. That evolved over ten years into a more complex job, because so many of the pieces that had been defined in a comfortable and familiar way for a hundred years were changing—the skill set, the resources, the market, and so on. Eventually, there were so many pieces changing that it was hard to say what, at a particular moment, a dean should be, because by the time you finished hiring, it had already changed. What it takes to be a dean in this place has changed dramatically again just in the years since I left the dean’s office, and it will continue to do so. That has an implication for longevity in office. Twenty-five years ago the average time in office for a dean was ten to fifteen years, and then that shrank to about five, about the same as for presidents and provosts. It used to be that you left a deanship either to a bigger deanship or up to a provostship. Now, it is likely that people can’t or won’t do this for more than five years, or that the situation will have changed enough that the institution needs you to do something different than when you started. So with burnout, job change, a host of things, the average time in the deanship is likely to grow shorter, and the requirements on any given dean search are going to be more idiosyncratic and temporary. We have something on our plate, and if we can get four years out of a dean addressing the things that we can see now, we’ll probably be ready for somebody else after that period, and you’ll probably be glad to get paroled. It’s become more of a specialty job. That certainly happened to the presidency twenty years ago and is now happening to the provostship more and more.
The problem is that there’s a learning curve. Exactly. I had one advantage in that I had been dean at two other places before I came to Emory. The disadvantage was that they were two other places. On Monday I thought I knew the job, but by Tuesday I realized I didn’t, and by Wednesday I realized maybe nobody does. The learning curve can be shortened by getting somebody who’s already been a dean elsewhere, but that carries its own risks. The disconnect between the dean and the faculty will be large and permanent. Again, take the shift after David Minter: what they were looking for was a faculty member–style dean. By the time I was done, they wanted somebody who would be, you know, more decisive: “Who cares what the damn faculty think? Get it done.” Steve Sanderson brought a managerial style that fit very well with the campus wanting things to work. The pendulum went there, and then when he left, there was a sense that it really wouldn’t be a bad idea to get one of the most experienced faculty members on the entire campus. One of our own. There’s that sort of tick-tock, tick-tock. The implication is that we’re right on schedule to bring in a techno dean who will address these issues and rely even more extensively on the associate deans in crucial area roles. So I do see the deanship becoming more technically described. The job description will evolve much more rapidly, and the real risk is that the dean will be seen as a remote figure from the faculty as well as from the students. That’s where I think the deanship is going within research universities. Freestanding arts 136
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and science colleges always blur the president and the dean because they do each other’s roles in many ways. A place like Davidson College is totally different from Emory. But now that we are in the major, major research university league, that’s a tiger we can’t get off, and the more we emphasize the college or school dean as participating in that research enterprise, the greater the gap will be with the role of individual faculty. That is probably the riskiest thing that the University faces in the next generation.
From the Wilds of College Life to the Wildlife Society: Interview with Steve Sanderson Steven Sanderson served as vice president for arts and sciences and dean of Emory College from 1997 to 2001. He received his PhD in political science from Stanford University. He left Emory to become president and chief executive officer of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.7
Tell us about your decision to come to Emory. I came to Emory from the University of Florida in 1997. I had gotten pulled into the world of deans by Cornell University, when I was asked to apply for a deanship there. I had never considered the possibility but went through that process. It was an enriching experience, because as a faculty member I had never looked certain issues in the eye—what you would do if you were trying to advance the cause of the college and the university instead of just your own academic work. I had played a minor role in being chair of a department, and I had created a big program in tropical conservation and development, but I was just a regular old faculty member. My wife, Rosalie, said, well, you ought to continue to look at this sort of position, because it might be interesting. So I did. When the Emory position came open, I was involved at the same time in the search for the Vanderbilt deanship. It was fascinating to compare the two opportunities. I was able to see side-by-side the difference between the two universities. Emory had so much more effervescence and a more diverse community and was so much more aggressive toward its mission than Vanderbilt. Within twenty-four hours, I was offered both jobs. There just wasn’t any question that I wanted to come here because of that vibe that was really good. I’m no good to anybody as a leader if the job is simply “steady as she goes.” What I’m interested in is change, and this place wanted change. There was one question in my interview with President Bill Chace. I had fifteen minutes with him. He said, “Well, are you a leader of men?” That was a good question! He didn’t say, “Are you an administrator,” or “What do you think about faculty governance,” or anything else. His question to me, whatever he made of the answer, was whether I was interested in leading. I think that’s what we were trying to do. What were some of the changes you heard suggested by the people interviewing you, 137
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and what were some of the things you had in mind when you arrived here? There were certain touchstones for everybody. The first was people. The first message I received from the faculty was that this place cares about its undergraduate teaching. This commitment was exemplified by the beginnings of the Center for Teaching and Curriculum. There was a lot of attention to try and have graduate students learn how to teach before they taught. And then I came just as the curriculum reform was about 80 percent complete, and in the fall, my first challenge was to get the faculty together to mark it up. Of course, being a curricular reform, it attracted strong opinions, and there were at least four hundred of them. We went through a really organized, intense process, meeting every week until we had it all marked up. The process was an affirmation of the devotion of the faculty to teaching. People not only had strong opinions about the body of learning and the habits of mind that they wanted to convey but they also were willing to commit themselves to those goals, including a consensus that only ranked faculty could teach the new freshman seminars. They weren’t creating a freshman requirement and then handing it off to TAs. The faculty wanted it; they loved it. Another thing that people felt very strongly, and I share the feeling, is that the arts and sciences are the heart and soul of the University. Evidence of that feeling was clear: my associate deans were completely committed to Emory College as a center for teaching and scholarship. Rosemary Magee, Irwin Hyatt, and Peter Dowell embodied the College as a sacred place with students and faculty at its core. They and their colleagues taught me and held me to high standards. Not only are the arts and sciences the biggest educational budget unit, but they really are what the University is about, and then it is surrounded by refinements such as the Graduate School and the professional schools. What every university has to produce is a really first-rate arts and sciences corpus. It was my job to represent that to the University and make the College a leader in the University. Some changes that I felt were necessary we made some progress in. One of the great challenges of any university is to focus. Universities don’t focus. They don’t decide what they’re not going to do as much as they decide what they are going to do. But you can’t do everything, and you end up diluting your effort. This particular university has great strengths historically and ethically and collegially, and it has weaknesses as well. For instance, in languages we taught a lot, but we were putting effort into languages that nobody wanted or nobody took. People had ambitions for things that didn’t make any sense at Emory or that had made sense at one time and then no longer made sense. For instance, we had our own versions of high-energy physics, which was quite the thing until the end of the Cold War, and then it became quite not the thing. My feeling was that we had to do physics in a way that interacted with other departments to create positive multipliers. So biophysics was a good idea, because we had strong biology and strong chemistry. We did some physical chemistry to unify the two, and then we tied our basic sciences to the applied sciences in the academic health center. All of that was by way of focusing and making our science effort more effective. Did you lead the development of Science 2000? That was the notion that the science departments, which were housed almost literally at the farthest remove from each other on different corners of the campus, should be brought into closer physical alignment as well as programmatic alignment. I’m sheepish about claiming anything, but I owe a lot to [medical dean] Thomas Lawley and [public health dean] James Curran, the former EVP for health affairs Mike Johns, and Dennis Liotta, who was vice president for research at the time. I said, look, we would like to join forces with you and open the door to the applied sciences. We know how hard that is, but there are great gains to be had if we share equipment and share appointments where possible, and 138
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recruit to best effect. It also extended to psychology and psychiatry and so forth. They supported that, and we worked together to produce protocols for equipment sharing and time costs and grantsmanship, and Dennis and Lanny Liebeskind [Dobbs Professor of Chemistry] were great at pounding on that until we got it right. The point was that we could be better unified. Before then, everybody in the College had said that the great shadow of a medical center loomed over them and got all the money. It turned out, of course, not to be true. Their life was just as hard as ours, and we were just as big as everybody else, so why not figure how to work together? It did come to a good result for Science 2000, and it helped us identify a larger strategy in science. The big question was what we could reasonably expect of a university built like us in this time. You have a few choices, and you bet on those. Chemistry really [took advantage of that opportunity], as one would expect, because they have very good research records and are real leaders. We also recruited David Lynn, another great collaborative type, and Les Real in biology. We built some senior leadership based on people at the intersection of things.
Any other hires that you’re particularly proud of? Not a hire, but we brought Eleanor Main back from the Graduate School to the College. The Educational Studies Department was in an odd position in the College and didn’t have a sense of where it wanted to go. They were really good people, but we could not for the life of us figure out a coherent, compelling direction. So I asked Eleanor to take the lead, and she was perfect. Economics was also in rough shape. They would ask for commitments that were just not possible. I took the department into receivership, and we had a little interim arrangement. Then Bob Chirinko and Hashem Dezhbaksh became the leadership core over there, and Hashem has really been not only a great teacher but also a great colleague and outstanding chair. One of the programs you moved into a different position was environmental studies. It was actually created during my tenure as dean. The faculty wanted something like that, and I had thought a lot about the subject because I had worked with a team to create a kind of “college without walls” at the University of Florida, an interdisciplinary college of faculty on natural resources and environment. I agreed that we would move forward on a department proposal if the faculty came up with one. The only thing I insisted on was that it be science-strong, because so many environmental studies programs are just feeling good about being green. This had to be rigorous. It’s been slow to build a significant faculty base, but I think it’s done well in its way. One thing I did that was big and different was to change study abroad. When I came we had roughly sixty undergraduate students a year studying abroad, and almost all of them were on other schools’ programs. The year I left, we had six hundred, and they were almost all in our programs. Bill Chace genuinely wanted to internationalize the curriculum. He himself studied literature outside this country and cared for the foreign experience, felt that it was enriching to undergraduates, as I did. I knew that that experience had shaped me, and I think every student should go outside the borders of the United States for some purpose. It shouldn’t just be with the family to Paris. We did several things. We invested a lot in a study-abroad program, and we created an international center. I took all of the dean’s money that went to faculty research and student activities abroad, and I put those funds in the hands of the steering committee of the international center. The center’s first director, Howard Rollins [professor of psychology], and the faculty who were in that mix did a great job. Nobody could come to me and ask for money; I didn’t have the money anymore. The faculty had it. They were deciding on a basis of peer review. That worked well, and Howard was a great asset. 139
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Howard and I also established good relationships in the sciences with Imperial College in London and with the University of Cape Town and the University of Western Cape, in South Africa. We also deepened our relationship with the University of St. Andrews, which is a really good one. What was the College’s relationship with the Graduate School? We had good relations, and Eleanor Main was a big part of it. Don Stein was the graduate dean while I was here, and was a good colleague and a good friend. He’s a serious scientist and a bridge builder. He is a psychologist but really a neuropsychologist, so he knew the sciences. He knew the funding streams. But I had all the faculty in the arts and sciences. He had faculty and graduate students who weren’t in the arts and sciences. There’s not a way to clean that up, so you need a good relationship, and I think we had that.
Were there initiatives with Campus Life that offered opportunities for collaboration? Frances Lucas-Tauchar was the dean for Campus Life, except for my last year, when she left to become president of Millsaps College. We worked very well together. Campus Life is a resource, but it’s also a sink in the sense that the College gets taxed for Campus Life, and the judgments about what Campus Life ought to be delivering to the students are not made by the academic tax providers. Some of the things that Frances gave priority to, legitimately, were not things I would have put at the top of my list. But how do you figure out how much to spend on counseling and on improvement in sports? I can’t say I have any great difference of opinion on what they did, because she was good and really cared about students. But it could have been deeper and richer. When I came, the faculty was so anti-fun. The faculty would make long speeches about Campus Life, as if it were a pox. I never felt that way. [Frances] and I actually worked well together. You were a member of the president’s senior staff, or cabinet. Well, here is one of the things that I regret about my time at Emory. I learned something from it, so I’m not going to blame anybody. I should have done differently than I did. Here’s my narrative. I came as vice president for arts and sciences as well as dean of Emory College. About two or three years into my experience, they were recruiting Marla Salmon as dean of nursing, and she wanted to be a vice president, too. That didn’t make any sense as far as anybody could tell. But instead of saying, look, the College is a different case, they said, well, Steve, we don’t think it makes sense for you to be the only academic dean who is also a vice president. I didn’t care personally if I had this label on the front of my name. It was the same mug in the mirror in the morning. But I should have defended my institutional prerogative and said no, because my faculty colleagues in the College saw it as a blow. It didn’t change anything in the way I spent my day, but it did change a little bit of the valence that was assigned to the College. Did it change the role that you played in making decisions about the budget? It didn’t. The way Emory’s budget was built, there were two big units, the academic health enterprise and the arts and sciences. The revenue stream for arts and sciences all flows through the College. I always had access to John Temple [former EVP for finance and administration], and I always had a fair hearing from him. He really cared about the success of the College. But there was never a point in the process where the College was anything other than a really big revenue center. How did you determine the priorities and strategic choices for the College? Who were your main conversation partners in setting directions? 140
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The chairs certainly were. I had active, good relations with the chairs, and I met with them a lot. I went out to the departments all the time. I visited all the departments in the first semester I was here. Gradually people saw that I really listened to what they were saying. There was a lot of interaction. My simple rule was that you could say anything you wanted to in a meeting that was professionally responsible, but you couldn’t not say what you had to say in a meeting and then come up to me afterward to voice an opinion out of the earshot of other legitimate stakeholders. If you had something to say, say it in the meeting. Then I worked with the Tenure and Promotion Committee through Irwin Hyatt and through the faculty as people rotated on and off. I talked with people I really admired. Micheal Giles, professor of political science, was so serious about his responsibilities—never about himself but always about making a strong decisions. That’s how I came to know Lanny Liebeskind, who was chair of the Chemistry Department. I would come across these very strong figures, always very responsible and willing to come to the meeting and do the work. All institutions grow by accretion, so what you have to do is to watch and not accrete so much. I announced that all space belonged to the College and not to the departments, and all positions belonged to the College and not the department, so that when there was a faculty vacancy, it devolved to the College. You could petition to have a restoration, but it was not a cinch. Basically, in the give-and-take, the faculty piece of the job was serious. I was much harder on tenure. The year I came, the success rate was 90 percent, and the year after I came, it was 50. That was a shock.
Did it stay at about that rate? It did. We did better on the front end [of the retention process]. We began giving more research support money to junior faculty, especially in the humanities. If we hired a junior scientist, we gave her a quarter-of-a-million dollars to set up a lab. But if we hired a humanist, we were not giving him anything, even though the scientist has a lot better chance of getting a grant than a humanist. So right away, everybody whom we hired in the humanities we funded. If we hired a young English professor, we would give that person a pot of money to advance that person’s research. It wasn’t a lot of money, maybe twenty thousand dollars. They could use that to make their research case for tenure. These steps helped us improve the rate of success at tenure by the time I left. But it never went back to where it had been. Departments would make recommendations, and if I turned them down, I would hold an open meeting with the tenured faculty in the spring. I wouldn’t say anything about particular cases. I would talk about our standards and how we were trying to meet them, and ask the faculty whether there was something that we could do to enhance our chances to help people succeed. Did you bring that standard with you to the institution, or was there something from the president or the provost that was decreeing that there needed to be stiffer standards of tenure? There was nothing from above. It was my feeling. To be honest—and this was nothing I ever really articulated or acted on—I don’t think that tenure serves the university. There are ways to give the right protections and a good employment contract to people without tenure. But that’s neither here nor there. We did put in place with our lecturers and senior lecturers very good contracts, good wages, good promotion processes, and so forth. We valued their work. In any event, I felt that the tenure system was built upside down. People wanted to make generous judgments on the front end and regret them for twenty-five years afterward. What I wanted was to give each person the best chance of succeeding, but if they didn’t, not regret sending them off. The other thing I wanted was to avoid any possibility that the University would overturn 141
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a decision, because the academic integrity of a college resides in the college, and the provost and the trustees should basically see a terrific case each time or see a rejection. A couple of cases were contested but not more than that. Is there anything you regret or miss about your time as dean, now that you’ve moved out of academia? The best thing about being a dean was that I quit being a political scientist altogether, and I really did read in the fields that I represented. Even though I wouldn’t claim any expertise, I would read as much as I could in the particular tenure cases—everything the candidate had produced. That was just due diligence on my part, but I really enjoyed being part of an arts and sciences community. I don’t know much about the dance program, but I enjoyed learning about it and talking to people who lived and breathed dance. I had an affection for Russian language and literature, but I don’t speak it and don’t know the literature, yet I was always taken with what they cared about. The best thing about my professional life is that I’ve stayed in school all these years. That’s what was greatest as dean. I was a generalist who was able to dine out on everybody’s scholarship.
You said earlier that Emory had strengths and weaknesses. What do you think they are? The greatest thing about Emory is that it really is an ethical place. This university is a good place, and it believes in being a good place, and when it’s not a good place, it gets embarrassed about itself. Its whole institutional narrative is about being good, whether it’s service or leadership. That’s really wonderful, and it’s not true of every place by any means. It is also all about teaching and learning. I think of all the conversations I’ve had here with people from eight to eighty who are eager to learn, eager for a richer life of the mind? Why don’t we read together, and why don’t we sit down on the lawn? That kind of positive anxiety about learning and doing and thinking and protecting knowledge and nurturing students— that’s very rich here relative to other places. Emory works hard at being self-conscious as an institution, sometimes bordering on neurotic. I used to do a dean’s dinner sign-up. I’d go over to the DUC and have one of those lovely buffets, and there’d be about twelve kids, and I would say, “If you could wave your wand and change one thing about Emory, what would you change?” The kids would say they want better race relations or want to know other kinds of people or want to see more of the world. It was heartfelt. The kind of student we were recruiting married well with the institutional anxiety about being part of a world that’s doing better than it was yesterday. That’s wonderful. It’s hard to recognize every day how unique Emory is in that regard; other universities are not like this. They don’t have the same feeling, the same kind of kids coming out. What took you off to New York and out of academia? I had left academic life before and had really thought about staying out when I went to Brazil for the Ford Foundation. So that wasn’t foreign to me. There was a conjuncture for me. I was coming up to the fifth year of a five-year term, and, to be honest, the president and the provost would not give any signals as to what their intentions were after the fifth year. In fact, the deans generally didn’t get annual evaluations in those days. My first year, I received this little-bitty letter from the administration saying that I was getting a salary increase, but there was no performance review. I wrote back and said I want to know how my performance was; here’s my annual activities report. So they started a serious evaluation. But you never knew where you were, and some basic things had changed. I supported a change in the way instruction was done, both technologically and in the freshman seminar that was really the heart of the new curriculum. But personally I didn’t feel well suited to that 142
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style of teaching. I had a long record of successful teaching, and I love to teach, and I think I was a good teacher. But I was an old-fashioned teacher. I prepared lectures, and I’m a storyteller. But I didn’t like the democratization of the classroom. I didn’t think that they knew what they needed to know, and I didn’t want to have a debate about what they didn’t know. If somebody didn’t know what the United Nations was, I didn’t want to hear their opinion about it. I had to get across what it was in the first place. So when I looked at the prospect of reentering the faculty and teaching again, I didn’t like it. I had a sweet taste in my mouth from my teaching and didn’t want to risk that. So I didn’t know whether I was going to be deaning for another five years, and I didn’t think I could go back to teaching. I knew I didn’t want to be a provost: the job description was awful. It was like being the executive officer on a ship: you have all the problems and none of the scrambled eggs with your ham. Not that anybody was inviting me to, but I didn’t want to be a president of a university with an academic health center, because at the time they were all in the soup. I didn’t want to be the president of a university without one either, because it shrank the mission so much without those wonderful science and clinical services. So that gave me some clear cross-offs in my career path. I was motoring along minding my own business when two things happened. One was that the Wildlife Conservation Society started to recruit me, and then my father died. I mean within days, those two things came together. So it was a combination of having done about what I thought I could do and not seeing my academic vocation proceed in a way that was clear to me, and then having this extraordinary opportunity. The clarity came with the process.
Any questions we haven’t asked? Anything that you have been burning to share? Poetry. What about it? We started Poetry Fest—in April of 1998, I think. There were a few faculty around interested in poetry, and I said, “Well, gosh, what would we do if we had a little walking-around money for poetry?” They all came together and noodled over it, and started the Poetry Month celebrations on the Quad. I still have my “Poetry Matters” T-shirt. We worked at bringing poets here and supporting poetry in the English Department, and now Emory is a great repository and a center of influence. You know, it takes on kind of a sweet taste over time, even the stuff that was hard. In my experience, being dean is an absolutely deadly job. I worked all the time, many weeks a hundred hours. It was suffocating. But now that’s not so vivid in my mind as the fun and the collegial effort that we all put into it, and the friendships that you end up making. Everybody here all the time tried as hard as they could to do the right thing, and I never, ever felt done in by another dean. When I tell people that, they can’t believe it, but it’s true. There was a scrape here and there, but nothing low-down or devious. The leadership here really is good.
The Long View: Interview with Peter Dowell and Irwin Hyatt Peter W. Dowell, who taught American literature, African American literature, and American studies for forty-five years at Emory, is professor of English, emeritus. His teaching and research interests spanned American literature and culture from the late nineteenth century through the 1950s and, in recent years, turned especially to baseball and American culture. He served as senior associate dean for undergraduate education in Emory College for fifteen years and 143
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earned the George P. Cuttino Medal for Distinction in Mentoring in 2000. Irwin Hyatt is professor of history, emeritus, and taught East Asian history at Emory for thirty-six years. He served as senior associate dean for faculty development for thirteen years before retiring in 2002. Upon his retirement, the University honored him with the Thomas Jefferson Award for his significant service and leadership. Hyatt earned his BA degree from Emory University, and after completing his doctoral work at Harvard he became the first Asian studies faculty member in Emory College.8
Peter, when did you first come to Emory College, and in what capacity? I came to Emory in 1963, officially as an assistant professor in English, but they were just developing an American studies program in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, and it was understood that I would teach one course a year in the ILA. I began by teaching the introduction to American studies. It was sort of funny, because I hadn’t finished my PhD yet, and I was teaching a graduate course. Irwin, you came as a student in what year? I was here as an undergraduate from 1953 through 1958, and then came back to teach in 1966. As a lot of people did, I came as an instructor and then finished the PhD and became an assistant professor. I’ve been here more or less continuously, with a few times off for leave, since 1966. A lot has happened in that time. Are there particular anecdotes that would suggest some of the changes you have experienced over the last forty-five years? Dowell: One event I remember from my first year of teaching was in the middle of the spring. I was teaching in the second floor of what’s now Callaway South [formerly the Physics Building], overlooking the Quadrangle. All of a sudden I heard this enormous screaming and yelling and hollering. We all arose up and we went and looked out the window, and here was a whole group of young men charging across from the Administration Building toward Candler Library. I later found out that it was the birthday of the Kappa Alpha fraternity (KA), and on the birthday of KA they reenacted Pickett’s Charge on the Quadrangle. That was about the last time they did it, but I still remember seeing that and wondering what the hell was going on. Hyatt: They used to wear Confederate uniforms!
Peter Dowell
Have you noticed a change in Greek life and its influence on the campus in your time? Hyatt: I think in some ways it’s the same, but it seems to me now that fraternities are more interested in the academic side of things and really have emphasized that. A smaller percentage of the male student body belongs to fraternities than was the case in the old days. I mean in the 1950s virtually everybody belonged to one. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have a social life. Of course, it hasn’t been like that in a long time now. Dowell: In the first year I was teaching here, I was asked to be the faculty monitor of a frater144
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nity party up on Lake Lanier. I agreed to do that, and then I talked to somebody in Campus Life, and they said, well, that meant I was supposed to keep the alcoholic consumption down. When I arose up there, one of the young men from the fraternity said you don’t need to pay any attention to alcohol, which I didn’t. Hyatt: I was asked one time to be a judge of the Dooley’s lawn displays. They used to have skits out on the lawns [of the fraternity houses], and the judges would go around and sit at a little table that each fraternity would have out on the lawn. The brothers would come out and, making no bones about it, just make you a drink, put a tumbler out and fill it up with bourbon. A student did that in front of one of the fraternities, and I said if I actually drank that I wouldn’t be able to proceed.
In terms of the quality of the students, the SATs have been going up, the GPAs have been going up, the College has become much more selective over the years. Have you experienced in your teaching an impact from that increase in the quality of the Irwin Hyatt student body? Hyatt: Peter knows more about that than I guess anybody alive, because he chaired the Emory Scholars Committee for so many years. Dowell: Garland Richmond was actually the associate dean who chaired the scholars program initially. I think something of that idea of the scholars becoming a kind of yeast within the student body had some effect. I’m not sure if today’s students are that much smarter than some of the earlier ones, but we have all these testing programs that they’ve been put through, and they know more about jumping hurdles. Maybe the quality is a little bit better across the board, but we had some awfully good students who I wouldn’t say have been replaced by superior ones now. I suspect it’s at the middle where quality has risen. I used to think the average student here was a B-minus; now maybe they’re B, B-pluses, though again, how much of that is grade inflation and how much of that is really that the students are better, I’m not sure. Has the experience in the classroom changed over the years? Dowell: The classroom activities are more varied. In the early days it was pretty much lecture with some question-and-answer discussion, writing of papers. Now you have oral projects, you have students going out and doing independent projects, and you have classes going to places in the city. That kind of variation and activity is one of the most pronounced changes. The major changes were in the curriculum. When I first came we were on the quarter system. Students took three courses, and each course met five days a week. So every day there was class. Then when Jack Stephens was dean, fairly early after I arose here, he brought the faculty together and proposed Wonderful Wednesday. Classes would not occur 145
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on Wednesday and would only meet four times a week. Everyone would be off on Wednesday. That obviously changed things. When we converted to the semester system, during Jim Laney’s presidency, that was an even bigger change.
You mentioned John Stephens, who was College dean in the 1960s. Hyatt: Yes. He was kind of an old-school dean. I remember one group of young professors describing department budget hearings with Dean Stephens. The story was that he had done all his figuring on slips of paper that he would produce from various pockets at appropriate moments. It all looked handwritten and very amateurish to the young professors. The administration was much leaner than now. Dowell: Oh yes. The only other administrators in the College were a dean in charge of juniors and seniors, and a dean in charge of sophomores and freshmen. Hyatt: John Palms followed Stephens. Palms was the last of the old-school deans. His idea of the way the College budget would be done included a meeting of department chairs at an impressive off-campus place like the Omni. We’d all sit around a table, and every College chair would have to defend or at least explain the budget requests that he had submitted to the dean. That was an old style of doing business that became less common as Emory became bigger. The discussion kind of meeting was fun, incidentally, and you did learn something about what other people were up to. Dowell: When Palms first came in, a lot of the people in English and some of the other humanities departments were leery that this physicist was going to just underwrite Emory’s emphasis on the sciences. He didn’t do that, however. He was pretty good at working with all the departments. How did each of you move into administrative positions? Dowell: David Minter arrived as dean in 1980, and he brought us over to the administration in 1988. He left Emory about two years later. Did either Palms or Minter enlarge the administration of the College? Dowell: Minter certainly did. He had first hired [psychology professor] Howard Rollins, and then [political science professor] Eleanor Main, as his chief assistant dean. He also hired a dean for the study abroad programs, Carol Thigpen. Study abroad is indicative of the way the College was expanding. Study abroad had been virtually nonexistent. A handful of undergraduates would talk to their faculty and say they wanted to study abroad and find places to go, but there was no real College input into getting students to do it. The Oxford, England, summer program was one of the early formal programs. Dowell: One of the big pushers of it was [Professor] Ron Schuchard, along with [Professor] Jerry Beatty, in the English Department. Initially we didn’t have the tie-in with Oxford. In those days we were simply in a place called Manchester College, which isn’t a college of the University of Oxford, but an old religious college that happened to be in Oxford. It was only later that the arrangement with University College grew up and Oxford became the center of the trip. How has the national distribution of students changed? Dowell: For a long while, the South and the middle-Atlantic [region] were the core of our student body. While I was in the [administration], the three largest home states for College students were Georgia, Florida, and New York. That held up pretty well even as it’s grown out to a more national outreach. Hyatt: Emory was almost exclusively a southern or a deep-southeastern school through the 1950s, 146
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when I was here as a student. When I came back to teach in the sixties, I couldn’t tell much difference the first year I was here. It seemed like it was about the same kind of people I’d gone to school with, in the way they talked and the way they acted. It was a real change by the time I came back in 1969 from being on leave for two years; we had a lot more students from up East. Did that change the nature of the teaching or the academic engagement in the classroom at all? Hyatt: Probably not. The students from up East were much more willing to speak up and talk in class. Southern students were more attuned to letting the professor talk. They weren’t as used to give-and-take. In those days, so much of [what affected the classroom experience] was just the spirit of the times. There was a lot of crazy stuff going on. Dowell: I suppose the major change in the curriculum during this time was a student-led movement, with a number of faculty involved, to take ROTC off the campus. We finally did eliminate it, but not because it was ROTC. The faculty objected to granting academic credit for it and giving grades and treating it like another course. Of course the air force—the military service in general—insisted that they wouldn’t allow us to have a unit if we didn’t make it a regular subject and give credit for it.
Surely the Vietnam War entered into the reasoning as well. Hyatt: Oh, certainly. Nobody ever gave it a thought until Vietnam came along. We talked a little bit about the geographic provenance of the students changing. Did you see similar change in where the faculty were coming from—different universities, different regions of the country? Hyatt: Well, the old faculty was like the students, mostly southern, though never as heavily as the student body. It’s been many years since I was aware of any regional flavor in the faculty. When our departments went out and recruited, they sought the best individuals they could get, period. Dowell: When I came, the English Department was pretty much either from southern schools or from Ivy League schools. Hyatt: Some of the southern professors, like Floyd Watkins and George Cuttino, were prominent in representing the Emory faculty nationally, yet what could they possibly be but southern? They did emphasize the southern character of Emory. As the College moved from Palms to Minter to Bright and Sanderson, with Jones as interim dean during the year after Minter left, what sort of changes in focus or priorities did you see? Dowell: Each one brought strengths. Minter, of course, had been given the idea that he should be changing things. He was the first College dean who hadn’t already been an Emory faculty person. So some people may have thought of him as an outsider. He was very active in recruiting faculty, and he would find people he thought ought to be faculty candidates and would try to sell them to the department. Of course that would upset the faculty, who thought that they were supposed to initiate searches and find these people, and then the dean was supposed to approve them. The dean wasn’t supposed to be out there recruiting faculty. When I arrived to the College administration for his last two years as dean, I remember he brought in a few documents to deans’ meetings that he’d written to the University administration about the faculty. I was struck at what an advocate he was for the faculty point of view. The faculty had not really seen this side of David Minter. What changes came about as a result of his efforts? Hyatt: His chief focus was on raising the quality of the faculty. He wanted to raise the quality 147
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of the students, too, generally, and the Emory Scholars Program was one initiative along that line. But I don’t know of anything that he thought more about or that seemed to engage him more than building the faculty. He was the first dean in my experience who used the term “interdisciplinary.” He would be talking about how if Emory brought this person here in English, there would be people in the romance languages or in history who would interact with them. He really thought in those terms. Dowell: He was an American studies PhD, so he had that interdisciplinary kind of stamp. Hyatt: I’m still impressed when I think about the degree to which, as a humanist, he could understand what scientists did. He could apply the same kinds of perspectives and vision related to the field of science as he did to things in humanities and social sciences.
Were there changes in focus, priority, budgeting practice between Minter’s administration and Bright’s? Hyatt: I don’t remember David Bright setting out to change things the way David Minter did. Minter was such a builder; perhaps by Bright’s time there wasn’t as much need for that. They were both good, honest men and effective leaders. Dowell: Bright was more willing to listen to arguments from groups of faculty about new programs, rather than coming up with a program and then trying to sell it to the faculty. Hyatt: Bright, of course, inherited a number of people who had been brought in by Minter, and who had then begun to build their own structures and to aspire to bigger and better things. So it was a different ball game in a way. He had more to juggle than Minter did. There has always been the double-duty of teaching undergraduates as well as graduate students. How has the relationship between the College and the Graduate School fared over the years? Dowell: A lot of the graduate programs were just developing when we first came here. The founding of the ILA, in the mid-1950s, was one indicator. One reason the ILA was founded was that we didn’t have many graduate programs, and it was going to be difficult to have PhD programs in all the different departments. Various senior faculty were interested in teaching graduate students, so the idea of an institute where faculty in different departments could have graduate students was a major impetus behind the ILA. Hyatt: The relationship between the College and the Graduate School generally was okay. But the Graduate School seemed to me not to have much money of its own. Their faculty held appointment in Emory College or one of the professional schools, and it’s the schools that pay the salaries. How the College and Graduate School got along was largely a function of how well the dean of the College got along with whoever the dean of the Graduate School was at the given time. The dean of the Graduate School for many years was Charlie Lester, an old Emory faculty type who understood the limited aspirations the Graduate School could have. I always had the feeling, however, that the later deans would sooner or later get tired of the second-tier status of the Graduate School. Dowell: Lester was one of the best administrators I ever saw. He had an ability to overcome some of this problem of the Graduate School being the stepchild of the College. A lot of the growth of the Graduate School occurred under him. He managed to help engineer all of that rather well. Of course, the other change was a kind of change within the faculty. When we first came here this place was really thought of as an undergraduate college. I was going to get to teach some graduate students, but I didn’t really think that that was the big thing. We’ve moved to the point now where that’s basically what most of the new faculty think: that whom they are supposed to be teaching is graduate students. The undergraduates are somehow there to teach, too, but the faculty think graduate education is what is important 148
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somehow. Even in the spirit of the faculty—talk about changes. We used to have lots of faculty meetings in the sixties and seventies. My sense of the senior faculty at Emory was that they were very College oriented. The present faculty teach in the College, but they’re not College oriented. They are oriented to their own academic field. The whole way they construct their faculty identity is very different from that older Emory faculty. Hyatt: Lester was like Jake Ward [former dean of the faculties and, later, dean of alumni, Judson C. Ward] in that he must have done at some time or other virtually everything. Charles Lester was never acting president, but he was just about everything else. He used to run faculty meetings as if he didn’t know anything much about parliamentary procedure. I think he just didn’t want to be bothered with it. Some faculty members acted insulted by that. But the meetings were moving, I presume, as Dean Lester wanted them to, and the business all was concluded pretty well.
Speaking of faculty meetings, has there been some change in the way the faculty meet or the way the faculty thinks of itself as a collegium over the years? Dowell: We used to have more meetings, and most of the faculty came, and there was a real engagement. We might meet every other week. It was just frequent. Now, of course, they have them at most once a month. The attendance is very poor. There are certain groups of faculty who do it, and the rest don’t. What is your sense of how the College and Campus Life have worked together over the years? Hyatt: Campus Life as such didn’t exist before 1979. I always think of Bill Fox as having been the person who really started Campus Life. He was the one who came to provide all kinds of services and direction for the students. He embodied a feeling that Emory is getting to be a bigger place, we have students coming here from all over. Here’s this guy who really cares about the students and exudes a warm approach. We did get exasperated sometimes with some of the things that Campus Life did. Some of the cooperative things, like freshman orientation, which both the College and Campus Life were involved in, gave us the sense that those things needed to be better balanced. Dowell: It was largely things that someone in the College office felt should have been checked with the College before Campus Life did them. Hyatt: There was more student social activity in the 1950s and sixties than we might imagine, but it was student originated largely. A lot of it was heavily fraternity and sorority. There weren’t a lot of organized activities for the student body as a whole, apart from music with the glee club, and theater. Then Campus Life came and started things like big rock concerts on McDonough Field. Dowell: I was the [associate] dean who probably worked most closely with Campus Life, because I was in charge of student affairs for the College. There were specific issues where the faculty and Campus Life might disagree. For instance, it took a long time for us to deal with learning disabilities. There was a strong feeling for a long time among the faculty that you brought the students in, and if they could make it, great, but if they couldn’t, too bad. The faculty was not particularly interested in creating certain kinds of programs to give students special aid. That had to grow up gradually to get it put in. Do you sense that Emory was behind the curve on those things, since there were other institutions nationally that were leading in those areas? Dowell: Yes. When we started looking at people to work in disabilities, we had candidates coming from places that really had well-developed programs already, and our program was really difficult to get moving. Part of the problem was that the administration put the disabil149
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ities program in the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs, where it was housed along with staff and faculty protests of various kinds, as well as sexual harassment case adjudication. The only rationale for the placement of this office—the one common denominator between these entities—was that they were all federally mandated programs, but they didn’t have much relationship to one another. For the longest time we kept fighting this [arrangement] in the College. Finally, under Steve Sanderson, we made the appointment of Wendy Newby as assistant dean for inclusive instruction. We seated her office partly in the College, so that it would not always be the most junior appointment in the EOP office.
How have faculty promotion and tenure changed over the years? Hyatt: It’s become a good deal more formal, with a lot more rules and regulations and procedures. Emory is just part of a trend nationally in that respect. David Minter was important in that. He really believed very strongly in the system that they had at Rice, where the Faculty Council, as it was called there, not only handled promotion and tenure but apparently played much more of a role in faculty governance than was the case at Emory. Rice is smaller and oriented a bit differently. What I constantly hear from people in the History Department now is that there is not the sense of camaraderie or fellowship that was the case when my cohort was coming through. But that’s probably the times also. Simply in growing, some sense of closeness is going to be lost. Dowell: The process became more systematic. The president became a more active part of it when Bill Chace set up the President’s Advisory Council [to review all tenure and promotion files and regularize the process across the University]. Both of your departments have grown. Hyatt: Substantially, yes. When I came there were fifteen people in the History Department, and now there are twice that number. Dowell: English is over thirty now. Hyatt: So many things have changed in our department. It used to be the faculty were all in either American or European history, and whichever of the two they were in, they knew something about the other. Now you have people spread all over the place, and methodologically they do different things. In the History Department as it was constituted when I came, virtually everybody was from the South. It was a different era in a lot of ways. One difference is simply size, and some of this applies to the student body. The class of 1958 had been so small that you would have known by name a great deal more of the people in your class than would be the case now. Your departments were very strong even in your first years on the faculty. Dowell: At one point, trying to build up the graduate programs, Emory decided to focus on six [or seven] departments to be the chief ones with graduate programs. English and history were two of them; chemistry was one; psychology was one; and biology. [The other two were anatomy and biochemistry.] They had obviously decided to say, okay, what are already the best or strongest departments here, and let’s focus graduate development on those. Who are some of the graduate students who went on to academic careers out of history or English? Dowell: Linda Ray [PhD 1971] was brought back here for an alumni award a few years ago. She had been at the University of Nebraska and worked her way up from faculty to being some kind of administrative person. There was a Joan Hall [PhD 1976], who worked with [Professor Emeritus] Lee Pederson, and of course his graduate students were distinctive because they worked with him on the linguistic atlas of the Gulf States, and we didn’t have any other 150
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linguistic types. She’s a major lexicographer now and runs one of the linguistic dictionaries. Hyatt: Two comparable history PhDs are James Robertson and James Wood, who have held endowed chairs at Virginia Tech and Williams College, respectively. There are a number of others who are also distinguished. Dowell: One interesting aspect that we haven’t talked about, and obviously it’s major, was the coming of African American students and the development of black studies, which was a major effort here beginning in the 1960s and then growing after that. In 1970 Delores Aldridge was hired, and the African American Studies Program was launched. [See chapter 12.] When I came in the 1960s, some of the people in American literature, particularly [Professor] Al Stone, created a course in African American literature. The first three or four years, different people from Morehouse [College] taught it. At one point I decided I’d like to teach it, and that’s how I really arose into African American materials. I think my case was typical. The simple fact is none of us had any training in it. I’d never had any African American literature in undergraduate or graduate school, and I had to teach it to myself as I went along and taught it to students. A number of people who were interested in this, like Al Stone, like me, like [professor of history] Harvey Young were in the ILA. So that became one of the tracks in the ILA—an African American studies PhD. I had something like a half a dozen PhDs in African American literature over the years. At one point, in the mid- to late sixties, [Professor and ILA director] Jimmy Smith helped engineer a joint program with Atlanta University. Dana White was initially brought here as a faculty member connected to Clark Atlanta University but was going to teach on both campuses. Dana finally was recruited to Emory College. One of the people very involved at Atlanta University was Richard Long, and later he came here as a faculty member. [See chapter 22.] So the African-American Studies Department is one of the major changes over the course of time here.
The Art of Creative Administration: Interview with Rosemary M. Magee Rosemary Magee was appointed vice president and secretary of Emory University in January 2005. In addition to her work with the Emory Board of Trustees, she served as a member of the Strategic Implementation Committee, as cochair of the Work-Life Initiative, and as chair of the Creativity and Arts Initiative of the University Strategic Plan. Before her advancement to the vice presidency, she served as a senior associate dean of Emory College. The University honored her with the Thomas Jefferson award in 2008.9
How did you first encounter the Emory administration? I came to Emory as a graduate student in 1977. I had the honor of being elected president of the Graduate Student Council one year. My most memorable recollection of that era is that Saunders Hall was going to be converted to another purpose than graduate student housing, and there was great consternation. Graduate students really liked the location, near the dental school building, and it was an inexpensive place to live. I was asked to head up a petition to the administration to continue to use that for graduate student housing until alternatives were identified. I presented the petition to the assistant dean for Campus Life responsible for housing, who was Joe Moon [later dean of Campus Life at Oxford College]. They did delay the change for a year, and that was my first real experience with the Emory administration. I then served on the search committee for the dean of the Graduate School, which led to my 151
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being hired as assistant dean in Emory College in August of 1983. David Minter was the dean; I was hired by Garland Richmond and Howard Rollins, the two associate deans. I did some work in student academic affairs for Garland and also worked for Howard, the budget dean, overseeing summer school and eventually incorporating summer study abroad into my portfolio. David Minter was a very ambitious and demanding dean. He demanded a lot of the University, he demanded a lot of the faculty, he demanded a lot of the students, and he demanded a lot of his staff. It was very clear to those of us on his staff that he was in charge and making the decisions, but once you established a relationship with him it became more reciprocal, and he became open to your ideas. I was asked to develop a program advising students working on proposals for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships and the like. David was certain that this emphasis would help bring a whole new caliber of students to Emory, and we needed to make sure that they had these special kinds of opportunities. Rosemary M. Magee The Lamar Committee10 had already delivered its recommendations by the time I was hired. As a result of its report, Minter, in consultation with President Laney and others, decided that faculty pay and faculty raises would be limited that year, and that the highest priority for funds would be student financial aid—need-based aid and merit scholarships. Other agenda items were also going to be important, but they were going to be deferred because student quality would be the driver of the new educational agenda and model. David received a lot of criticism for that, but that was just the starting point for his vision. Again, I’m sure he did this very much in tandem with President Laney to lay the groundwork for the next phase of a strategy for faculty recruitment and development. The second thing that I remember as very controversial back then was the so-called star system—hiring a William Arrowsmith or a Richard Ellmann [the first two Robert W. Woodruff professors], either as full-time regular faculty members or visiting professors. That approach still is controversial. People receive relatively large salaries while not teaching as much as their colleagues on the faculty. Dean Minter believed that we needed to raise the academic profile of the institution. Those two issues—student financial aid and recruiting highly visible faculty—were hot-button items during his administration, but he was not easily deterred from what he wanted to accomplish to enhance Emory’s standing.
What was your role in reshaping study abroad? At that time, all Emory study-abroad programs were scheduled during the summer; we didn’t have any academic-year study-abroad programs. David Minter had a lot of trouble with a financial model that would defer Emory tuition dollars or place them in other institutions. He didn’t see how we could sustain that approach; he was going to need all of the resources to do the things he needed to do for Emory to grow in strength and reputation. 152
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The summer study-abroad model was fairly easy for people to accept, and we expanded those programs. We had a summer program in Russia with the Pushkin Institute that Juliette [Stapanian] Apkarian started. We had art history; we had the Vienna program and the French program and the British studies program. We gradually expanded those to include a program in Salamanca, Spain. Judy Raggi-Moore [senior lecturer in Italian studies] started the Italian program. But we didn’t have a good way to do the academic year abroad. These programs were growing in small ways until Howard Rollins returned from a leave after serving as chair of psychology. Upon his return, David Bright asked him to lead an environmental studies initiative. Howard said, “I don’t know anything about environmental studies, but I’d really like to put something together for international programs.” By that time I was in the job that Howard had previously had as the budget officer. Carlos Alonso, who was the chair of the Spanish Department, asked to pilot a program in Salamanca in the academic year. We had a place there; we had other foundations to build on there. So Howard I worked with Carlos to establish the Salamanca program as a pilot for academicyear study abroad, with a financial model that we thought would work. It was very successful. Howard and I then worked to take that initial Salamanca idea and expand it into a larger program. He came up with the idea of establishing the Center for International Programs Abroad. He figured out how to make the dollars and cents work. Then the Institute for Comparative and International Studies was added, so that the area studies programs all were pulled out of the departments to report to ICIS, and Howard led that for a while. All of this developed incrementally over a lot of time, spanning the deanships of David Minter, David Bright, and Steve Sanderson.
At a certain point you moved into College budgetary work. What did that entail? Eleanor Main had been overseeing the budget, and then was asked to be acting dean of the Graduate School. When a new dean of the Graduate School was hired—George Jones— Eleanor became the associate dean there. While George was also the acting dean of the College, he asked me if I would do the College budget work. I thought, It can’t be that hard, can it? Of course, I had no idea how to use Lotus or Excel or any of those programs, but I took on that responsibility, based on my earlier budgetary experience with summer school and study abroad. Over time, I grew to enjoy it. Ron Johnson, professor of chemistry (now emeritus), was an associate dean at the time overseeing space planning, but he was stepping down, and I ended up doing both the budget and the facilities part of the job. It was a great moment for Emory College in terms of expansion and resources. I found it very challenging and creative work. A huge issue at the time, especially during David Bright’s administration, was a lot of energetic discourse, shall we say, around the College and Campus Life. The growth of the Campus Life Division added costs to the College. Many of these discussions had to do with the role of the faculty around advising, governance, curriculum, and admissions. More recently, there’s been a lot of professionalization of all of those areas (admissions, student support, advising, etc.), which I think has some benefits and also some drawbacks. But a big part of that shift had to do with the drive toward a research faculty. It sounds like there were actually pulls in two different directions. One was a shift towards research faculty, and the other was a pull toward the professionalization of student advising or student activities, Campus Life as a whole separate division. Right. Of course, Bill Fox had a lot of those ideas and dreams that were really needed—to strengthen the sense of community on campus. Once that occurred, some people felt that the student services areas became too large.
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What other significant academic transformations do you recall? David Bright established the Center for Teaching and Curriculum. Our original idea for something like the CTC was to call it CREATE—Curriculum, Research, Education, and Teaching at Emory. David loved acronyms, and he especially loved clever ones. He invited Walt Reed [professor of English] to be the director of it. Walt went into the meeting with David, and he came out and had a cheerful smile on his face, and David was quite cheerful because Walt agreed on the spot to do it. But Walt does not believe in acronyms that spell out words. So he said it should be the Center for Teaching and Curriculum, and Walt led that program for quite a while. CTC was a College center and remained a College center all those years, although it was very open to people from other disciplines participating and sometimes sponsoring programs. Now we have the University-wide Center for Faculty Development and Excellence that Laurie Patton [Charles Howard Candler Professor of Religion] is leading through the provost’s office, and the CTC has been absorbed into it. Some of this reflects shifts in the relationship in the centers of gravity over the course of time. Two initiatives stand out as critical developments in the late 1990s—Science 2000 and the “Arts Commons.” Sometime in the mid-nineties the science chairs had started meeting—Dennis Liotta in chemistry, Krishan Bajaj in physics, John Lucchesi in biology, and Dwight Duffus in mathematics and computer science. They invited me to participate in those meetings, and we came up with the Science 2000 proposal. Some important things came out of that in terms of faculty and research support, start-up funding, and the facilities. Those plans eventually led to the construction of Cherry Logan Emerson Hall and the Mathematics and Science Center, as well as renovations in the Rollins Research Center and the Dental School Building. We actually had a presentation called “Art and Science,” and we were told over and over that if we were going to make progress the College had to choose either moving forward with the arts or moving forward with the sciences. We refused to choose, because we really needed to make progress on both of these fronts. In the arts, a committee met in the late 1980s that led to the selection of Peter Eisenman as the architect of a proposed arts center. Max Anderson [former director of the Michael C. Carlos Museum] was chair of that group. Near the end of the process it became clear that there was little trustee support for the design, and that fund-raising would be difficult. I went to a meeting of the arts faculty with President Bill Chace and Provost Billy Frye and Dean David Bright, where basically they said this project is going to be put on a shelf. The University had already spent $3 million on design, but the administration said we’re going to put it on a shelf, and if somebody comes along and offers $50 million, then we’ll build it. But the arts were living in Annex B [a former barracks on the site of the present Goizueta Foundation Center of the Business School], and in the basement of what was previously the Physics Building [now Callaway South]; the conditions were deplorable. I went to David Bright and laid out how I thought we might move beyond where we were. I felt that saying we’re just going to put this on a shelf and wait for $50 million was a sign that we weren’t going to do anything at all. We assembled a new planning committee—myself and Ben Arnold in music, Sally Radell in dance, David Cook in film studies, and Vinnie Murphy, Michael Evenden, and Alice Benston in theater. We got in a van and drove to various places, from Spivey Hall [in Clayton County] to Clemson University. People visited Vassar and other places on their breaks, and we put together a report that listed what we thought the highest priorities were. By that time Steve Sanderson had become dean, and he said, “Wow, this is really interesting. Let’s go out and try to raise some money for it.” 154
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With my colleague Randy Fullerton, I put together a presentation for Steve to give, and we went to New York. The people who we thought were potential big donors didn’t come to the event, so we saw this as a trial run. At the last minute he asked me to give the presentation, since I had done the report. William Ransom played the piano at the home of an Emory alumnus, Bill Cohen. The next day Donna and Marvin Schwartz made a commitment for a naming gift. It was incredible. Then we went out and identified an architect. We tried to put together all the resources we had and then house as much as we could in the new Schwartz Center, which was intended as the first phase of a two-phase project. Later, as the project moved along, we hired Michael Dennis as the architect. I met with the Real Estate, Buildings, and Grounds Committee to show some designs, and they challenged me about the project because, of course, they felt really burned by the Eisenman project. The next day I received calls from three of the trustees inviting us to come back with Michael Dennis. What I learned was that if you have a good idea, or if it’s something the University needs, then maybe there will be an opportunity, a way to do this, and you just have to keep working at it.
What was the order of development? Was it that the arts departments had grown and really needed the space, or that we built new space and the departments set about filling it? It works both ways. The process was enormously complicated. Of course, we didn’t meet everybody’s needs. Even if we’d built both phases of the arts project, we would not have met everybody’s desires. But we accomplished a lot. One big decision was the size of the concert hall. Some people thought it should be big enough for the entire freshman class, but if we’d done that it still wouldn’t be big enough for the whole freshman class now. Still other people thought it should just be a very intimate place. I actually think it was the right size, so that you can use it for intimate concerts or student recitals as well as the New York Philharmonic. The whole issue around theater was problematic. Phase two is where we hope to have more traditional theater space. Dance had grown and was gaining some independence from the Physical Education Department, so they needed some space. They had no faculty offices. Visual arts had been in really horrible conditions. Theater in some ways was the most robust. The Music Department needed both traditional musicology rooms and performance space. But there were also more traditional student needs that we haven’t fully met even today—Ad Hoc, No Strings Attached, and different groups. It met the needs that we saw at the time as being the most important, and every member of that committee signed on to that report. That’s how we got it through—that kind of consensus. Talk about the fund-raising for the arts center. Our trustee Laura Hardman [College 1967] was extremely persistent. She had us meeting over breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the Loridans Foundation, the Woodruff Foundation, and the Kresge Foundation. She made those calls personally and placed us in front of people to make a presentation and ask for support. We had to show 100 percent trustee participation, and she called each board member. We ended up with gifts ranging in size from ten dollars to $10 million—from students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends—when all was said and done, which was quite an accomplishment.
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CHAPTER 10
CAMPUS LIFE The Interplay of Living and Learning at Emory William H. Fox came to Emory in 1971 in pursuit of the doctoral degree in religion and literature in the Institute of Liberal Arts. He became the first dean of Campus Life and then was promoted to vice president. In 1991 he became vice president for institutional advancement (now the Division of Development and Alumni Relations) and raised more than a billion dollars for the University during his tenure. Named senior vice president for external affairs in 2003, he retired in 2005.1 157
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Tell us briefly about when and why you came to Emory. I chose Emory for my PhD by going to a library at Southern Methodist University, where I was in the dean of students’ office and teaching, to look up PhD programs to see what I might be interested in. I did not want to study English or religion per se, but I had heard of the field of religion and theology. I found three or four programs, and the one that fit best was Emory. I didn’t know Emory well and had never been on its campus, so I flew to Atlanta and visited the ILA [Institute of Liberal Arts], which at that time was in Thomson Hall, the old dormitory. James Smith was the director, and I met with [professors] David Hesla and Bob Detweiler. I left convinced that this was the right place for me. When I was accepted, my wife, Carol, got a job here, and that was the beginning of our Emory and Atlanta years. That was in 1971. The first two years I essentially was a graduate student. My third year, in the fall, Smith died quite suddenly of a heart attack. Detweiler was appointed acting director, and he said he would take the job if he could have a full-time administrator to work with him. Bob was aware that I had done administration at SMU for about seven years, so he asked me. I took that job in January of 1974, and it was exciting, it was fun. I did a lot of the paperwork, we had a great secretary, and she and I ran the ILA—not the academic program, but admissions, financial aid, interviewing students. I grew very fond of Emory. They also began to let me teach in what then was called the Humanities Department. Some of us had an idea to start a major in interdisciplinary studies, and with the support of the faculty of the ILA, I began that project and went through all the steps to create a new major. That was a great experience. It was exciting intellectually and personally. This of course delayed a less-than-brilliant person from finishing his PhD, so I did not finish until 1979. When I did finish I received a faculty position in the ILA and became director of the undergraduate major in interdisciplinary studies. By then, we had several majors and a number of courses, and we asked people from across the University to teach things that were interdisciplinary, but which they had never had the chance to teach. Along the way—in 1977—Jim Laney became president, and in fall of 1979 Robert and George Woodruff made their dramatic gift to Emory. That’s right. Actually I had already been asked to be acting dean of Campus Life before the Woodruff gift. After Jim Laney became president he appointed a University-wide strategic planning committee, and I served on that. I was assigned to the subcommittee on student life. It was almost like destiny at work. So when I went to Campus Life as acting dean, I didn’t go empty-handed. I had already heard from across the University—we talked to faculty, we went to Oxford, we talked to students, we talked to trustees. I had presented a report on the priorities as they had appeared, so I didn’t go to Campus Life with a blank slate. One bright October morning in 1979 I was preparing for class. I was head of interdisciplinary studies, assistant director of the ILA, and teaching. I was sitting in the library preparing, and someone tapped on my shoulder. It was [then–University Secretary] Tom Bertrand, and he said, “The president needs to see you.” Well, I did not know the president well. I thought I was in trouble. The president said he would like for me to consider serving as interim dean of Campus Life while Emory did a national search. I was thrilled to death and thought it would be fun. But I said, if I leave the ILA now I’m going to need a job when a dean is chosen, and he said, we’ll guarantee you a job at no less salary if you will do this for us. So within a week I was in a new office, as interim dean of Campus Life. I must admit that I never acted “interim.” I just took over. I had dreams. I had a platform. I had a whole agenda. Then the Woodruff gift was announced, and some of those dreams that I had worked on for two years we now had funds to realize. 158
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The top priority for the University regarding community life was the physical education center. With the Woodruff backing and Clyde Partin [former athletics director Clyde “Doc” Partin Sr.] and others begging, Jim Laney let us move ahead. That became the first major capital project in student life. We never saw the P.E. center exclusively as a student area. We always saw it as a community area, although students would certainly have a major role. But we planned a faculty locker room and staff space. There were very few places for this community to even gather, and suddenly we had this possibility. This first capital project was followed quickly by desperate need for more housing. So the P.E. center was followed quickly by the Turman Residential Center. What we call “campus life” I always considered a University-wide division. The largest, most important clientele we had were undergraduates, but Campus Life was for the community. We tried to plan activities that would involve students, faculty, and staff in the same places at the same time. The P.E. center realized that quickly, and in Turman Residential Center we built faculty apartments. Our greatest mission was the one that every institution has, and that was the life of the community. We suddenly had opportunity with the infusion of funds and a president who put as one of his top two or three priorities the improvement of community life at Emory.
When did the job become no longer “interim”? They did a national search. I know nothing about that, except that I did have an interview, and I was told two or three days later that I had been chosen—would I like the position? By that time, I was absolutely enthralled with the possibilities of the job and wanted it so badly that I said yes, thank you, and left before they could take it back. Some of the priorities were laid out by the strategic planning document that you had helped to craft. What other priorities did you bring to those early years? I remember walking out of a class I was teaching and talking to a young man who was a student leader at Emory. He was a senior. I asked, “How do you like Emory?” He said, “Well, I think I received a good academic education, but this isn’t a great place to be a student unless the only thing you want is an education. I don’t feel it’s a very caring place; I don’t feel any real sense of community with the larger body.” I never forgot that, and I carried that conversation with me to the Campus Life office the first day. My number-one intention was to see what we could do about making a community. A related passion was for this to be a caring place. The sense of caring, of compassion, of realizing that we were here to serve and care for our students—those were my overriding passions. Were there things you wanted to do in Campus Life but were not able to do because of budgetary or cultural reasons? We would be asked every three or four years to submit a priority statement. Each time I put the arts center first, even though I was representing Campus Life. That’s how much an adequate arts center meant to me. I love the arts, am passionate about the arts. I also wanted Emory to have an international award—something that stood for the very best of what we are and what we promote. It would probably take, I figured, a $2 million endowment: the winner would receive fifty thousand dollars from the annual payout, and the other fifty thousand dollars would support our putting on an event. Every time Columbia University has its Pulitzer Prize activity, the whole world pays attention. I also wanted to have a requirement that 100 percent of undergraduates live on campus, with exceptions only for those who were married or had some kind of severe medical need or lived at home with their parents. I thought a fully residential campus would be the answer to the question of community. The Clairmont Campus has come a long way in that direction. 159
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I wanted a campus pub really badly, but state laws forbid that, and I finally quit putting it on my list. I wanted more all-University events that would cost money. I suggested one time that the Monday before Thanksgiving we have an all-University Thanksgiving dinner in the Dobbs University Center [the DUC], on all levels, and everyone could come for free, and someone would get up and talk about our blessings. When I was a student here we had a kind of Thanksgiving potluck in the old gym. You couldn’t say it was anything luxurious, but it had a spirit to it. The Heritage Ball started through Campus Life. One time we had it down at Colony Square, and it was packed, with faculty as well as students.
What were some of the most challenging moments? The Sabrina Collins incident was the hardest moment in my professional life.2 Jim Laney and I met every morning for two months to review what was happening. We knew a month before the public did what was the truth, and we had to sit on it and live with it. I had television trucks outside my home waiting for me to leave in the morning, and the telephone rang all night. One of the things that I had done on being appointed to Campus Life was to promote everything without any discrimination. I had chaired a College committee for improving our racial mix. I demanded that there be in the residence halls a program every fall about civil rights and equal rights. And then this thing was happening under my administration. I can’t tell you how many tears I shed. One night a local black political leader came on TV, and he said that if she did it herself, the environment at Emory drove her to it. That hurt. We had the highest percentage of faculty members who were African Americans, the highest percentage of African American students, an office devoted entirely to multicultural affairs, with a good staff and programs and money. We had tried so hard, and then for someone to say this “racist” place was what made her do it was so untrue and heartbreaking. You had this position in Campus Life for thirteen years or fourteen years? Well, thirteen, and then the fourteenth I was still head of Campus Life while taking on a new role as senior vice president for institutional advancement. I did both jobs one year. And I asked Bobbi [Barbara A. B.] Patterson, who was then the associate chaplain, to help out as interim dean of students, and Todd Schill and Ron Taylor carried a lot of water as associate vice presidents. Did you view the move from Campus Life to advancement as an exciting challenge that you were ready to take on? When the opportunity first was presented to me I said no—the first time I guess I’d ever said no to Jim Laney. I loved Campus Life so much I didn’t want to leave it. So I said, Jim, I just don’t want to do fund-raising. I don’t know how to do that. Then on Memorial Day [in 1991] he called and said, this is a critical moment, and I need you. So I said, yes, sir. Then I became excited as I began to think of opportunities. I had so many friends who were alums that I’d get to see again. By the time I started I was enthusiastic. There were times I missed the wonderful people with whom I worked in Campus Life, and I came to discover that I would not know many students. But I never wished I had made a different decision. What do you see as the biggest accomplishments in your time in institutional advancement? We did the best reconnection with alumni in Emory’s history. I gave a lot of attention to that and traveled a whole lot for that. In my first year or two I would go to an alumni event and hope for 10 or 12 people; now there’s 120. I wish I’d had a little more program money, but we did build an alumni house. That was a high priority for me. That was a priority before I came along, but I’m very proud of the way we ended up doing it. 160
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Moorehouse College President Benjamin Mays, Bill Fox, and religion professor Jack Boozer
I’m also proud of the money we raised. In those twelve or so years that I was in institutional advancement, we raised more than $1.5 billion. We were blessed that the Woodruff Foundation gave to us. But we had to reach out beyond that. We started reaching out much more nationally. The [whole] organization deserves credit for that—people like Jack Gilbert and many others.
Both of the divisions that you inherited you expanded, especially Campus Life. When you stepped into that role, there were maybe a dozen staff members. And by the time you left? Four hundred professional staff—everybody from assistant and associate deans to food servers. Jim Laney made a decision to put food service under Campus Life, and that was fun actually, hard but fun. We made changes, and bless her heart, [food services liaison] Helen Jenkins went along with it. She needs to have a statue in the middle of the Quad. This woman kept us fed for fifty-seven years. Other things that I’m really proud of? I helped form the University Athletic Association. That has proved to be successful. Jim Laney supported me, and without his support it might have gone down the tube. I take enormous pride in the Counseling Center, in little things like the Humanitarian Award, in the Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Life. We were the first school south of the Mason-Dixon Line to have such a center. I had a lot to do with the purchase of University Apartments, which provided space two decades later for the Clairmont Campus. There was some resistance about spending the money for it, but we had to have it for the longterm future.
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Were you also instrumental in developing the Magnolia League? When I first came to Campus Life I made visits to campuses that had similarities to Emory—Duke, Vanderbilt, Miami, Tulane. I didn’t go to SMU because I knew it backwards and forwards, and by the way, SMU had some good student life programs that I was proud to incorporate here, including a much better residential program. The whole sophomore adviser program that I created here with Joe Moon’s help I got from them. We [now] have a great residential program, and Joe Moon deserves more credit than I do there. Of all the Campus Life programs, the one I liked the best was Duke’s. I kept in touch with my counterpart at Duke, who is a gem of a man. He and I began talking about how much we learned from each other, and we got in touch with other vice presidents, from private schools with very similar student bodies and faculties and missions, and we formed what we called the Magnolia League. I was in some other associations, but none as important as that. We were open, we didn’t try to promote ourselves. It was very helpful. You left knowing you weren’t the only one with problems, and you weren’t the only one with solutions and new ideas.
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