we shall see, Adams was violating most of these cardinal sins. He got Foundation money to pay for expensive meals, trips, and a salary supplement. No other UGA president had ever tried to get his wife onto the Foundation payroll. Tensions escalated when some members of the Foundation’s governing board repeatedly called his hand on questionable spending.
However, in the aftermath of 2003, many observers felt that the Foundation had overstepped its bounds in the clashes with Adams. The Phelan handbook also cautioned that foundations sometimes take their independence too seriously and attempt to exert undue influence on their university, “including the president’s length of service.”
In the end, of course, the UGA Foundation failed in its effort to get Adams fired. The conflict over the Adams affair split the Bulldog nation into warring camps, but by the time the story disappeared from the front pages of the newspapers it was still not clear exactly what had been contested, why, or who won. This book, based on a thorough review of documents and on interviews with as many of the principals as were willing to speak, explores those questions.
At the time, Adams’s decision to retire the popular athletic director and former football coach Vince Dooley was widely proffered by the media as the cause of the conflagration. But the seeds of strife were sown years earlier. Dramatic political and institutional shifts within the state of Georgia and its flagship university had created new fault lines that set the stage for upheaval.
Adams had been an unpopular choice with the UGA faculty when he was named president in 1997 because of what the academics saw as his lightweight credentials. He did little after his arrival to win over the hearts and minds of the faculty, which saw him as arrogant, aloof, and dismissive of their concerns. And even though he wanted its money, Adams’s relationship with the University of Georgia Foundation was no better.
As it would turn out, Adams had support where it counted.
In Atlanta, the once dormant Republican Party had captured both the governor’s office and the state senate. In January 2003 George Ervin “Sonny” Perdue III was sworn in as Georgia’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Perdue’s surprising victory over Democrat Roy Barnes set in motion a realignment of alliances that played out dramatically behind the scenes as Georgia’s elite wrestled for power and control. Traditional power centers were shifting and long-time political alliances fell apart. Several conservative Democrats in the legislature switched parties.
By 2003, Adams had been in Athens for five years. He had survived a major scandal in the men’s basketball program and questions about his spending habits and had engineered himself a hefty salary increase. But he had made some powerful enemies on and off the UGA Foundation. Some prominent Atlanta alumni had already begun discussions about whether Adams was up to the task of running a major research university. When the Dooley story broke, Adams’s critics figured the time was ripe to go after him. Thousands of Dooley supporters came out of the shadows to make their opinions known. What they could not know was that Adams had won the Dooley battle before it began. In conversations with Dooley and others, Adams had subtly let him know that he had the backing of “some people” who felt it was time for a change in athletic directors.
That brings us to Donald Leebern, the colorful and wealthy liquor distributor who is a University System Regent and one of the most interesting pieces in this complex story. Adams never identified to Dooley those “some people” but it now seems obvious that Adams had the backing of Governor Perdue and Leebern. Adams also told reporters that he had consulted with people “at every level” before making the Dooley decision.
The public uproar over the Dooley dispute was contrasted by the UGA faculty’s reaction to it. Not a single faculty member stepped forward to defend the beleaguered president. Fourteen academic deans issued a statement saying only that the university’s interests would be served by moving past the controversy. Adams simply shrugged it all off, perhaps knowing that his job was secure. As the weeks wore on, the UGA Foundation commissioned the auditing firm of Deloitte & Touche to conduct an investigation of Adams’s salary and expenses and other issues they felt Adams had mishandled. The report, released in October 2003, confirmed Adams’s misuse of Foundation funds but stopped short of accusing him of criminal acts.
Nevertheless, it was a broad indictment of Adams’s performance and Foundation members thought they had a smoking gun. Several members pushed for a vote of no confidence. But Griffin Bell, the Atlanta lawyer and former U.S. attorney general who was advising the Foundation at the time, and has since died, urged restraint. Bell felt the audit was damning enough but he understood that the Board of Regents, as Adams’s employer, might see it as meddling in their affairs. So Bell advised the Foundation to pass the audit on to the Regents for further action, hoping the Regents would ask Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker for an investigation.
That never happened, and instead the Regents and Governor Perdue quickly gave public statements of support to Adams. To the utter consternation of Foundation members, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (where I worked at the time) picked up on a few paragraphs of the audit mildly criticizing the Foundation for inadequate oversight over Adams’s spending and ran this headline: “Audit targets UGA Foundation oversight, spending by Adams.”
The audit report thus had the opposite effect of that intended by the concerned Foundation members.
Attorney General Baker, meanwhile, took the matter under advisement. For almost three years a spokesman for the attorney general claimed the office was investigating the case. The “investigation” turned out to be merely a review of the audit and of letters written to the attorney general. After his reelection in November 2006, Baker wrote the Board of Regents, strongly condemning some of Adams’s transactions, calling some of them possibly unconstitutional. But the attorney general took no further action.
The Regents’ reaction to the Foundation’s audit report drove a wedge deeper between the two UGA powers centers. The Foundation threatened to quit paying Adams’s salary stipend. The Regents responded by ordering Adams to terminate the university’s association with its foundation. There followed a period of negotiations that lasted almost two years. At various times both sides indicated they had worked out an agreement, but in April, 2005, the Regents pulled the plug on the Foundation a second time and began organizing a new fundraising body. This ended a seventy-year relationship between the two entities.
Most Georgians have now moved past the extraordinary public squabble and few of the key players are eager to revisit the issues. But five years after the blowup, the fallout still haunts the university and hinders fundraising efforts. Although UGA met its $500 million capital campaign goal, it did so only by counting donations required for priority purchase of football tickets. Those monies were never supposed to be part of the capital campaign, according to Billy Espy, a leader of the campaign.
And the Foundation members who witnessed close up what they saw as Adams’s perfidy can’t forget.
“The issue to me is trust. And Dr. Adams violated our trust,” one trustee said shortly after the audit report was released. The critics feel the same way today.
The late Griffin Bell didn’t believe the controversy would die until Adams is gone from the university. “At some point,” he said, “we are going to have to deal with the problem.”
This book examines in some detail the “problem” Bell referred to. It reviews the history of the relationship between the university and the Foundation, profiles Michael Adams and looks at how he was selected as UGA president, examines his actions as president that caused conflict with Foundation officials, and puts in perspective the crisis which unfolded in 2003 and its implications for the university and the state today. Along the way we learn more about Michael Adams, Vince Dooley, and Donald Leebern, as well as a number of other people who are not as well known but who were and are involved
