the past few years which is the focus of this book. A new $42.2 million Student Learning Center opened in the heart of campus in 2003. It is considered one of the largest and most technologically advanced such facilities at an American university. The 206,000-square-foot building contains twenty-six classrooms and ninety-six small study rooms. An electronic library allows users to access materials in other university libraries. The building has five hundred public-access computers, and many classrooms and study rooms have wireless internet access. There is also a coffee shop and reading room.
A new medical school, to be jointly operated by and staffed with professors from UGA and the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, is scheduled to open in 2009. The 200,000-square-foot Paul D. Coverdell Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences opened in 2006, providing space for faculty research in biomedicine, ecology and environmental sciences.
The University of Georgia today is big in every respect. Big in academics, with 32,000-plus students who boast rising test scores. Big in sports, with high-achieving athletes in almost every category and with distinguished alumni at all levels of professional and international competition. Big in business, with graduates in the executive suites of major corporations. Big in the professions, with its law graduates heading top firms and filling key judgeships. Big in politics, as previously noted. Big in philanthropy, with supporters giving the university about $100 million a year and with its endowment now approximately half a billion dollars. And big as a business itself, with an annual budget of $1.3 million.
When an institution is that big, and when it has a reputation built up over two centuries and carries with it the hopes and aspirations of an entire state, the person who heads up that institution becomes both its symbol and its lightning rod. The “forming hand of Society” and “the love of Virtue and good Order” come into play, as Lyman Hall and Abraham Baldwin might have put it.
Hall and Baldwin might have had quite a lot more to say if they could have been around in 1997 to see how Dr. Michael Adams was selected to be the next president of the University of Georgia, and to watch what unfolded over the next few years.
2
Charles B. Knapp, the twentieth president of the University of Georgia, announced in early 1997 that he would be leaving in the summer to head the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit specializing in leadership development. An economist, Knapp earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin and then taught at the University of Texas before joining Jimmy Carter in Washington in 1976. Only four years out of graduate school, Knapp served in the Carter administration with his UT colleague Ray Marshall, who was Carter’s Secretary of Labor; Knapp was Marshall’s special assistant for two years, then Deputy Assistant Secretary for two more years, before exiting with Marshall at the beginning of the Ronald Reagan administration in 1981. Knapp then taught public policy at George Washington University for a year before transferring to Tulane University in 1982. At Tulane, he taught economics and gradually moved into administration, as senior and executive vice president. Then in 1987, he was named president at Georgia.
At the time of his appointment, Knapp was said to be the youngest president of a major U.S. research university. Despite his youth, he had solid academic credentials and experience in public policy, politics, and major-college administration. He was a popular choice for the UGA presidency, and if there were any anomalies or behind-the-scenes maneuvering around his selection, no one has said so.
Aside from a winning football team, what the power brokers who selected Knapp wanted from his tenure was more respect: they wanted Georgia’s standing in academia moved up several notches. They wanted Georgia positioned for a “leadership role in national and global research, service, and higher education.” They wanted higher test scores. They wanted more prestigious faculty. They wanted more of the state’s best and brightest high school graduates to choose Georgia instead of the Vanderbilts, Dukes, Yales, and Penns. They wanted an upgraded and expanded campus and a larger endowment. They wanted an academic reputation to match the ones the university already had for athletics and partying.
Knapp himself said his goal was that the nation’s oldest chartered public university should also be one of the nation’s best public universities. Over the next decade, he arguably delivered.
His good-bye resolution in the Georgia state senate noted that he had “emphasized the importance of teaching . . . encouraged senior faculty to teach core undergraduate courses, and . . . supported the recognition of teaching excellence” by establishing honors such as “the Meigs Teaching Award and the Russell Undergraduate Teaching Award” and through an office of instructional development to provide more resources to faculty. The senate resolution praised Knapp for sharply increasing competition for admission, higher test and grade point averages for both undergraduate and graduate students, and significantly increased research activity. “Total research expenditures rose to more than $200 million in fiscal year 1995 . . . According to the latest data, the University now ranks thirty-second in the nation in total research expenditures and first in the nation among universities that have neither medical nor engineering colleges. The University is recognized as a Research Institution I by the Carnegie Foundation,” the senate said. Knapp also helped design Governor Zell Miller’s HOPE scholarship program and was a founding member of the Georgia Research Alliance, “a highly successful partnership among private corporations and the state’s six major research universities that was created to foster technological innovation and economic growth in the state.”
In fundraising, Knapp and an alumni steering committee led the Third Century Campaign—at that time the largest capital campaign in UGA history—to raise $150 million for scholarships, academics, and new buildings. The campaign reached its goal a year ahead of schedule, and even after the end of the campaign private gifts were running more than $30 million a year. The increased financial strength allowed Knapp to preside over the opening of a a new East Campus in the run-up to the 1996 Olympics, with UGA hosting competition in gymnastics, soccer, and volleyball. New construction during the Knapp decade included the Biological Sciences Complex (1992); Ramsey Center (1995); Music Department (1996); Hodgson Hall (1996); Georgia Museum of Art (1996); Rusk Center for Legal Research (1996); and the UGA Welcome Center (1996).
Knapp was praised by those he worked with in Athens and Atlanta for building coalitions between alumni, business and corporate leaders and benefactors, private donors, and state politicians. These good working relationships included, significantly, those with the UGA Foundation. Meanwhile, Knapp also held a faculty position as a professor of economics, chaired the board of directors of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, and served on the National School-to-Work Advisory Council and the NCAA President’s Commission.
As he departed for the Aspen Institute in the summer of 1997, Knapp was leaving behind a land-grant university that on his watch had grown to more than 30,000 students, with 8,500 employees and an annual operating budget of more than $600 million. It was an institution said to be “poised on the edge of greatness as it moves with confidence into a new century and a new millenium.”
After Knapp let it be known that he planned to move on, the powers that be at Georgia began talking amongst themselves about finding his successor. An outside observer would assume such a search would be for someone similar to Knapp—a solid academic with broad experience who had been steadily climbing the leadership ladder at major universities.
There was no shortage of such potential candidates spread across the American higher education landscape, although Savannah lawyer Frank W. “Sonny” Seiler said the search committee was ultimately disappointed that no sitting president of a large research university applied for the job. “Maybe we’re too proud but we thought the job was attractive enough to get someone of that stature,” he said. Nevertheless, some 130 hopefuls did seek the position. Seiler described the search as excruciatingly
