was awful,” he recalled. “I almost got hemorrhoids.”
Seiler served on the search committee by virtue of his role as president of the alumni association. UGA business professor Betty Whitten was the chairwoman. Others on the committee included Columbus liquor dealer Donald Leebern; AFLAC insurance CEO Dan Amos; federal judge Julie Carnes; Athens businessman Howard “Ed” Benson; and Albany businesswoman Henrietta McArthur Singletary. The sixteen-member search committee also included six members of the UGA faculty and staff, and the student government association president.
The committee was reasonably diverse, if skewed toward influence, power, and wealth. One thing all the members had in common was that they bled red and black. Seiler himself is a good example of the lifelong loyalty many Georgians hold for their flagship university. He is also well-known in legal circles for his successful defense of a prominent Savannah antiques and art dealer in the shooting death of a local hustler, a murder made famous by the best-selling book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Seiler was a prominent character in the book and even had a role in the movie, directed by Clint Eastwood. Seiler, seventy-five, a friendly and outgoing man, has also had roles in Gingerbread Man (1998) and The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000). But Seiler’s favorite role is as the breeder and owner of UGA’s English bulldog mascot. As a second-year law student in 1956 the newly married Seiler bought a white English bulldog puppy as a gift for his new bride. An avid UGA football fan, he took the puppy, which he named Uga, to the opening game at Sanford Stadium against Florida State. The Bulldogs won 3–0 and athletics department officials were so taken by the puppy they asked Seiler to bring the mutt to subsequent games, and a tradition was born. Uga became the official Georgia mascot and a succession of Ugas have followed (the current one is Uga VI), making Seiler’s bulldogs among the most recognizable of college mascots. Uga V’s mug made the cover of the April 28, 1997, Sports Illustrated, which named him the country’s very best college mascot.
Seiler said he thought the presidential search committee was well-balanced. He recalls lively debates over the candidates, with members of the faculty generally on one side and businessmen on the other.
“The faculty wanted an agenda that would promote multi-cultural classes,” Seiler said. “That was the first time I heard that term . . . Then tenure was a big issue. They didn’t want anything to affect tenure. And when I tell you the faculty was 100 percent this way, it’s true. We kind of felt like we were shopping for an energetic president and they were shopping for someone who would agree with their philosophy. It never got violent but it was sure as hell opinionated.”
One person who was not on the committee was UGA Foundation chair Shell Hardman Knox of Augusta. Like many prominent Georgians, Shell Knox’s family has long-established ties to UGA. She graduated in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in special education, is a founding member of the UGA Presidents Club, a former chairman of the UGA Foundation, was vice chairman of UGA’s Board of Visitors, and was director of the university’s Studies Abroad Program in Cortona, Italy. The granddaughter of former Governor Lamartine G. Hardman (1927–31), she is married to prominent attorney Wycliffe “Wyck” Knox, a former UGA Foundation treasurer. The couple are both avid Bulldog fans and significant donors.
Shell Knox had worked closely with Charles Knapp and was vitally interested in who would succeed him. She had wanted to be on the search committee but heard through others that Leebern didn’t want her.
Over a period of five months and under a veil of secrecy, the search committee reduced the list of candidates to fourteen. The list included eleven men and three women; in accordance with state law, their names were not publicly released. Shell Knox, meanwhile, was following the process closely from the sidelines. Early in the search she was encouraged, she said. A friend on the search committee would call and say it’s unbelievable how many people are interested in the job. But as the process wore on, the friend reported a “shift in focus.” Adams was “in the mix,” Knox was told, and she was warned that Adams probably wouldn’t be her personal choice to succeed Knapp.
A round of interviews with the finalists was scheduled for May 1997 at the Hilton Hotel near the Atlanta airport. By then it seemed clear that Adams was a controversial front-runner. On paper, Adams may have been the unlikeliest of the candidates. As president of a small private college in Kentucky, he had no experience at a research university, let alone a flagship school like UGA. His record as president of tiny Centre College for nine years was solid but unspectacular. Before that he had been vice president for university affairs and professor of political communication at Pepperdine University, a Church of Christ school in Malibu, California. His academic resume was thin, but his credentials in fundraising and national politics had evidently earned him an inside track in the UGA search with some influential Regents, notably Leebern. Countering that was an equal lack of support from the UGA faculty representatives. Committee chairwoman and business professor Betty Whitten was reportedly unimpressed with Adams’s background and warned the other committee members that he would “never be accepted” by the UGA faculty.
Whitten, who has since retired from Georgia, has steadfastly declined requests for interviews about Adams. Others familiar with the process say she believed he was the weakest candidate and thus scheduled his interview first. But when she arrived at the Hilton for the start of the interviews, she was told that Adams had a personal conflict and couldn’t arrive in Atlanta until later. His interview was rescheduled for last.
Meanwhile, the committee had prepared a standard list of questions so the candidates’ answers could be compared and assessed later. When Adams finally arrived and his interview began, it was apparent that someone had fed him the questions or at least had discussed with him the other candidates’ answers. His response to the very first question was, “I understand there’s been a lot of discussion about that in the last few days.” Whitten has also told people that when Adams submitted his expense report for the trip to Atlanta, which she had to sign as chair of the search committee, it showed he had been in Georgia for the entire time of the interviews.
Adams’s academic credentials were of little concern to others on the search committee. They were looking for a CEO-type who knew how to wield his authority and preferred to apologize rather than seek permission. They stressed Adams’s intellect, his vision, and especially his political acumen and ability to connect with ordinary Georgians. Seiler said Adams was an impressive candidate. He had spent a day driving around the Athens campus before his interview, which impressed the committee. Although a native of Alabama, Adams grew up mostly in Georgia, which also helped his standing. Parties to the interview process say Adams was a great salesman of himself. He had a way of answering questions that made the questioner feel that he agreed with them, even when he didn’t give the answer they wanted.
The necessity for academic standing apparently had been replaced by something more important—political skill and fundraising ability. The old days of the bookish college president, it seemed, were over.
At the close of the Hilton interviews, the search committee narrowed the finalists to five “officially unranked” and still publicly anonymous candidates. These five names were submitted to a special Regents subcommittee chaired by Leebern, which cut two more from the list and submitted a shortlist of three finalists to the full Board of Regents. In June 1997, the Regents released the names of the three finalists. They were James Machen, vice president for academic affairs at the University of Michigan (now president of the University of Florida); Debra W. Stewart, vice provost and dean of the graduate school at North Carolina State University (now president of the Council of Graduate Schools); and Michael Adams, president of Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.
The final result was a foregone conclusion, according to insiders. Many of those interviewed for this book believe that Leebern had hand-picked Adams from the beginning. Leebern was by all accounts the most influential person on the search committee and he has remained one of Adams’s staunchest backers throughout the subsequent controversies. Seiler acknowledged that Leebern played a pivotal role in Adams’s hiring.
