Others quickly fell into line. Chancellor Stephen Portch, nearing retirement, gushed that Adams was a “perfect fit” for UGA. Portch praised the members of the Board of Regents, all appointed by Democrat governors, for choosing a partisan Republican to head the University of Georgia. Portch had insisted throughout the search that he wanted a president who would be as much at home in the onion fields of Vidalia as in the classrooms in Athens. He evidently felt that Adams was the complete package—intelligent yet down-to-earth and practical.
Governor Zell Miller praised Adams’s “real world” political experience. Lieutenant Governor Pierre Howard drew on undisclosed information to proclaim that the Regents’ choice of Adams demonstrated their dedication to classroom excellence.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution observed that faculty and students were “taken aback” by the appointment due to reservations that a candidate from a school more similar to Georgia in size and stature had not been chosen. But the newspaper opined that the size doesn’t matter when picking a university president. Adams brought unique qualities to the job, the newspaper said, noting his fundraising abilities and Centre College’s traditional high ranking among small teaching colleges.
Even Betty Whitten seemed to have overcome her misgivings. When rumors of Adams’s impending appointment began circulating several days before the official University System Board of Regents announcement on June 11, 1997, she stated that he would “do a great job.”
3
The twenty-first president of the University of Georgia made his first official appearance in Athens on June 26, 1997. Regent Donald Leebern, who some said had personally steered Adams through the selection process, sent his private airplane to Danville, Kentucky, on June 25 to fetch Adams’s wife, Mary, and sons David and Taylor to join Dr. Adams in Atlanta. The boys were delivered to their grandparents’ home in Stone Mountain, and Dr. and Mrs. Adams were driven to the home of Chancellor and Mrs. Stephen Portch to spend the night. Early the next morning, Dr. and Mrs. Adams, Chancellor Portch, and Leebern rode together to Athens. At precisely 9:45 a.m., holding hands like newlyweds, Mike and Mary Adams walked under the University Arch on the old North Campus while the Red Coat band played “Glory, Glory to Old Georgia.”
“How’re you doin’? I’m Mike Adams,” the newly minted president said to a group of students. He was, according to news accounts, an instant hit with faculty and students. It is safe to say at that point the curious onlookers knew virtually nothing about him.
Born March 25, 1948, in Montgomery, Alabama, Michael F. Adams is the older of two children born to Hubert and Jean Adams. Hubert was a broker and sales manager with Kraft Foods, a job that required frequent family moves. By the time Adams finished elementary school he had lived in Albany, Macon, and Atlanta. The family moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, after Adams’s sophomore year in high school and Adams graduated there from City High School (living temporarily in a teacher’s home after Hubert Adams was transferred to Raleigh, North Carolina, during his son’s senior year).
Adams showed early ambition and leadership. He was class president during his sophomore and junior years of high school and student body president his senior year. He graduated in 1966. Although he hasn’t lived there for many years, Adams has said he still considers Chattanooga as his home. After high school, he entered David Lipscomb College, a Nashville-based school associated with the Churches of Christ. The first in his family to attend college, Adams was a stellar student. He graduated magna cum laude with a degree in speech and history in 1970 and immediately began graduate studies at Ohio State University. He earned two graduate degrees in political communications.
Adams took an early interest in politics, particularly as practiced by the Republican party. His 1971 master’s thesis at Ohio State University was on the “Role of the Ethos” of Spiro T. Agnew in the 1970 U.S. senate elections. That was followed two years later by his doctoral dissertation: “A Critical Analysis of the Rhetorical Strategies of Sen. Howard Baker Jr. in His 1972 Campaign for Re-election.”
After earning his doctorate at Ohio State, Adams taught there for two years before taking a job in 1974 with Senator Baker, then U.S. Senate minority leader; he served as Baker’s chief of staff from 1976–79. In 1980 Adams tested the political waters himself, running as the Republican candidate for a U.S. House seat in a solidly Democratic Tennessee district and was soundly defeated. It was his first and last political campaign. From 1980–82, Adams was a senior advisor to Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander. His first job as a college administrator came the next year when he took a job as vice-president for university affairs and professor of political communication at Pepperdine University. He became president of Centre College in December 1988.
Adams’s tenure at Centre is instructive for those who would seek to understand his behavior and performance at Georgia. As he was preparing to take the post at Centre, an Adams acquaintance at Pepperdine accurately predicted that he would be a forceful, dynamic, and at times controversial college president.
Centre College is a small but mighty private liberal arts school in Danville, Kentucky, about sixty miles southeast of Louisville and forty miles southwest of Lexington. Founded in 1819 by Presbyterians, it has become the top school in Kentucky in terms of academic rank and prestige. Whatever the U.S. News and World Report annual college rankings really mean, Centre was forty-fourth nationally in 2008, and Consumer’s Digest declared Centre the nation’s number one value among private, liberal arts schools in 2007. The campus sits on 150 immaculate acres and has sixty-four buildings, of which thirteen are on the National Register of Historic Places. However, the school is tiny, with only twelve hundred students. If anything, Centre’s alumni are more fanatical and more loyal than Georgia’s. Over the past quarter-century, Centre ranks first among U.S. colleges and universities for the percentage of alumni giving money to the school. And its alumni have excelled on the national stage disproportionately to their numbers, including two U.S. vice presidents, one chief justice of the United States, one associate justice of the Supreme Court, thirteen U.S. senators, forty-three U.S. representatives, ten moderators of the General Assemblies of the Presbyterian Church, and eleven governors. Centre even has a football team, the Colonels (formerly the Praying Colonels), who compete in the NCAA Division III Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference, with a 509-374-37 record compiled over the past 128 years. Centre’s 6–0 defeat of top-ranked Harvard in 1921 is considered by the College Football Hall of Fame as one of the two greatest upsets ever in college football.
Against that backdrop of history and academic distinction, it is a fair question to ask how Adams ended up as Centre’s president. The answer seems to be similar to the situation a decade later at UGA: he had a powerful patron.
Journalist Richard Wilson, former director of the University of Kentucky’s School of Journalism and Telecommunications and retired education writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal, interviewed Adams when he was appointed at Centre. The interview began at Adams’s Pepperdine office located high on a bluff overlooking Malibu beach and the blue Pacific Ocean. It ended at a beachfront bar over cocktails.
Wilson recalled that Adams’s academic credentials were considered slim even for Centre, a school with just over eight hundred students at the time. “On the surface,” Wilson wrote, “Adams may seem a strange choice for the presidency of what may be Kentucky’s most elite private college. He didn’t come up through the faculty ranks and was not groomed through a variety of bureaucratic posts within academe.”
Wilson said Adams was the choice of J. David Grissom, a Louisville banker and entrepreneur and the long-time chair of Centre’s trustees. Grissom liked Adams’s down-to-earth style and the fact that he wasn’t an academic. “We thought all of his experiences,
