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Transcript from "First Year as President"

Your early days had to be colored by the recent controversy with the Jan Kemp case as you mentioned. You had issues with athletics. You had issues with developmental studies. I’m sure you were getting a lot of advice, from people both within and without the University. Can you speak to how that surrounded you in your first year of service?

Sure: I actually might take you back to a story during the search, you know the search committee was an eclectic group. It was chaired by Sid Smith, who was on the Regents, retired federal judge from Gainesville. But we had everything from former quarterbacks to members of the arts and sciences faculty that had led the charge, really against Fred Davison. So there was a lot of dissonance in the search committee. I remember one discussion that maybe went on for an hour with the search committee about athletics, and I’d had some experiences with athletics that they reported to me at Tulane, and I thought we had a really good discussion about it, kind of talking about the balance that was necessary to run a competitive intercollegiate athletic program and to do it in a way that was consistent with the mission of the University. I remember it concluded, and Judge Smith said, “Well, that was a good discussion Chuck.” I said, “Well thank you, Judge.” And he said, “I’ve got one more thing to say to you.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “We want to win!” So I kind of took that to heart as part of it and always did, but it was a time of, I think Henry King Stanford had done a good job of kind of pouring some oil on the waters, but there was an underlying still sense of tension and a lot of people concerned about the direction of the University, the reputation of the University coming out of the Jan Kemp affair. I really set out to do two things right away. One was to stop talking, I believe I used the term wallowing, in the Kemp affair. I did everything I could, both in substance and symbol to do that. I don’t know if you recall that there was a lot of heat to film a movie about it, and they wanted to film it on campus. I said, we’re not going to do that because we’re not looking in the back, we’re looking in the front and this doesn’t help us look in the front. In terms of that issue, which was most important as looking forward, what I tried to do was to establish what was important. What was important was that the University of Georgia had an opportunity to take its place among the great public universities of the country, and that’s what we need to keep our eye on. Athletics was an important part of that. I’m still a rabid Bulldog. I will admit. I live and die with the University of Georgia athletic teams to this day, but what we’ve got to keep in mind is that’s only part of the University and in fact, and this used to drive people crazy when I said it, it’s not the most important part. Our most important part is teaching, research, and public service. And a strong athletics program can be a great benefit to the University. It can bring people together. It can build enthusiasm. It can be a portal that people enter the University through that otherwise would not be available. But that we’ve got to keep our eye on the ball. I think a lot of people that were athletically inclined interpreted that as a de-emphasis of athletics, and that did cause a lot of…we had to do a lot of talking with people about that in the first few years, and I tried to explain what I was up to. I tried to be clear. I was clear with the regents and the hiring process that you know, that my priorities were academic and that’s where we were going to take the University, because I thought that Georgia as a state that was and still is on the rise, deserved a comprehensive public university that could compete with places like Virginia and North Carolina, and I think we’ve reached that objective. But it did not come without breaking a few eggs in the process.