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Transcript from "1967 & 2007"

Let's go back a little bit. You got a specialist degree from the university in 1967, so you came back, and…

I came back, because I noticed there weren't that many black students here still. And I guess I took a little vacation from '62 and in '64 I came back during the summer. I came for four consecutive summers. Things were better, and then I was not at Center Myers dorm, I was in Creswell dorm, and there were no mixtures as far as black-white students in the dorm rooms, but you know, we were on the same floor, whereas before that had not happened. I guess things were easier because I sort of knew the ropes, I knew where things were. The Music Department was always warm and inviting. I found the professors there to be very accepting, very encouraging, and the students for the most part. But there were problems with students who, I guess, associated with the black students. They were ostracized by their fellow students, and that was at the beginning, I noticed less of that. There was more mixture of students and people talking with you outside of class when I came back for my sixth year. But it was still a very segregated campus as far as…it wasn't very integrated. I believe the summer I graduated there were eight other students who were here, and amazingly there were three in music, and I sort of felt proud of that, because I guess they felt, you know, it was okay in music. The others were attending, I think it was a counselor's workshop. They were not students for a degree. But nine students on campus still didn't make much of a dent, and I said it at the commencement a few weeks ago, there were seven thousand and one hundred students here when I came. And now there are thirty-four thousand plus. That's a big jump. And when you look at percentages, it still is very small. But, you know, it means we still have a ways to go, that we need to continue to work to recruit students. One of the biggest problems is that the really top students in all of Georgia tend to go to the schools where they get the most financial help, and if they are really, really smart, they have high GPA's and SAT scores…You know, Harvard gets them, Yale gets them. All the big schools get them because they can pay it. Georgia…I guess the scholarship here…the progress with scholarships is not where it should be. That's why I want to work to try and help improve that, because I think that, you know, students don't want to come if they can't feel that they will get financial help. They also want to feel that they will be comfortable. If we can just get them on campus, I think they would see that, that they can be comfortable. It's a wonderful university, and it competes, I think, very favorably with many other universities nationwide.

Those folks in the Alumni Society have really been working on you. I can tell.

(Laughter)