a coke and a smile: emory university decides how to allot
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This article was downloaded by: [University of Otago]On: 06 October 2014, At: 10:50Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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A Coke And A Smile: Emory University Decides How toAllotLeonard Ray Teel aa Georgia State UniversityPublished online: 05 Dec 2012.
To cite this article: Leonard Ray Teel (1981) A Coke And A Smile: Emory University Decides How to Allot, Change: TheMagazine of Higher Learning, 13:4, 12-21, DOI: 10.1080/00091383.1981.10569816
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A COKE AND A SMILE
Emory University Decides How to Allot
12 Change
By Leonard Ray Teel
T oward the end of 1978 when theologian James L. Laney had been
president of Emory University for little more than a year , he went to see the university's most prominent benefactor, the Coca-Cola magnate and philanthropist Robert W. Woodruff. Laney carried a piece of paper on which he had drawn up a wish list of the compus's priority needs. Laney had listed scholarships and distinguished professorships and a few buildings, all of which would amount to such an expense that it was unlikely Emory could afford them anytime soon from present income. The preacher had come prepared to plead an "effective case" for Emory's needs in the years of his presidency.
The soft-drink tycoon had in the previous fifty years, since 1937, given the university more than $100 million , continuing the philanthropy of the first president of Coca-Cola, Asa G. Candler, whose interests had been in theology and medicine . Nearly all of Woodruffs gifts, however, had been directed to the Medical Center, including the School of Medicine, the creation of a cancer clinic, the construction of a medical administration building and the advancement of the School of Nursing, which was named after his wife, the late Nell Hodgson Woodruff. More recently, in the 1970s, he had underwritten the cost of a chemistry building and of White Hall, a main classroom building that also houses the offices of Emory College.
This widening of Woodruffs philanthropic interest in Emory was encouraging to Laney. Beyond that, Laney evidently got the impression that Woodruff liked him personally and professionally, that
LEONARD RAY TEEL is a reporter for the Atlanta Journal. He is also completing a doctorate in history at Georgia State University. His new book Erma will be published by Random House in September.
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$100,000,000
Woodruff saw in him a good manager of money and men, as Woodruff himself had been across town at the world headquarters of Coca-Cola. Like Woodruff, Laney seemed to possess a world view and talked about wanting to do something great. At Laney's inauguration in 1977, Woodruff was photographed as he placed a hand on the new president's shoulder. That remains one of Laney's favorite photographs and hangs on his office wall.
The two men had met in 197 5, when Laney was still dean of Emory's school of Theology , but their close relationship did not develop until the theologian became president of the university. That day in 197 8 Laney did not press too hard with his list.
"Here's what we need, Mr. Woodruff," he said.
"Well, I'll be!" said Woodruff. He just looked at the piece of paper.
It was around this time, Laney recalls, that Woodruff could be seen on fine Saturday mornings as his chauffeur drove him around the campus. "He would drive around and look," says Laney, "at all the buildings."
A Special Endowment
Almost a year passed before, late in 1979, Laney could announce Woodruffs generous decision. Turning ninety years old, he was transferring three million shares of '-'V'"''·'-'v.J.a
special endowment. When the accountants finished figuring the value, they totaled the gift at about $105 million, with an annual yield of $6.9 million in dividends. Thus over a ten-year period, Emory could count on spending about $69 million.
This largest single endowment gift immediately boosted Emory three places higher in the national rankings of collegiate endowments. On June 30, 1979, the Chronicle of Higher Education put Emory in sixteenth place with $168,171,000 (estimated market value); a year later Emory's total was figured at $265,818,000 and it has climbed past Washington University, Rockefeller University , and Dartmouth College. Only the top three endowed universities- Harvard, the University of Texas, and Yale- had advanced that year by $100 million or more.
"The key is that these are uncommitted funds," Laney stresses, "not funds to shore up some program that is now in need of additional funds . This endowment allows us to begin new things. We can en-
Opposite page: The administration building at Emory University. This page: The R obert W. Woodruff L ibrary for Advanced S tudies was an early donation from Coca Cola magnate R obert Woodruff The wrought ironwork at the main gate to the campus is reflective of the early architecture of the campus which features marble buildings and red tile roofs.
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vision . ... We can go ahead at a time when many other universities are cutting back."
Laney has set his sights even higher than the $105 million, however. With the announcement of the Woodruff endowment, the president said the huge gift wotlld be the kickoff of his "Campaign for Emory" to raise a total of $160 million within five years. The extra $55 million would be available for rapid expansion of the building program.
"It is significant that ranking scholars at many institutions around the country share the view that the opportunity we have at Emory to become one of America's most coherent and important universities is virtually unique in higher education at this time," he reported to the trustees last November.
At the risk of offending someone, he dared to tell them in the same message that Emory has "lost some of that vitality and coherence" it possessed thirty to forty years ago. What the university needs is a new "vision of coherence" and he left no doubt that he believes he will have the money and the management team to make the vision real.
Certain Restrictions
Although Woodruff himself placed no conditions on the endowment, the university's trustees and president soon moved to impose certain restrictions. In his report to the trustees last November, Laney noted that income from the endowment will be committed to academic programs "at the rate of an additional $1 million each year," and will increase until the academic share equals 60 percent of the annual endowment income. At the present rate of earnings, the academic commitment would therefore grow from this year's $1 million until it leveled off at about $4.1 million a year in four years. Unused income in the meantime could be used for capital improvements, the president noted.
In addition, Laney has narrowed still further the areas of discretion. As he points out, the money was given to Emory to achieve some of those priorities that he had written on the piece of paper he handed to Woodruff. "We had the priorities," Laney says.
The Woodruff income is therefore already flowing. During the current year, he advised the trustees last November, Emory
14 Change
is spending some of it on "carefully screened research projects by faculty," to develop the university libraries , to begin hiring, at least on a visiting basis, the first of up to twenty distinguished Woodruff professors. Laney's staff has also begun awarding the first of the forty Woodruff fellowships and scholarships worth more than $338,000 a year. This tuition aid program is dear to Laney's vision of Emory. He hopes that the placement on campus of forty young men and
Theologian James T. Laney, president of Emory University.
women "whose qualities of mind and character promise significant contributions" will in turn stimulate the rest of the student body and even challenge the faculty to do better. In scientific terms, Laney refers to the forty Woodruff scholars and fellows as a "critical mass." He uses the same term for the Woodruff professorships, hoping that they too will cause some sort of academic chain reaction. "In a bid to strengthen the faculty in a similar way ," he told the trustees in the same message last November, "we will eventually recommend to you the appointment as Woodruff professors of as many as twenty scholars of international distinction."
Woodruff funds not being used for academic purposes are being used as leverage for some of the capital improvements that the president, among others, deems urgently needed : new buildings as well as extensive renovations to the old humanities and science buildings along the original Quadrangle, which was laid out in 1915. In the long run, as much as 40 percent of the
Woodruff income could be pledged for capital improvements, "urgently needed facilities already identified by trustees," Laney reported last year.
The needs list is long and includes a physical education center (for which ground breaking was scheduled in May , 1981 ), a new housing facility (to be startedin summer, 1981 ), an addition to the Woodruff Memorial Building for research, clinical facilities in ophthamology, a student center (now being designed) and a science building for physics and biology .
Such a massive construction program would require much more than the Woodruff endowment income if it were to be accomplished anytime soon , and so Laney is pushing ahead with his four-year "Campaign for Emory." So far, he is encouraged at the rate of contributions. In a three-week period of March and April he said the total increased by $2 million . In eighteen months, the fund has added $31 million to Woodruffs $105 million endowment. Although Laney has set the upper limits of his campaign at $160 million (including Woodruff's $105 million), other university officials speculate that the campaign will keep on going.
Since last November, Laney has been able to take student housing off the list of urgent projects in line for Woodruff funds. In February the president announced that the J. M. Tull Industries Foundation had donated a grant of $1 million to help underwrite construction of a $6.5 million student housing project. The remainder of the cost will be amortized from student rents.
Laney also hopes that at least half of the cost of a student center annex will come from "Campaign for Emory" donations- with "maybe" half matching funds from the Woodruff income. The cost of such a center is hard to estimate but one guess is $7 million; the university has hired the noted Atlanta firm of Portman and Associates, builders of Peachtree Center, to come up with the student center designs.
Likewise, the new physical education center is expected to be paid for with a combination of gifts. The $19 .5 million complex will replace the converted World War II airplane hanger that has been home to the university's growing intramural sports programs. The new facility, also designed by John Portman and Associates, will have an olympic fifty-meter swim-
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ming pool and courts for tennis, racquetball, squash, and basketball. Such a build"
· ing for intramural sports is considered all the more important because Emory participates in so few intercollegiate activities: track and field, cross-country, and swimming for men and women, and tennis and soccer for men only. In addition to four indoor basketball courts, there is to be a central basketball arena with seating for 5,000 spectators, thus giving rise to new hope that perhaps Emory one day might field an intercollegiate basketball team, competing at least among nearby Division
" III (non-athletic scholarship) institutions.
Uncommitted Funds
When the priorities of Laney's list and the trustees' list are subtracted from the Woodruff income, millions of dollars still remain uncommitted in the decade ahead.
Such a surplus of free-floating funds at Emory, as anywhere, would naturally stimulate a certain competition and anxiety about how the money should be divided, and spent.
Perhaps one of the most remarkable bypro ducts of the Woodruff endowment is Laney's university-wide effort to create a sort of dignified dispersal of uncommitted funds. As he told the trustees , he allocated a portion of the Woodruff income for the current year to establish a series of "self-study committees" in the arts and sciences (covering both graduate and undergraduate teaching and research), in each of the professional schools of medicine, law, theology, dentistry , nursing, and business. From these self-studies will come recommendations for improvements that "will guide our allocation of the Woodruff funds to various schools and departments," Laney has stated.
Some of the self-studies have already been completed and others are scheduled to be finished by June. So far, Laney is pleased with the results and gratified that so many people have c.ontributed so many hours to the process of identifying weaknesses and areas of strength. Laney believes the faculty, students, and staff have taken up the task with confidence
· that the uncommitted funds will be allocated "not arbitrarily , here and there."
" I have not had the impression that there's been a scramble for this money," Laney said in April. In the minority, he believes, are those who would agree with one science professor in Emory College
that "the Medical School will grab it all. You just have to look around to see what wags the dog. The Medical School wants us to tailor our programs to suit them."
Those that think that the allocation of the uncommitted Woodruff funds are inevitably going to one place or another are wrong, Laney insists. There is no inevitability in this, he says.
"The Medical School is a major part of the university," he adds cautiously. "It is one of the most distinguished parts and it'll get the portion of the Woodruff money that it deserves. It will be a goodly portion but nothing like a majority of the funds. And I don't think anyone in the university with any wisdom could possibly gainsay that. After all, it could have gone to the Medical School in its entirety ."
Faculty suspicion of the professional schools is a long-standing matter here . In the latest visiting committee report of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the committee stated that it was "unavoidably forced to note that faculty morale in the college (Emory College) is
Coca Cola heir, Robert W. Woodruff
not high. Far too many faculty believe that the college's needs are being shunted aside while the needs of professional schools are being met quickly and adequately . ... The faculty and the students in these areas (the humanities especially) feel neglected, hidden in the shadow of powerful and visible professional ,schools , with undergraduate programs possibly subsidizing graduate work."
That report was made in October, 1972, five years before Laney became
president. Today, Laney says, such feelings about neglect are unfounded.
Visiting Committees
For the better part of a year now, Emory has been looking into the mirror, with the knowledge that when its selfimages are recorded, outsiders will be asked to verify whether they are true images. The self-studies will be scrutinized by some of the leading educators in America, drawn into this project through Laney's own connections at Harvard, Yale, and elsewhere. Laney composed panels of visiting committees modeled after those he has seen working well at other universities. Laney himself has served on Harvard's visiting committee for the Divinity School, where he also taught for one semester in 1974-75 as a visiting professor. His associations at Yale have continued since he received his doctorate from the divinity school.
Among the educators he recruited for outside analysis of Emory's various selfstudies are George E. Rupp, dean of the Harvard Divinity School, who will be on the committee examining the Candler School of Theology; Daniel C. Tosteson, dean of the Harvard Medical School, on the medical school committee; and Howard Lamar , dean of Yale College. Lamar, in fact, is chairman of what has been called the "high plateau committee;' which will review the reports of the four undergraduate and graduate arts and sciences committees for science, social science, humanities, and undergraduate education. That also includes Stanley Cavell, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value at Harvard; Maurice Glicksman, university provost and dean of faculties at Brown . University; Kathryn Kish Sklar, professor of history at UCLA; and Robert Bellah, Ford Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies and chairman of the department of sociology at the University of Calif0rnia at Berkeley.
Lamar's visiting committee, which will also include members of the Emory faculty, will analyze the arts and sciences reports with an idea of finding ways to bolster the faculty for the 1980s and 1990s, when the current enrollment declines may have reversed. Much has been said about setting new, stricter standards for faculty competence, and the Lamar . committee is expected to raise such ques-
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tions about the research potential and graduate teaching abilities of arts and sciences faculty.
Student Housing Needs
The last of the self-studies is scheduled to be sent to the president in June. One of the most intriguing of these now being drafted concerns the wide spectrum of undergraduate experience in the arts and sciences. The Committee on Undergraduate Education, chaired by Candler Professor of History James Harvey Young, is considering recommendations on such matters as the need for star teachers with reduced research responsibilities, and the sad state of housing and dining arrangements. One subcommittee on cocurricular experience explored the possibility of a modest entry into intercollegiate basketball competition to create "a sense of community" that is perceived as lacking at Emory.
One of the key subcommittees, operat-
ing in an area of the president's professed interest in reshaping Emory into a residential student body, has made a searching study of the dormitories, including unannounced visits. That subcommittee on undergraduate residential experience stated in its preliminary final report in April that the university's planned housing facility for 400 students "will fill only half of the existing need" on a campus where many students are forced by the lack of housing to live off-campus. Those that are housed at Emory are cramped by lack of study rooms, seminar rooms, lounges, and other common areas that have been converted into student rooms because of the housing shortage. "Inadequate facilities drive many independent , resourceful students, whom the college would benefit from having on campus, into private housing," the subcommittee reported. "Staff time that could more profitably be devoted to improving the quality of residential education is taken up finding places for undergraduates to
live. Until the housing shortage is eliminated many of the recommendations made in this repqrt will prove difficult to implement."
Emory's continuing student housing problems have for years been a source of dismay and humor. On one Alumni Day, a resident of Dobbs Hall mentioned to a distinguished returning alumnus a certain problem with the building's plumbing. If someone is taking a shower and someone else turns on a faucet, the person in the shower is in danger of being scalded, the student said. The older man laughed and said, "I'm glad to hear nothing's changed since I was in Dobbs Hall."
In housing as in other areas, Emory is matching its own problems with those of some of its peers. "Yale, Stanford, Duke, and Northwestern also face housing shortages, and are taking dramatic steps to eliminate them," the subcommittee noted. "Stanford conducted a year-anda-half-long study to determine what kind of housing would best meet its needs,
Many feel that the personal relationship between Emory president James Laney and Robert Woodruff, shown together here at Laney's inauguration ceremony in 19 78, has been a strong and positive force in Woodruff's decision to give the University such a large endowment.
16 Change
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and then began building spaces for 800 more students. The trend among students at all four institutions is toward moving back to campus. The high cost of offcampus housing and gasoline have contributed to this trend, but attractive residential programs at these schools have also pulled students back to the dorms."
The residential subcommittee also took on the question of students' nutrition and the failure of the university to bring students , and faculty, together for possible intellectual sharing over meals. The university ought to reorganize its food service, the subcommittee recommended, not only improving nutritional habits but also making it easier for students to have such mealtime encounters. Emory's meal plan presently attracts only eight percent (230) of the undergraduates. In contrast, Duke, Stanford, Yale, and Northwestern have mandatory board plans with dining facilities localized in or near the dormitories. "The deans at these institutions emphasized that dining rooms are the hub of dorm social and intellectual life," the members reported, quoting Dean Norman Robinson of Stanford as saying, "We now hold sacred the principle that each dorm must have its own dining room." Those four universities also offered a range of other "common areas" such as pottery workshops, photo darkrooms, music practice rooms. "We saw almost no rooms of this kind in Emory dorms, and were told by the housing staff that many such areas had been converted into student rooms over the last few years," the subcommittee noted. In one, Alabama Hall, 112 women have a lounge which seats fifteen to twenty and two study rooms seating four each.
The absence of such common areas has affected the university in other ways. The Woodruff Library has become in large measure both a study hall and a living room for many students. Professors regularly decry the use of the main research library for socializing, and a new campaign is underway to rennovate the old Candler Library for undergraduate use .
Perhaps no other committee has met so often or considered such a broad range of qualitative changes as the Committee on Undergraduate Education. At last count in April the members had convened twenty-two times and written four subcommittee reports, piling up an impressive stack of meeting minutes since last fall.
A Committee Meeting
By the twenty-second meeting, on the evening of April 6 , the problem facing the committee was no longer what the university's problems and challenges are, but which of the dozens of concerns should be flagged for immediate attention and relief when the administration goes to spending the Coca-Cola endowment income and the Campaign for Emory funds.
The committee members around the table comprised a diverse group in the eyes of the chairman, Young, who has taught at Emory for almost forty years.
The absence of common areas had made the library into a living room for students.
There were faculty members for biology, physics, Afro-American and African studies, religion, English, philosophy, political science, chemistry, history, and anthropology. "We have some old hands and some young very bright untenured people," Young said. The younger members included Kristin Mann, a specialist in African history, and Peggy Barlett, the representative from anthropology. Also included at the table were three students and two representatives from the Woodruff Library, as well as the dean of campus life.
"What are we going to do about priority?" Young asked in opening the meeting. "My view is that to list everything, one to thirty-five or so, is not only difficult but perhaps impossible. We could try categories: highest, high (something that we definitely believe should occur), strongly recommended (not absolutely urgent but longer range)."
There were nods of agreement. "I can think of a fourth category,"
said Peggy Barlett : "Things that may be important that we haven't looked at."
With that settled, the subcommittees were instructed to go back to their reports and screen the recommendations one more time. For the subcommittee on curricular questions, this meant reconsidering the
questions, this meant reconsidering the importance of eleven major recommendations:
• A substantial increase in the size of the Emory College faculty is needed.
• Quality teaching must be properly rewarded.
• The academic program for freshmen students should be enhanced.
• More educational experiences should be provided which would be shared by all or most of the Emory College students. At the present time, the only common academic experiences are one quarter of a writing course, health education, and drown-proofing.
• Enhanced opportunities for intellectual growth should be provided for junior and senior students in honors programs.
• More systematic and continuous attention needs to be paid to developing the basic skills of reading and writing.
• More academic programs that bridge the gap between the liberal arts and practical applications should be introduced.
• A program of teaching about teaching should be initiated.
• One person should be given the responsibility for coordinating information and facilitating planning for internship programs.
• A college program should be established in which students older than twenty-five could pursue a degree on a part-time basis.
• A program of instruction in information resources and skills should be made an integral part of the curriculum.
Apart from the priority recommendations, Young had other business for the committee to consider at the twentysecond session. So many ideas had been presented since last fall that he was concerned some might have been lost in the volume of talk. The painstaking United States historian had combed the pile of minutes from the meetings for "matters that came up, but did not come up again." He listed these "retrievals" so that "we don't lose something through inadvertance . You will recognize your own ideas."
The next hour and a half offered a survey of the broad range of interests addressed by this self-study:
1) the need to give students a concentrated exposure to another culture
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2) grade inflation, where there were too many As and Bs
3) Emory's interface with the city of Atlanta
4) interdisciplinary programs 5) cluster colleges such as those tried
at the University of California at Santa Cruz
6) grade competition exceeding the joy of learning
7) goals for students other than preprofessional goals: an awareness of larger ethical, moral and social problems
8) diversity in the student body: economic, racial, etc.
9) data from the student life survey and other data about students
I 0) artists-in-residence 11) educating Emory students to their
own narrowness, about the diverse world they live in
12) the status of old Candler Library as a possible undergraduate library, to allow the Woodruff Library to be more exclusively for research
13) more staff and more office space for recruiting, together with the need for more need-based financial aid to students
14) need for still more accurate data on why students leave Emory
15) description of what is meant by an excellent education
16) whether the data gathered on the freshman experience on other campuses was really used
17) making the campus a more exciting intellectual place for students following the example of the Phi Beta Kappa Symposium
18) the "undernourished" fine arts 19) interaction of professional schools
such as theology and dentistry with the undergraduates so that all these talents enrich the undergraduates
20) music programs' need for rehearsal halls
21) tenured "star" teachers who receive their recommendation for tenure because of their splendor as teachers, for whom research responsibilities should be less
22) the need for students to know something of Emory's history
23) ways to make it easier to get off campus for cultural events in Atlanta
With the president already committed to an enormous increase in scholarships, the mention of item 13 stirred some questions about the types of aid and the
18 Change
choosing of recipients. Ronald C. Johnson of chemistry
thought the committee ought to affirm "need-based as well as merit scholarships. I just think it would. be a mistake if we did not affirm our views on this."
Harvey Klehr of political science
Prior to becoming president of the University, Laney served as dean of the School of Theology, location of the Pitts Th eology Library.
reminded the committee that overall scholarship assistance, with the addition of the Woodruff Scholars and Woodruff Fellows, was increasing by 60 percent in one year.
Mary Billingslea of Afro-American and African studies noted that "some groups are questioning how scholarships are being awarded and on what criteria."
Chairman Young said the committee could recommend that "we favor bothneed and merit- but we don 't want need to be neglected."
Retrieval item 12 raised fundamental questions about the rights of undergraduates. Could they be restricted in the use of the Woodruff Library where they currently have full access?
Thomas R. Flynn of philosophy reminded the committee that some faculty would favor forbidding undergraduates free run of the Woodruff Library.
"No, no , no," interjected the chairman . "It's got to be the carrot and not \ the stick."
Flynn added, "They could issue browsing passes. If not , then we'd have just another open space and we'd have what we have now-which is horrendous."
Peter W. Dowell of English said the undergraduates now use the Woodruff Library as a study hall.
Flynn said he undertook to question students about their study habits. One fraternity member told him that the fraternity house was regarded as strictly a social center. Those who wanted to study set out for the library.
" I said, 'You're kidding!'" The students are entrenched, Flynn
concluded. The dean of campus life , William H.
Fox, believed the situation could be changed later in the 1980s with the construction of the desired student center addition. He reasoned, "Woodruff will be less of a student center, but only when the old Candler Library is also renovated on all those unused levels."
The renovation of the Candler Library should certainly be included in the committee's recommendations, the chairman said.
"Not just renovation," said Robert H. Rohrer of physics. "With apologies to tree lovers, there is space behind the Candler Building where another extension could be added."
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The chairman said there might be some resistance to using that space because "somebody's ashes were spread out beneath those trees."
Billingslea concluded, "The students are crying for a place to study."
Phi Beta Kappa Symposium
The Committee on Undergraduate Education did not elaborate that night on retrieval item 17, which referred to the Phi Beta Kappa Symposium held in the fall of 1979 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Emory's Phi Beta Kappa chapter. The Journal of the American Acadmy of Arts and Sciences afterwards suggested that seldom was such a strictly local observance celebrated so notably on a na tiona! level. Even today, President laney regards that weeklong symposium at which distinguished scholars spoke on "The Limits and Presuppositions of Intellectual Inquiry," as one of his presidency's finest achievements.
The Symposium was a coup for Emory's reputation for intellectual and academic achievement. Students were excused from classes during the week of the Symposium to hear ten outstanding thinkers: James Boon, associate professor of anthropology and Asian studies at Cornell University, on "Comparative Deenlightenment: Paradox and Limits in the History of Ethnology"; Stanley Cavell of Harvard, now a member of the Emory visiting committee for arts and sciences, on "Knowledge as Transgression: Mostly a Reading of It Happened One Night"; Leon N. Cooper, Thomas J. Watson Sr. Professor of Science and codirector of the Center for Neural Science at Brown University, on "Source and Limits of Human Intellect"; Stephen Jay Gould, professor of geology and teacher of biology and history of science at Harvard, on "The Evolutionary Biology of Constraint"; Leonard B. Meyer, Benjamin Franklin Professor Music and Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, on "Exploit-
ing Limits: Creations, Archetypes, and Style Change"; Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, professor of history of religions and Indian studies in the Divinity School, University of Chicago, on "Inside and Outside the Mouth of God: The Boundary between Myth and Reality"; Karl H. Pribam, professor of neuroscience in the department of psychology and in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, on "The Role of Analogy in Transcending Limits in the Brain Sciences"; Judith N. Shklar, professor of government at Harvard, on "Learning without Knowing"; Meredith Skura, assistant professor of English at Rice University, on "Creativity: Transgressing the Limits of Consciousness"; and Leo Steinberg, Benjamin Franklin Professor and University Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, on "A Corner of the Last Judgment."
Even before the scholars had assembled at Emory, President Laney and the
The Robert W. Woodruff Library for Advanced Studies has become a focal point of the Emory University campus. Serious shortages of common space for students have resulted in overuse of library and study areas on campus.
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The Emory University School of Law, originally built in 1916, was moved into a new building, Gambrell Hall, in 1973. The University has maintained its building program in recent years thus freeing the new endowment funds for other projects.
Emory Symposium Committee had arranged to publish the papers. The Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences accepted the project, to comprise one entire issue. The journal, Daedalus, "had long been committed to the kirtd of inquiry that Emory was moving toward, and thus welcomed the opportunity to participate in such an endeavor," the editor, Stephen R. Graubard , wrote in the
20 Change
preface to the Spring 1980 compilation of the papers. With the prestige of the Academy thrown into the effort, the Symposium became an intellectual success.
On the publication of Daedalus, Laney and his staff and faculty were jubilant. The new president believed that he had created the sort of image he wanted for his presidency. If he needed any further assurance, he got it last summer at the
Rockefeller Foundation conference at a villa at Bellagio, Italy, when Barbara Tuchman came up to him and said, "You 'II never guess what I've got in my purse - that marvelous issue of Daedalus."
Expensive Decisions
In the next ten years Laney will supervise the spending of the Woodruff millions more or less according to the information he is receiving these days by the ream. Of course the recommendations are sent to him without price tags, or with only general estimates of short- and long-range costs. At some time his staff will need to estimate costs and make expensive decisions. It is during this final stage that some veteran faculty members turn skeptical about the whole self-study process.
An established professor whose credentials are impeccable and whose position is secure concedes that the self-study mechanism is "a good information collection system. But I question the evaluation of the information . And I wonder about the ultimate question of how the money is to be spent. I think the president will ultimately decide it all."
That is why they elect presidents, of course. The board of trustees evidently has placed a great deal of confidence in this particular president who is already advancing against some of the recognized problems on the campus, in the undergraduate school as well as the professional schools.
Taking Laney at his word, the professional schools such as the School of Medicine, can expect to get the portion of the Woodruff money that they deserve: "a goodly portion." The Medical School's components, including the Yerkes Primate Research-Center and the Emory University Clinic, have helped advance the reputation of Emory in recent years. Even grander success is envisioned as Atlanta becomes even more prominent in the medical sciences in the Southeast, according to the new medical school dean hired by Laney, James F. Glenn. Glenn will naturally be seeking the extra funds, aggressively, to reach his own visions for the medical school, and Laney will quite naturally be wanting to, in his own word, "gallop" to greatness in an area of science that is already well along the way to distinguishing the university across the country.
In the next twenty years, Emory's
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Woodruff Medical Center can expect to have a new medical communications center, an expanded medical library, a growing medical television effort, sophisticated audio-visual teaching technologies, expanded patient care facilities, an Emory Clinic three times its present size and doubled bed space in the Emory University Hospital. All these are envisioned by Dean Glenn in a special campus magazine issue, "Emory 2001 ,"published by the student newspaper , The Emory Wheel.
"The twenty-first century will see even more prestige accrue to Emory University in consequence of activities in the entire medical complex," Glenn stated. He included Emory as one of the for tun· ate medical teaching schools where there will be enough money to survive " economic pressures." Others will be less fortunate, he noted.
Another of President Laney's newly
appointed deans, David L. Minter, dean of Emory College, evidently will be aggressive as well in lobbying to w!n the undergraduates a respectable share of the Woodruff income. In his contribution to "Emory 200 I" he started off with the list of necessary construction projects: a new biology-physics building, renovation of the college's old marble-faced red-tileroofed humanities buildings, restoration of the Candler Ubrary as a "major resource" and a "more complete faculty club as well as spaces in which students and faculty regularly interact. . . . "Then, he says, "we should observe dramatic improvements in the quality of life at Emory."
In that same "Emory 2001" issue, a student publication, the president repeated much of what he had told the university 's trustees last November about the process for spending the Woodruff in-
come. But he leaned, as some of the selfstudy recommendations are leaning, toward construction of more residential space on campus. He told the magazine that the most important development at Emory by 2001 would be the change to a residential student body such as is happening at other campuses around the country. Such a student body, housed on campus, "would participate in a full and varied life of the intellect on campus in and out of classes. It's that shared life that we need . We ought to be incandescent with that ."
With so many demands for what some believe is still too little money, Laney will undoubtedly spend the next ten years making a good many friends, and enemies. As one prominent American university president was fond of saying, "Every time you make a decision, you create )line enemies and one ingrate."
The central core of the University campus revolves around a picturesque quadrangle of old buildings. N ew facilities, notably a medical complex funded in large part by Woodruff gifts, dominate the outer sections of the campus.
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