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, when put together, made him a much more interesting and qualified candidate. He had not been in academe all of his life and we thought that would help him in dealing with the problems of a liberal arts college like ours,” Grissom said at the time.
Adams replaced the popular Richard L. Morrill, who left Centre to become president of the University of Richmond. Educated at Brown, Yale and Duke, Morrill was the author of three books and numerous scholarly papers. Adams’s body of research basically consisted of his master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation, both unpublished. As his resume was being read for the first time to the assembled faculty at Centre in 1988, an administrator remembers that one professor turned to him and whispered: “Dr. Morrill had no peers on this campus . . . and neither does this guy.”
Adams did have energy, fundraising skill, and a network of political contacts. He put all to work at Centre, as he has throughout his career, following a consistent path as a builder of structures if not consensus. He established residential foreign studies programs in London, England, and Strasbourg, France. He also began the most ambitious fundraising program in the school’s history, eventually more than tripling the school’s endowment to $120 million and helping establish that previously mentioned enviable record of alumni giving. By the end of his tenure, private gifts and grants to Centre were approaching $9 million a year, up from $1.4 million when he arrived. As the money flowed in, Adams spent lavishly to improve Centre’s physical facilities, according to faculty members. (After Adams left Centre, the school’s financial officer was forced to resign, ostensibly for moving money from one fund to another to mask Adams’s spending.)
One knock on Adams has been that he is hot-tempered and imperious. Predictably, these qualities did not universally endear him to Centre’s faculty any more than they have at Georgia. In fact, some of Adams’s most enthusiastic support for his being hired at UGA seems to have come from a faction within the Centre faculty.
Many had tired of nine years of what some described as bulldozer tactics. A quiet revolt was being plotted by eighteen senior professors at Centre after unilateral changes to the faculty handbook, in violation of the college’s own policies. Adams blamed a dean for making the change without his permission; faculty members said they knew better. “It was done at Adams’s instruction,” said a senior faculty member who was at the meeting. “He stood right there and lied to sixteen senior faculty members. When you lie to sixteen faculty members you don’t build capital.” Three other faculty members confirmed the professor’s recollection.
Trustee chairman David Grissom reportedly soured on Adams over the years; he did not respond to inquiries about his relationship with the former Centre president. Journalist Richard Wilson, who had written the 1988 Adams preview in the Louisville Courier-Journal, recalled getting a telephone call from Adams about a year later. Adams wanted to have lunch and chat. They met at the posh Lafayette Club atop Lexington’s tallest bank building. “I sat and listened to him for an hour and a half and all he talked about was the rich and influential people he had met,” Wilson said. “As if I cared. I thought it was not very savvy of him in dealing with media people.”
Charles Vahlkamp, a retired Centre faculty member who attended the