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A Major
Decision On November 2, 1978, forty-four-year-old George M. Harmon was named the ninth president of Millsaps College. He had the right stuff: a quality liberal arts education from a Southern school, an Ivy League graduate education, extensive academic and corporate business experience, the requisite management and fund-raising experience, a love for higher education, and energy, lots of sheer energy. And if that wasn’t enough, the Board of Trustees wanted a quality graduate school of business established at Millsaps to serve the business community. Harmon updated and refined the proposal he made at Southwestern five years earlier and presented it on February 2 to the Academic Affairs Committee of the Board, which had a faculty representative, and on February 3 to the Academic Council of the College, which included the Dean of the College and division heads. Both groups were asked to keep the proposal in confidence until Harmon could make his report to the entire faculty on February 7. He wanted them to have notice before the Board formally voted on the action on February 16, but he didn’t believe it was really news to them. After all, the presidential candidates were openly evaluated on their ability to establish a business school at Millsaps. “When I announced the establishment of a school of management to the faculty, you would have thought they had never heard of the M.B.A. program. And I mean all hell broke loose,” Harmon recalls. “Many of the faculty were up in arms, and many students took up their cause. The TV stations were out here every day. Looking back, however, I probably couldn’t have orchestrated it better in terms of publicity. But it wasn’t very pleasant at the time. I’m sure the Board must have had some questions that first spring whether they hired the right person, but they backed me. They never wavered, and we went forward with the business school.” Many faculty members saw the business school as an assault on the liberal arts, while others thought it was risky from a financial point of view. It was neither. In fact, as time has shown, the establishment of the school of management drastically increased sources of financial support which benefited all areas of the College. Many of the then-dissenting faculty members give Harmon his due for turning around the College’s finances and increasing its national profile. But at the time they quite reasonably saw the school of management as a potentially massive drain on the coffers of an institution already under financial stress. “I was against a graduate program without the library system to support it,” says Emeritus Professor of History Charles Sallis. “But today I think the College is better for a number of reasons, one of which is the Else School. It was a question of timing and procedure for many of us who opposed it. The proposal had not been formally submitted to the faculty. But it is also my personal belief that if given a year to review the proposal, the faculty would have voted against it, and George understood that. So he acted. And indeed our faculty, including the liberal arts faculty, is stronger now than it ever has been in my 32 years here.” “George and I have butted heads on a number of issues over the years because both of us love the College and were acting from that love. But he never held a grudge, and when presented with the facts of a case, he always made a principled decision. He’s a man of his word,” says Dr. Sallis. “There is always a dynamic tension between presidents and their faculties. At some schools, it becomes a pitched battle, but it never did here. We were the loyal opposition. We kept him in check, and vice versa.” I'm not always the most diplomatic person,” admits Harmon. “but I get the job done. As you make changes at a college, you make people mad, right or wrong. It’s always better if you don’t have to be in a rush, but we didn’t have time to fool around. We had to change direction quickly, and I paid the price for that.” When Harmon assumed the presidency, the College had an operating budget of $4.8 million that had shown 14 successive operating deficits. Had the trend continued, Millsaps would have been insolvent within four years. Instead, the budget was balanced within two years and has consistently remained so, growing to more than $36 million today. The endowment has grown from less than $5 million to more than $93 million, after an investment of approximately $75 million in physical plant and equipment improvements, including the Campus Life Complex. During Harmon’s 22 years of leadership, the College raised more than $141 million, against a combined goal of $117 million during its three capital campaigns. But if the story was just about money, it wouldn’t be much of a story. But it is about students, their education, and the leaders they become. When the Board and the President sat in circles of folding chairs tallying gifts and naming prospects, they were not unlike parents at a kitchen table looking over the grocery bills. They talked constantly, incessantly, about money – but what they really were talking about was the future of the family, about where it was today and where it could be tomorrow. In 1979, the College had no full-time development, student affairs, or admissions staffs and had not had a successful campaign since the 1950s. The administration and the physical plant had been cut back severely in order to shift funds toward maintaining the academic programs, but even that strategy had long before unraveled. In the face of this situation, Board Chairman Jim Campbell and Harmon convened a meeting of the Board and set out an ambitious goal of raising $7 million. Their fund-raising consultants told them repeatedly that $6 million was the maximum they could expect. The Centennial Development Campaign Phase I raised more than $14 million, twice the original goal. At the time the campaign was announced, it was the largest campaign in the history of Mississippi higher education. PREVIOUS PAGE | PAGE 3 OF 5 | NEXT PAGE |
