While still in office, President Jimmy Carter came for a groundbreaking of the Cannon Chapel at Emory’s Candler School of Theology in the sweltering August of 1979 — the same year that Emory University received $105 million from Robert and George Woodruff, the largest gift ever given to an educational institution at the time.
Unbeknownst at the time, however, the gift would propel the university to become a preeminent global institution while laying the foundation for the development of the Carter Center.
During a Feb. 10 evening “Presidents in Conversation Event” at the Carter Center, Mr. Carter, James T. Laney, Emory’s president from 1977-93 and ambassador to South Korea from 1993-97 and the current Emory president, James W. Wagner, reminisced about the center’s ties with the university.
They seemed confident that the relationship because of shared values and global concerns would endure, but failed to address any new initiatives they might tackle together other than to be open to unknown future challenges that they would address together in a pragmatic manner.
Dr. Laney recalled how thrilled he was to have a sitting president come to the groundbreaking event at a time when Emory still was considered a relatively provincial institution. Mr. Carter’s recollection was more elemental. He recalled how hot he was because of the heavy robes he had to wear in the August heat.
The recollection drew a laugh from the several hundred attendees, but Dr. Laney quickly responded by noting Mr. Carter’s appearance earlier this month in the House of Lord’s ornate Robing Room — where the queen dons her heavy robes — to promote his center’s health initiatives around the world.
Known as “the gift,” the Woodruffs’ philanthropy challenged the university to assume greater ambitions. “It gave the university a sense of strength and prominence in the nation,” Dr. Laney recalled including, he said, a sense of global responsibilities in the domains of economic development and health.
Following Mr. Carter’s defeat in the 1980 election, the now former president agreed to join the Emory faculty as “a university distinguished professor” at the behest of Dr. Laney who wrote him a letter and personally met with him proposing the position.
Dr. Laney recalled that Mr. Carter’s acceptance and presence at Emory “electrified” the campus including both faculty and students as he crossed it with Secret Service guards in tow heading to a lecture hall or class where he would meet with students across a great many academic disciplines ranging from English to international affairs.
But it wasn’t until 1982 that Dr. Laney agreed for Emory to partner with the former president and Rosalynn Carter in the establishment of the Carter Center, a nongovernmental organization that would address complex issues including democracy building, conflict resolution, human rights, mental health and neglected tropical diseases.
A few years later, Dr. Laney remembered, he was walking across the campus with Karl Deutsch, an eminent scholar of international affairs who joined the Emory faculty and the center as a presidential fellow after retiring from Harvard University, when they crossed the path of Mr. Carter and his entourage.
“I want to tell you in 1,000 years there won’t be a name remembered among the U.S. presidents except for yours,” Dr. Laney said the professor told Mr. Carter. “And that’s because you are the first leader to link human rights to foreign policy.”
Mr. Carter’s recollection of the period prompted him to ask Dr. Laney if by launching the Carter Center he would receive tenure at Emory.
Dr. Laney, who confessed that he had to backpedal a bit, responded, “Well, to be tenured you generally have to write a few books,” he replied.
“Of course, he went on to write two dozen books,” Dr. Laney added. “Well, I’m still not tenured.,” Mr. Carter responded quickly in jest.
Since the first Woodruff gift, the Woodruff Foundation gave the university $261.5 million in November 2006 to overhaul the Emory Clinic, renovate the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Administration Building and facilitate Emory’s strategic plan.
With these funds, Emory has become a leading global medical center as evidenced by its role in containing the Ebola crisis, which Mr. Carter addressed directly.
Emory University Hospital accepted the first patient to be treated for Ebola virus disease in the U.S. and over the next three months, the hospital’s Serious Communicable Disease Unit successfully treated four patients.
Physicians, nurses and scientists have worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is on the Emory campus, to share lessons of preparedness, prevention and treatment with colleagues throughout the U.S. and in West Africa and to conduct research aimed at developing more effective vaccines and therapies.
But less well known is the Carter Center’s influential role in working with the Liberian government.
“Liberia has national laws and local laws administered by chiefs,” Mr. Carter said. The Carter Center through its political work at the beginning of the century following decades of warfare there had formed “a network of trust,” he said, with the 4,000 chiefs in villages throughout the country that was useful in the efforts to contain the Ebola virus.
Other well-known initiatives have been its election monitoring around the world, its peace initiatives in Africa and its fight against diseases like malaria and Guinea worm.
Emory and the center also have shared the involvement of programs and individuals. Mr. Carter mentioned the late Robert Pastor, who served as a Senior Fellow at the Carter Center, where he established the programs on Latin America and the Caribbean, democracy and election-monitoring, and Chinese village elections. He was also Goodrich C. White Professor of Political Science at Emory University.
He also mentioned William H. Foege, who was appointed executive director of the center in 1986 and was instrumental in the creation of the Rollins School of Public Health while serving as a member of the Emory faculty.
Additionally Richard Joseph, former director of the African Governance Program at the center, served as a political science professor at Emory, and in the 1990s Ambassador Marion Creekmore served as director of programs at the center and Emory’s first vice provost for international affairs.
Other connections include the center’s mental health program and the Rosalynn Carter Chair in Mental Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Rollins School. Mr. Carter graciously said that Mrs. Carter’s mental health journalism project was enough by itself to justify the center.
Other programs that have overlapped include the program dealing with water and and the Laney Graduate School’s doctoral program in religion that work on common issues involved in economic development and peacekeeping.
And while a lot of both Emory and the center’s focus has been abroad, Mr. Carter spoke at length about his involvement and that of the center in the Atlanta Project which brought local and national agencies to focus on the plight of the city’s poorest residents in a coordinated manner.
The pivotal question for the evening focused more on the future than the past, however. What’s next for the Carter Center?
All three participants indicated that in their opinions the two institutions would be forever tied together. They also stressed the common values of service and global connectivity with the university providing financial support for strengthening faculty distinction and assisting students with financial aid, many of whom experience internships at the center.
Dr. Wagner was particularly eloquent on the leadership values the university seeks to instill with an awareness of the importance of reaching decisions through the airing of diverse opinions and the give-and-take of participants with different points of view.
The idea that the Carter Center could become a venue for granting degrees was shot down on grounds that at Emory research and teaching are paramount while the Carter Center staff are more pragmatic and time sensitive.
“They work on different time cycles,” Dr. Wagner said.
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