COURAGE TO MAKE THE RIGHT DECISIONS
To better understand Fenves’ decisive approach to leadership, it helps to start with a nine-foot-tall, twelve-hundred-pound bronze statue.
Years before the current national debate over Confederate statues, and only two months into his UT presidency, Fenves made a bold move. Since the 1930s, a towering bronze sculpture of Jefferson Davis, former president of the Southern Confederacy, had stood on UT’s Main Mall, the symbolic heart of the campus — among a series of statues commissioned long ago by a Texas businessman and Confederate army major, who had himself fought at Shiloh and Chickamauga.
Over time, the Davis statue had attracted controversy and protest, and a few months before Fenves took office, UT’s student government passed a resolution calling for its removal. Following the June 2015 slayings of nine Black parishioners in Charleston’s Emanuel A.M.E. Church, those demands intensified.
Fenves led the effort to remove Confederate statues from prominent public areas on UT's campus, including this statue of Jefferson Davis in 2015.
Fenves led the effort to remove Confederate statues from prominent public areas on UT's campus, including this statue of Jefferson Davis in 2015.
In response, Fenves quickly organized a task force to evaluate the “contextual appropriateness” of the statue, as well as others. “Basically, he used the expertise on campus to gain consensus among multilayered constituencies, and it worked,” recalls Cherise Smith, chair of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at UT. “It was a decisive move, streamlined and deliberate. I was very, very impressed.”
Despite a legal challenge, Fenves decided the Davis statue would be forklifted from its limestone pedestal and relocated to UT’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, destined to become part of an educational exhibit.
“While every historical figure leaves a mixed legacy, I believe Jefferson Davis is in a separate category, and that it is not in the university’s best interest to continue commemorating him on our Main Mall,” Fenves explained in a letter to the UT community.
Two years later, he did it again. Following violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the removal of a Confederate statue, Fenves revisited the 2015 task force findings.
While preparing for church, Leonard Moore, vice president of UT’s Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, recalls his phone ringing early one Sunday morning. At midnight, Fenves calmly told him, four more statues would be coming down — including two Confederate generals, Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston, and Confederate cabinet member John Reagan — slated to join the Davis statue as part of the Briscoe Center collection. Moore was impressed, both with Fenves’ gutsy decision and the courtesy of an advance alert.
Days before students returned for classes — and with little fuss or fanfare — the statues were removed. In a community letter, Fenves said that after the violence in Charlottesville, it had become clear to him that Confederate monuments had become symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism. “We do not choose our history, but we choose what we honor and celebrate on our campus,” he wrote.
Earlier this year, Emory history professor Joe Crespino joined faculty colleagues on the presidential search committee for a luncheon with Fenves. To a person, they reported it was hearing his account of those decisions that convinced them: Fenves was the one. They believed he was the next person who should lead Emory.
Beyond Fenves’ broad knowledge about higher education — a wide range of experiences as an administrator, researcher, teacher, and scholar — “to hear him talk through the challenges he faced at the University of Texas, particularly the decision to remove the Confederate statues — as a historian, I found it enormously impressive,” says Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History and chair of Emory’s Department of History.
Fenves has dived right in to his duties as Emory president, including hosting a virtual Q&A session on his first official day on the job.
Fenves has dived right in to his duties as Emory president, including hosting a virtual Q&A session on his first official day on the job.
“It showed he has an essential quality of leadership, a clarity of vision to know when to take a stand and where to draw the line,” he adds. “I think that was when I realized we had an incredible opportunity here.”
In her thirty-one years at Emory, Nancy Newman has served on more search committees than she can count. This one, she says, was different. “He’s a fabulous strategist who doesn’t shy away from the hard things,” Newman says about Fenves. “Through his experience, he’s shown us time and again, these are situations where he shines. The more we plumbed his depths, the more greatness we found.”
She left that day “with such excitement, absolutely energized.” Newman, LeoDelle Jolley Chair of Ophthalmology at the Emory School of Medicine, recalls thinking, “This is a guy who makes me want to work at Emory another thirty years.”
With a record of promoting social, economic, and racial equity for UT students, Fenves is already engaging with some of those issues at Emory. When a coalition of Emory Black student organizations reached out to administrators over the summer with concerns and demands, he helped lead efforts to listen, talk with them, and respond — well before he had actually stepped into his new role.
President Fenves recently toured Emory University Hospital, stopping frequently to thank frontline health care workers along the way.
President Fenves recently toured Emory University Hospital, stopping frequently to thank frontline health care workers along the way.
“When a president who doesn’t even officially start the job until August 1 has given students an audience, that’s a very good sign of things to come,” says Carol Henderson, vice provost for diversity and inclusion and chief diversity officer. “He’s a motivator and a collaborator, already listening and connecting with community members.”
Across the nation, “we are at an enormous moment of change and reflection — so many institutions are being asked to address questions and think of history and racial legacies in ways they haven’t in many decades,” Crespino adds. “To have someone with Greg Fenves’ experience and also his own personal history, his own personal story, at Emory in this moment is so powerful.”
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August 17, 2020 at 08:05PM
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Right time. Right place. Right leader. - Emory News Center
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