Skipping Academe with Zell

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That Zell Miller will join a white shoe law firm on K Street won't surprise many Beltway insiders. After all, that path is well trod, and for good reasons. Money, prestige, and the opportunity to stay in the game by hobnobbing with establishment elites are sufficient grounds for many politicians to hang around Washington long after they -- or voters -- end their term in office.

But Zell Miller is a bit different from most of his colleagues, as his embrace of President Bush and public spanking of Democratic colleagues revealed. In fact, his decision to join McKenna Long & Aldridge doesn't rest upon the standard reasons alone, but upon an ugly turn at Young Harris College (YHC), his (and my) alma mater.

Before last spring, Miller planned on retiring to his home town of Young Harris to teach at the eponymous junior college there. He's a YHC graduate and former professor at the small Methodist school, which was founded in 1886 by a circuit-riding minister. But in May, David Franklin, a history professor there whose wife is academic dean, penned a vitriolic letter to Miller that was obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In the letter, Franklin, from whom I took a Western history survey course during his first year there, 1979/80, said:

"You, Zell Miller, are a disgrace to your city, your county, your state and your country. Your attack upon the U.S. Senate that you sit in now was so unpatriotic it boggles the imagination."

In response, Miller declared that he wouldn't teach at the College, as the letter "makes it abundantly clear that I would not be, shall we say, warmly welcomed." And: "I have long put up with this kind of vitriol in the political world but I am not going to at my alma mater."

Prof. Franklin has transformed himself from the preppy, buttoned down, clean-cut Southern fraternity boy I remember into a provincial parody of academic chic. Note the clichéd language in the description of his Anthropology 101 course:

In keeping with the Liberal Arts tradition and association with The United Methodist Church, this course is a "celebration of human diversity" and the American "ethnic salad." Above all, cultural anthropology is the glorification of the human race.

Moreover, Franklin is given to vitriolic -- one might say unhinged -- commentary in the forum pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I don't know whether his opinion of Miller is shared by his colleagues at YHC. I do know that Franklin was listed among the leaders of John Kerry's Georgia campaign staff.

This is a sad development, because it evinces a wannabe predilection among at least some of the faculty. Not so long ago, small, isolated schools such as Young Harris paid little attention to academic fads; their physical isolation -- YHC is in the sparsely-populated mountains of Northeast Georgia -- didn't so much protect them from pseudo-intellectualism as it gave faculty and students the privilege of ignoring the relativism then invading academic culture. Yet this privilege wasn't abused, at least in my time on campus and in the lives of family members connected with the school (including my wife, a sister & sister-in-law, several cousins, and an aunt and uncle who taught and worked there for many decades). Rather, it was used to carve out a small space in which personal friendships, traditional education, and a close-knit community were nurtured.

But so politicized has higher education become that even the smallest academic communities now employ teachers who're only too happy to lash out at a native son who professes traditional conservative beliefs -- even if he also happens to be the school's most distinguished alumnus. That's a pity, especially for the students who could have learned about American politics from a former governor and Senator who spent decades in the public arena.

Can there be any doubt that, had Miller spoken out against the Bush administration, his place in academe would have been assured? After all, Max Cleland, Georgia's embittered ex-Senator, found his liberal credentials far more useful in landing an academic post than in maintaining his Senate seat in a Red State. Viewed from that perspective, Miller's ostracism from his alma mater is a badge of honor. But for Young Harris College, it remains a shameful stain.

Update: Eugene Volokh, whose blog I admire and read, raises some objections to my presentation of Zell Miller’s decision not to teach at his hometown alma mater. While some of his points might stick in the big-time academic world of a UCLA or Yale, they’re more difficult to apply in the particular, and perhaps peculiar, case of tiny Young Harris College. Within the context of the school’s history, and the close, familial ties traditionally enjoyed by its alumni and supporters, David Franklin’s remarks had a greater impact than those unfamiliar with the school might imagine. I’m well aware that such a seemingly insignificant event at larger, more cosmopolitan institutions would hardly serve to make a prospective professor feel unwelcome. I attended graduate school at the University of Michigan, and trash talking scholars, politicians, and any other sentient beings was the norm.

But at a school with a student body of about 600 – less than half the number of my small-town high school 25 years ago – few high profile alumni, a tradition of educating Christian ministers, and nestled in an isolated, sparsely populated region of the Deep South, the retraction of the welcome mat that such comments represented was a unique event in the school’s history. Miller’s reaction wasn’t, I believe, simply to the comments of one rude man, but to the changed atmosphere on a campus at which he has been student, teacher, and champion, and in the town where he was born and raised and even served as mayor. The county in which Young Harris sits is home to only about 9,500 people after two decades of rapid growth (its population was only 5,600 in 1980), and Atlanta is a 100 mile drive away over curvy mountain roads.

It’s obvious – too obvious to have stated in my original post – that Miller isn’t a 30-year-old newly-minted Ph.D. desperate for an academic post. At age 72, with a full political career behind him, it’s understandable that he wouldn’t want to spend his golden years subjected to even more of the vitriol to which any politician is accustomed – especially in a world he had every reason to assume would be welcoming, and in the department within which he would teach.

So the story isn’t about a litigious matter; there’s no need to notify the AAUP. Rather, it denotes a significant change within the customs of a small institution which has, in spite of its isolation and tradition, embraced the greater culture of academe sufficiently to cause its most famous graduate to feel unwelcome. I believe that is newsworthy, and not simply within the Young Harris community. And I maintain that it’s a damned shame.

Update II, 12-10-04: Ralph E. Luker at the History News Network's Cliopatria Group Blog supports my contention that Zell's prospects at YHC weren't looking good. Luker, a well published historian of American race relations and the Civil Rights Movement, lives in Atlanta. This morning he blogged:

[T]he prospect of his returning to the college classroom, it seems to me, was not a happy one. Those who think well of the idea cite the fact that: a) David Franklin is the husband of Young Harris academic dean, Louisa Franklin; and that b) Professor Franklin was a charter member of the Kerry for President Steering Committee in Georgia. So, when Eugene Volokh points out that David Franklin was only one professor exercising his free speech rights about Zell Miller and Glenn Reynolds revises his post accordingly, they're both underplaying the fact that the husband of the academic dean [emphasis original] published his vitriolic letter attacking the state's vitriolic United States Senator in the state's newspaper of record.

Luker goes on to say that he's not wild about retired politicians taking teaching positions, or of the feeling of entitlement many of them hold. I agree, in general, with those sentiments. But remember that, in this case, Miller used to teach at YHC, so this was more of a return to an aborted academic career than any affirmative action for old pols. I'm heartened that Luker, a professor who knows the South and the state of Georgia well, agrees with the gist of my post on Miller.