Too many at the top of higher education are unfit for their roles. For better models, we can turn to the model provided by the late Gil Blackburn.
Too many at the top of higher education are unfit for their roles. For better models, we can turn to the model provided by the late Gil Blackburn.
C onsidering the behavior of many university presidents over the past year, it’s easy to conclude that the search for strong leadership in higher education is as promising as Diogenes’ quest for an honest man. I recommend directing your lamp toward the example of Gil Blackburn, a longtime senior administrator who passed away last winter at the age of 84. About 20 years ago, while at Gardner-Webb University, Blackburn stood up for the school’s academic integrity and against its president. His example can guide university leaders today.
Blackburn was born and raised on a horse farm near Mount Airy, N.C. (the inspiration for Andy Griffith’s Mayberry), the youngest of six children. In 1960, he earned his associate’s degree from what was then Gardner-Webb Junior College, a small Baptist institution in Boiling Springs, N.C. In 1968, while he was still a graduate student at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Blackburn returned to Gardner-Webb to begin his long career as a professor and administrator.
The events that led to Blackburn’s greatest professional challenge started in the winter of 1999. It began when Gardner-Webb’s star basketball player copied a classmate’s final exam for a New Testament course. (Oh, the irony.) A disciplinary board found the student guilty of violating the school’s honor code. Policy dictated that because the student cheated, his F would factor into his GPA even after he retook the course for a better grade. That low grade made him ineligible to play basketball the following season — the team’s first in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
Desperate to have their hoops star eligible for the big season, representatives from the athletic department asked Blackburn, by then the vice president of academic affairs, for an exemption. Blackburn had played football at Gardner-Webb; he loved college athletics. Just not as much as he valued the school’s academic integrity. He had helped students draft the honor code a few years before and made sure a framed copy hung in every classroom.
Blackburn denied the request. So the athletic department took the case to the school’s president, M. Christopher White. White stealthily overrode Blackburn’s decision, instructing the registrar to adjust the student’s grade and restore his eligibility. (White later explained that he acted as he did because a faculty member had given the student bad guidance.)
White’s subterfuge initially worked. The student led the basketball team to the DI section of the National Association of Christian Colleges basketball championship, earning tournament MVP honors. Meanwhile, Blackburn felt so frustrated and betrayed by the president’s subversion of the school’s principles and policies that he considered resigning.
Instead, he stayed and fought.
Toward the beginning of the 2002–03 academic year, after learning that the NCAA was investigating Gardner-Webb for rules violations, Blackburn determined the school should come clean. Enlisting the help of several colleagues, he called a faculty meeting to discuss White’s disregard for the school’s policies and honor code. There, White apologized, but also said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “That didn’t sit well with the faculty,” who overwhelmingly voted no confidence in his ability to serve.
White had a powerful ally in the Board of Trustees, though. Not only did the Board stand by the president, it demoted Blackburn and a colleague for supposedly violating the cheating student’s privacy.
Blackburn’s punishment sparked outrage. Three professors resigned. Students and faculty protested for days, a rarity at the small Baptist school. The episode received national news coverage. By mid October, the blowback had grown so intense that White resigned.
Blackburn was soon vindicated. The new interim president named him to another senior position the following semester. Then, in 2004, the NCAA placed Gardner-Webb on three-year probation “for multiple violations,” including the grade scandal. The men’s basketball team had to vacate all the games the star player had played in during the 2000–01 season.
Blackburn left Gardner-Webb that year to take a senior administrative role at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. That’s where I met him, when he interviewed me for a position in the spring of 2007. I didn’t know his backstory then, but I saw how seriously he took the honor code: As at Gardner-Webb, a framed copy hung in every classroom.
Blackburn retired in 2010. In 2013, he returned to Gardner-Webb to receive an honorary doctorate and deliver the commencement address. The school was clearly grateful.
The challenges that America’s universities face today — the elevation of inclusion above academic accomplishments; the intolerance of divergent perspectives; the coddling of campus radicals — are more serious than those that Blackburn faced at Gardner-Webb. Yet now as then, the challenges undermine the academic purpose of higher education, and with it the integrity of the institutions; and now as then, it takes courage and moral clarity for administrators to say as much.
America’s universities can learn from Gil Blackburn.