[MUSIC]
>> It was created in 1948,
three years after the end of World War II,
to serve a need for industry.
They were looking for people who were college-trained,
who were at a level between the engineers and
the people that were actually doing the work on the job,
who could interpret what the engineers were saying
to the workers.
>> I heard on the Six O'clock News radio,
no TV then,
that Georgia Tech was opening a two-year school.
So I told my mother
I think I'll wait over the weekend
and go see what that's all about.
>> I was in the Navy, Naval Reserve,
and a group of people from Southern Tech
came over to the naval base, which was right next door.
They made a presentation about Southern Tech,
and it really excited me because
the idea of getting a job in two years
really appealed to me
because I'd been without any money,
any income, for all those years.
And growing up in the country,
the idea of having my own car, having a job,
being able to think about getting married,
things like that, were really important to me.
And I thought two years, get a good job,
this is for me.
>> The campus that I attended was on
what's now the Peachtree-Dekalb Airport.
It was a naval base during World War II.
While I was at Southern Tech,
I experienced a challenge but also learned a lot.
I learned how to study, learned how to use a slide rule,
which was, to tell you the truth,
I had never seen a slide rule.
And when I came to school here,
if I can get it out of here,
I saw all the students walking around
with one of these on their belt.
And I didn't know what it was,
but it appealed to me, so I learned how to use it.
>> We had a lot of fun.
We were an older group than normal college students.
February of '48, I was 23.
>> The school in those days was tough.
It was not much fun.
It was all work, but that was good for us.
I think, when I graduated,
I had 120 credit hours in two years.
That's six quarters.
So you figure that up,
and you can see what a heavy load we took
back in those days,
and that was good for us because
we left there with a great work ethic.
If you didn't make it through,
you didn't have a pretty good work ethic.
>> And there were two barracks.
They were two stories high.
The rooms were two men to a room,
just like in the military,
which I was accustomed to because
I'd just gotten out of the Air Force.
>> [LAUGHTER] I can't help but laugh
when I think about the campus because
the campus was part of an old naval base,
and it was the officer's quarter at the naval base.
And so campus life consisted of a canteen,
or a big place where we had our meal service,
which was an old Navy chow hall,
so you can imagine what that was like.
>> One thing I have to say for the staff at that time,
if you're having a problem,
you could go to a professor and get help
without a question.
>> The school made a tremendous contribution
to my career because
I learned a lot of things fundamentally
that were important in technology
and the aspect of the business for the future
that all the business had huge technology component,
and it became more and more important
that I understood how it worked
and could reliably predict the future.
>> I really feel that Southern Tech positioned me
to excel in the workplace.
And I'm very thankful to them and the teachers we had
and Georgia Tech for staff in the facility to begin with.
>> It took them one year,
and then they changed the name to
Southern Technical Institute,
and that's what it's going to remain
all the way up to 1986,
or Southern Tech as everybody used to call it.
[MUSIC]
The Board of Regents approached
Willingham and the other leaders
from the legislature from Cobb County
and said that Cobb County is dragging its feet
on the technical institute.
Why don't you make an offer
to bring Southern Tech to Marietta?
So that's what they did.
They worked out a deal
that they were going to give them the land
for the campus,
which is right where the campus is here,
and the Marietta Housing Authority
got involved in it all and what have you,
and so the upshot of it all was that
the Board of Regents decided
that they would move the campus here.
And then maybe the last part of the story is that
Dekalb then finally came in with a counteroffer,
and people locally got really concerned,
so they went back to the governor,
and they got the governor to increase the amount
to two million dollars.
>> I had a call from the dean of
the Architecture program at Georgia Tech,
stating that looking at my background and experience
that there was a great need to have
a practicing architect join the Architectural faculty
at Southern Tech at the time.
So my wife and I made a trip to the campus.
We immediately liked it and the people we met,
so I joined the faculty in
the Architectural Engineering Technology program
in September 1971.
At that time, the program was going through a transition
from a two-year associate degree
to a four-year bachelor's degree,
so the administration and faculty that I was working with
developed the curriculum for that
four-year architectural engineering technology program.
>> I'm from the hills of North Georgia.
I'm a hillbilly.
And I walked in down here.
I've always done well in the schools.
I attended fairly well.
And the first day of school was orientation,
and the dean then said,
look to your left, look to your right,
look in front of you, look behind you.
He says, one of you will graduate.
And he said, that's it.
>> I was raised local,
so I was a local boy who went to a local school.
That was one of the appeals for
what we knew then as Southern Tech,
the Southern Technical Institute at that point in time.
I had gotten a merit award in high school in math,
and so since I was math-oriented,
I wanted to go to school and maybe study engineering.
>> I discovered Southern Tech in 1972
when I came back from Vietnam.
And having survived that,
I figured I learned a couple of things in that.
One was that I had the capacity to learn
anything I wanted to set my mind on.
I was a helicopter mechanic in the Army,
and I worked on quite a few different machines,
and so I really knew that
engineering was the way I wanted to go.
>> Southern Tech has always been
a very small school until recently
and, I guess, a medium school now
of about 6600 students total, I believe.
And so the alumni following has not been
possibly as extensive as it could be,
but when people get a degree from here,
they go to the four corners of the Earth for work.
>> What I liked about the school
was the hands-on approach,
the things that we studied, we did in the lab.
We were allowed to use
some sophisticated instruments
and measure the things that we were doing.
So it was challenging yet fun.
>> In 1980, they're able to gain their independence
from Georgia Tech.
And some amount of politics is obviously involved
in all of these things,
but finally in 1980, it came about.
>> We did the split from Georgia Tech.
We used to be a division of Georgia Tech.
I think that really helped us a lot.
And a lot of students were really thinking
this is not going to work.
This is not going to be good
because we won't be known,
but we became stronger.
We became independent.
>> We were booming into the technology world,
and Kathy Hall of the Math department,
and I would go down to Georgia Tech once or twice a week
to get computer printouts.
We would get in our car, run down at Georgia Tech,
get computer printout, and run back once or twice a week.
That was booming into our technology.
It was awfully funny.
If you dropped your cards, you remember that,
you drop your cards, you didn't get a run.
>> I was always happy
that Georgia Tech was on my degree, their name,
but I think Southern Poly,
particularly in the business world,
was really recognized in a very positive way.
>> We finally got a new [inaudible]
because Georgia Tech got a new [inaudible] .
And then we split away from Georgia Tech, as you know,
and that was good. It gave us our own reputation.
For years, everybody said,
why would you not want to be a part of Georgia Tech,
but there were reasons.
>> And so then they did a job search and brought in
Steve Cheshier as the first president,
and he remained president all the way up
through two name changes until 1997.
>> There was a growing, what I would call,
benign neglect of this campus
by the Georgia Tech leadership at that time.
We couldn't get new buildings, for example,
because if we wanted a new building,
it had to go on Georgia Tech's building list
and had to get to the top of their list.
So you can imagine,
we're out here so remote from Tech.
It was not likely that the building need out here
was going to be one they viewed as
the Number 1 building need for them,
so we didn't get buildings for years.
It was not intentional.
It was just out of sight, out of mind,
and they, I think, still thought of us,
some of the leadership there,
as a two-year technician place,
not a bachelor's degree place.
So the regents were wise enough to recognize
that we needed to develop on our own.
>> Most of the folks that I was going to school with
were night students.
Many of us were working during the day,
going to school at night,
and today there's much more of a campus life,
if you will, for the day students.
And not that there wasn't back then,
but really the draw here was
a lot of the night school because I'd say
most of the people worked and went to school
at the same time,
but that was very helpful to me
because I met people in all different companies,
all different jobs,
and we were very similar in where we wanted to go.
I graduated, started my family, 1983 was a big year.
>> You know who you are and where you've been,
but how do you get where you're going?
There are so many choices,
and you're an individual looking for your own path.
It's time to decide what's right for you.
It's time to consider
the challenging field of technology
and the Southern College of Technology.
Think about it.
High tech once seemed such fantasy,
but it's very real in our world today.
Yesterday's science fiction has become
today's scientific fact.
Artificial intelligence, robotics,
lasers, satellite communications,
computer-aided design and manufacturing,
microchips, the size of a grain of sand,
processing information with the speed of human thought.
Technology plays a major role in our workplace,
our homes, and our recreation.
Technology is the basis of our nation's leadership.
And this is only the beginning.
In the 1990s, half of all new jobs from
entry level to management will be in high-tech fields.
Career opportunities are increasing
almost faster than they can be filled.
A lot of very different individuals believe
that technology is the future, their future,
so they choose the Southern College of Technology
for their education.
>> In 1986, they changed the name to
Southern College of Technology,
not a popular name with the faculty here.
They wanted to be called
Southern Institute of Technology,
but there was a little school
down on North Avenue in Atlanta
that was called Georgia Institute of Technology,
and they seemed to think down there that
"Southern" sounded bigger than "Georgia,"
and they didn't want this institution out in Marietta
to be called Southern Institute of Technology
if they were just Georgia Institute of Technology.
>> This school is unique even among
engineering technology schools,
where if you had a spectrum,
and you had craftsman on one end,
and you had engineering,
in the sense of research engineering,
on the other end,
we were more toward the engineering side
than we were craft side.
It was applied engineering in that sense.
Most of the other schools, I think, in Georgia,
when you say engineering technology,
it would have been more toward the craftsman side.
That would be at least one way I would explain it.
>> And the focus at Southern Tech was
more engineering technology-related.
It really met my goals very well because,
as a hands-on machinist working with metal,
engineering technology was the bridge I needed
to go to the next level to be a machine designer.
>> I've been here for 27 years.
When I graduated from here with my bachelor's degree,
I went into industry,
worked for a company called Colonial Pipeline
as a design engineer.
And then I got married and had a child
and decided that travel wasn't really conducive
to being a mom.
So I went back to school and got my graduate degree,
and our old department chair,
Dave Sommers ended up talking me into coming to teach,
and I've been here ever since.
>> The university continued to grow,
and it became a four-year university.
It attracted a different group, a different generation,
people who had electromechanical skill sets and
wanted to do something with it
and needed an avenue to grow and learn.
For me, I have always aspired to have my own business.
And when I started at Southern Poly,
I knew at the time I would continue to start something.
I really didn't know what it was at the time.
So from getting the experience on
the mechanical engineering technology side,
the fabrication side, the business management side,
it gave me the tools I needed to start my own company and
to design and build machines for people
all around the world.
>> Architectural programs around the nation
began to realize that we had
a very strong program here at Southern Poly.
We began to attend a lot of national conventions,
ACSA, American Institute of Architects,
and we began to integrate that program nationally
with other architectural programs.
>> One of the things that's so unique about
the engineering technology programs at
Southern Poly is that
we require industry experience, Number 1,
and we require our faculty to keep up with the industry
because, in our field,
it changes every two, three years, technology.
So I have a consulting business
where I go all over the world teaching USB
at PCI Express and Serial ATA.
So that's how I stay current as far as industry goes.
>> The Architecture degree program really is
a degree that trains people to solve problems,
so many of our graduates go into related fields,
some in engineering, some in construction,
some material manufacturer representatives.
And so there's a wide range of opportunities
for particular graduates.
>> At the time, when we were still on a quarter system,
we had a lot of Physics faculty because
almost everybody in Southern Tech had to take
three quarters of Physics.
Almost all the programs required
three quarters of physics.
When we switched to the semester system,
two things happened.
First of all, people who had to take physics
had to take two semesters of physics,
and secondly, we were starting to develop programs
that didn't require physics.
>> It's a great institution.
It's had good growth, good programs,
great jobs for the graduates, great students.
It was always the second or third highest
academic capability students in the state system.
Usually we were behind only Georgia and Georgia Tech
in SAT scores and things like that.
So we've always had quality students, quality programs,
quality faculty, outstanding administrators and staff.
So it's just been a great story. It's been a good place.
>> Legend has it that back in the early 60s
before I was here
that fraternities and other groups
would, shall we say, confiscate
one of these old cast iron bathtubs,
fill it with ice, and put their beverages in there
to keep it cool.
And then they decided to put wheels on it
so they could wheel that conveyance around.
Then it finally came to a competitive issue
as it would among fraternities, I suppose,
that they race those bathtubs.
So they put seats in them,
steering brakes, those type of thing.
>> Take a cast iron bathtub,
put some wheels on it, and put a motor on it,
and see how fast you can go
was basically what was happening.
And sure enough, our MET guys, our engineers,
built bathtubs that would go over 80 miles an hour
down the battle on backstretch.
>> I've never heard of bathtub racing before.
So I saw my first one as a student in 1987.
And really, when I saw that,
I decided that was something that I wanted to do.
>> The challenge was to
take a cast iron roll top bathtub and build a frame,
mount it on the frame with wheels and an engine,
and win the race.
I got involved with some guys like Edward Jordan,
who was a faculty member and Ken Langley,
who was a past president,
and those guys really saw my enthusiasm
and took me under their wing
and helped me to find some of the stuff that I needed
to get started.
>> I drove a bathtub in one of the races.
That was the 76th race.
A friend of mine, Glenn Welch, and I built a bathtub,
and we raced it.
>> I actually secured a sponsorship with Domino's Pizza.
They were sponsoring race cars at the time.
Danny Sullivan was a big race CART driving Indy 500
at that time frame,
and so they were big into racing.
And so I secured a sponsorship with them,
painted my bathtub in their colors,
and put the details on, and we wore it.
They gave us some funding
and then some uniforms associated with that.
And other racers had had
long-term sponsorships prior to that.
A lot of them being associated with beer.
There was a Miller Brewing Company-sponsored bathtub,
and there was an Anheuser-Busch-sponsored bathtub
or maybe two.
Other guys had radio stations that had sponsored them,
96 Rock, which was a radio station here
back during that time frame.
>> They rose to the prominence of having
14,000 or 15,000 in attendance for these races.
>> I think I raced in '87 or '88. It was my first one.
I think 1988, maybe.
And in those days,
there were about 10 or 12 bathtubs that were racing.
They've been more in the past.
>> It's a sight when 15 or 20 of these bathtubs
with 175 cc engines pulling 100, 120 horsepower
would fire up and, of course, on campus,
they would race the cars at sometimes speeds
over 100 miles an hour.
>> It was just a great example of how bright,
how creative our students could be,
how good they were at building things.
>> Twenty hours a week,
each [inaudible] working on the bathtub,
getting it ready, testing.
And we had some innovations.
Our tub was the first one to have
a quick disconnect gas tank so that,
instead of pulling into the pits
and opening the gas tank and filling it with fuel,
we had a full one there,
and we used bungee cords,
and we'd unstrap the empty one
and plug in the new, and we were gone again.
>> There was never any real level
of difficult competition.
It was always a great camaraderie and
esprit de corps for the way everyone helped one another.
If on race day or during practice,
if anybody was ever broken,
you could get parts or anything from anybody else.
They would give you anything that they had
to help ensure that you were able to
have your time out on the track.
>> It was a great time.
It was a great party time.
It really showed the ingenuity
of the Southern Tech students.
>> It helped me to overcome some fears.
It helped me face some fears.
There were things that were challenging
associated with doing it in leading people
and physically driving
this rolled rim cast iron bathtub at speeds
for sure in excess of 50 miles per hour,
with no question.
>> It was always a safety concern.
In fact, early on, prior to when I came,
there was an accident,
and a child got seriously hurt
when the go-kart got out of the track
and hit a spectator.
So from then on,
we knew its time was limited.
We liked it because,
just like the student clubs now that build
formula, solar cars, and things like that,
this was a student organization.
that built the motorized bathtub,
and they learned a lot about building and
racing and all that.
>> Unfortunately, when we built the Student Center,
we had to change the route around campus,
and it made some hairpin turns and that,
along with rising liability insurance rates
and just the cost of the event,
the bathtub race went away, unfortunately,
but we had a great heyday.
Back in the day,
there'd be thousands of people here
and kegs of beer,
and it was quite the event.
>> With respect to the last race,
the last race was held in 1992,
the year that I graduated.
I think it was a springtime race,
and I graduated after that.
I believe it was the 25th annual bathtub race
at that point in time
from when they'd had the first one.
I think I remember that because
it happened to coincide with
the 75th running of the Indianapolis 500.
They were always close
and that they were 50 years apart
from that standpoint.
And I think the reasons the race ended
was that, from my perspective,
the campus and the university was evolving
to something that was new and different,
and the competitive nature and the technology
that was being applied
was ever increasingly more dangerous.
And I think our society was changing in the way
that it evaluated these events and
the risks associated with those kind of events,
and so it seemed like an appropriate time
to bring that to a close,
and we had all done that with the university,
and we knew well in advance where that was going to be,
and we managed that appropriately in concert with them.
[MUSIC]
>> Technology, science, information.
Each day the future rushes to meet us.
At Southern Polytechnic State University,
we understand the forces shaping the future.
More importantly, we offer an education
that prepares our graduates for that future.
Polytechnic means skilled in many arts,
and in today's world,
that means the technical arts and applied sciences.
Southern Polytechnic is a university
that brings that definition to life
by providing the knowledge
that will ensure promising careers for its students.
>> By the '90s, Georgia, again, was way behind
the rest of the country
in nomenclature for institutions.
Institutions that would have been called universities
anywhere else in the country
were still being called colleges in Georgia,
but we got a chancellor named Stephen Portch
in the '90s that thought it was time
that we caught up with everybody else.
And so, actually,
there are just a whole host of institutions
in 1996 that got university status
at virtually the same time.
>> I sat down in front of Steve, and he said,
I want you to go out to
Southern Polytechnic State University
to be the interim president there.
Dr. Steve Cheshier was planning to retire in a few months,
and they wanted an interim president in place
for somewhere between nine months and 15-month period.
I was rather shocked, but at the same time,
when the chancellor says I want you to do this,
you better say yes.
So I said, yes.
>> With a mandate from the university system,
they asked us to switch.
At the time, we were on a quarter system,
and right at that time,
we switched to the semester system,
which was a huge change for students,
and particularly engineering type students,
they preferred the quarter system.
And we were in-between presidents.
Steve Cheshier had retired.
When I came, Dr. Dan Papp was the interim president,
and within a year,
there was a search going on during that time
as soon as I'd gotten here,
and that landed with Dr. Lisa Rosabacher
becoming the president.
>> One of the things that attracted me
to Southern Polytechnic was the fact that
it did have that polytechnic emphasis,
the focus on how to apply knowledge
to literally make the world a better place.
It's a very practical applied approach
to higher education.
>> We wanted to grow the enrollment,
and we wanted to develop a school
that was high-quality and student-friendly
and also a school where students could come and
not only study the philosophy behind a particular subject
but actually deal with that subject, touch that subject.
>> This is my third school,
and I've known students that have gone to other schools,
bigger schools than Southern Poly,
but I think the best thing about my experience here
is that everything in class was hands-on,
whether you were in an engineering course
or architecture or English,
everything was hands-on.
So we had textbooks, we had to do readings,
but there was more,
how can you take this and apply it to something
that you will probably have to do
outside of the classroom?
I think that's, more importantly, what I'll get
out of this experience here at Southern Poly.
>> Southern Poly has always had a reputation
of producing very highly-skilled graduates
who are usually able to hit the ground running
when they get hired.
>> Once our graduates get out of the industry,
when they start working in industry,
we start getting phone calls from them
and saying, we want more.
And so I think a lot of the local industries,
that's really what they're doing,
they're looking for students
that know how to design buildings.
Right out of the bat, they know theory,
and they also know the practical application.
>> I've hired scholars, hundreds of engineers,
and hired and worked with hundreds of engineers
from any school you can name, MIT on down,
UCLA, Naval Academy, Tennessee,
Auburn, Florida, you name it,
and I would put the abilities of a Southern Tech graduate
up against those of anyone else from any other school.
>> The colleges' enrollments had been largely flat
over the previous several years,
and we had wanted the university to grow.
And so one of the areas that folks thought
that the university should go into was engineering,
but there'd been several unsuccessful attempts
in the past because
Georgia Tech had pretty much an exclusive
on the offering of engineering
within the University System of Georgia.
>> We've been known for our entire history
for engineering technology,
and we were the premier engineering technology institution
in the country.
However some people would
look at wanting to become an engineer,
and they thought you could only do
so by majoring in engineering.
And it turns out, in engineering technology,
you can also work in engineering,
but it was a challenge to promote
because, some states, you couldn't be licensed
as a professional engineer
with an engineering technology degree.
>> I went to talk to President Rossbacher,
and we agreed to submit the proposal.
And so we sent it to the Board of Regions,
and as expected, Georgia Tech opposed it.
And so I called the folks at the Board of Regions,
and I said, what happens now?
And they said, you go,
and you talk to the folks at Georgia Tech.
I said, will it do any good,
and they said no.
I said, then why am I doing that?
And they said because that's the procedure.
>> Dr. Rossbacher and Dr. Szafran,
our VP for Academic Affairs,
developed a plan to try to coordinate with Georgia Tech
so that we could add engineering.
And at the time, Dr. Papp was
the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
at the University System office,
and I think he saw the need to do that as well,
especially having been the interim president here
for a year.
>> The construction was where we made
our first foray into this.
And we were trying to identify areas
that Georgia Tech didn't specifically offer a degree in.
And so after we did that,
we started to talk about what we should do next,
and so we settled down Mechatronics Engineering.
>> Zvi Szafran and deans and
a couple of the department chairs
went to their colleagues at Georgia Tech and said,
we think there's an unmet need
for engineering programs in the state of Georgia.
Let's find out.
And so working together, we put together a study
to find out if that thesis was true.
And it turned out that the study did demonstrate
that there was an unmet need for engineering programs
for students who wanted to take classes
evenings and weekends on a part time basis,
and particularly nontraditional students.
>> After that, we wanted to do the big three:
civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering.
And that was a little bit more complicated
because that's Georgia Tech's bread and butter.
>> When the Board of Regions ultimately approved
the curriculum in engineering for Southern Polytechnic,
the first person to congratulate me
was the president of Georgia Tech.
So we have pointed to that opportunity
a number of times as not only have we done that,
but the Board of Regions have pointed to it as
well as a really good example of how
institutions within the University System of Georgia
can be collaborative rather than competitive.
They were reinvigorated a couple of years ago
with human power, so pushing them
rather than using a Briggs & Stratton motor,
and just the passion of the alumni for that experience.
>> I think it was three or four years ago.
I was very excited to learn
that someone in the Southern Polytechnic community
had found a way to bring back
bathtub racing to the campus.
We actually came over for one of those and
saw that there's a little bit of remnants
from what we did,
but they're all push, a lot safer,
and a great way to get students involved
and maintain some of the heritage
and some history of the university.
And I hope that, in some way,
because this was a very unique time,
it was very unique to this university
and what we were able to do and accomplish here,
I think it's important that we try to keep
those traditions going forward.
So I would look to the future
to find a way to honor that.
[MUSIC]
>> [LAUGHTER] I guess there are a lot of things
that are memorable.
On the crazy side or the fun side,
we always had a goat beauty contest.
The administration building was called, by the faculty,
the goat shed, derisively, I might say.
So every year at homecoming, the student organizations,
fraternities and so on, would have a contest
who could beautify a goat the best.
They'd dress up goats, lipstick,
and they put dresses there.
So that was crazy and of course,
then with the animal rights concerns and all that,
that went the way of objections.
>> The story is that back in the '50s or '60s,
who knows when,
a student pulled a prank by releasing a goat
in the Administration building, left it there,
snuck it in as the building was closing.
So when the staff got there the next morning,
the goat had pretty well left its mark
all throughout the building,
had chewed some things out and obviously left a mess.
So Greeks and later other organizations in the fall
got together for Goat Night,
which was skits and fun stuff,
a fun night of activities and competitions.
>> Goat Night, it's very unique,
and it's one of
the things that I looked forward to the most every year,
especially as a freshman coming into Southern Poly.
I was extremely excited.
It happens in fall semester,
so it's one of the first events
that I really experienced here.
Goat Night is a series of
competitions between all the Greeks here,
and it usually revolves around a skit, a dance,
and then the eating contest,
and then various things such as
a banner contest and philanthropy events,
such as raising money
during pen ding wars and that kind of thing.
Each year I was at Southern Poly,
it just seems to get greater and greater and greater.
The dances become more elaborate.
People start putting in more and more practice time.
I mean, you come in in the fall semester,
you start classes, and you pretty much
immediately start planning for goat night.
Painting the rock at
Southern Poly is a very big competition.
You fight to have your colors painted on it.
There's rules around the rock.
You can't just go and paint it.
>> Back in the dark ages,
the fraternities used to have a thing about
capturing the rock and from one another and so on,
and they camp out on the rock and
defend it from all comers and so on.
Well, about the third year
of the existence of the computer science program,
we captured the rock.
That is to say the faculty
of the computer science program,
captured the rock and defended it for
about three days from everybody else,
and that was an interesting experience.
>> How can you not love a place that
has a rock as an icon?
The rock in the middle of campus that students paint just
about every day with logos and symbols and messages.
How can you not love that?
>> While you're painting it, it's good bonding time
with your own chapter.
But then once it's painted the next day,
the sun comes up and everyone walking around campus
gets to see the rock in more colors,
and you get to leave your certain message,
and it's your touch on campus.
>> Chancellor Huckaby announced that there would be
consolidations a few years ago.
There was round one involved,
eight institutions, I think, becoming four.
Even at that time, there were
rumors that we would be consolidated,
many rumors with Kennesaw State University,
some that we would be consolidated with Georgia Tech.
Everyone sort of well, they're just rumors.
We have a unique mission and we're growing in enrollment.
It wouldn't make sense to do so.
And then after the first round,
they did not consolidate us.
So everyone breathed a sigh of relief and
felt like we're not going to be consolidated.
But the rumors persisted and
they became probably more widespread.
Still everyone was in denial that it would happen.
And then in 2013 on November 1st,
I believe, they announced
that was Friday. I remember it well.
The announcement came out that the second round of
consolidations would be
Southern Polytechnic State University
and Kennesaw State University.
And it was a shock,
even with all the rumors, we just
didn't think it would happen.
>> This is home to me.
And so I thought it would be that forever.
We got married and we thought,
we'll bring our kids back here for
homecoming and things like that.
My brother goes here. So it's really like home.
>> All the alumni I've talked with and it's been
scores have concerns about school's future.
And we're just hoping that the focus
and the purpose of the school
will be maintained in its new role,
and not become another me-too engineering school.
There are enough of those around.
>> The night it was announced, a number
of close colleagues from here came to my house,
we sat around a fire pit and we
openly wept, we were devastating.
>> Initially, it suck
because I've done a lot of work on
campus up until that point, and even now.
And so you feel like a lot of that is just going to be
eliminated or just pushed to aside
for this new institution.
And from my position,
I viewed it as a takeover from the beginning.
And so it was big KSU,
big brother coming in to take over smaller SPSU.
After a while though, you sit back and you look at it and
you have to look at both the positives
and the negatives, not just the negatives.
And so the students that are coming into the institution,
moving forward, they'll have a lot more resources.
>> We had an open forum in the theater,
which was highly charged,
but President Rossbacher and President Papp were
on stage answering questions as best they could.
But the students were starting all kinds of movements.
They created social media sites
that they were about to keep SPSU true,
and they launched a campaign to call all of
the regents many times to lobby, to prevent this.
And to the regents credit,
they granted an audience,
which I don't think they had done before
for two of our students in one alumnus to come
down to the board meeting where they would vote to
approve the consolidation to move forward.
>> I've never seen
the student body come together like that.
Anybody that reads my editorials
for this thing knows that I've pushed
for the students coming together and
having a stronger voice on campus.
And I think our presence was definitely felt
during the initial consolidation
announcement and the weeks,
I would say 4-8 weeks afterwards.
>> One of the changes I've seen on campus is that it has
actually brought our students
closer together as a community.
When the decision was announced in November,
there were a lot of opportunities for
our students to gather on
campus so they can process the change together.
And it was almost like a group counseling feel.
You would see little pockets of students breaking about
the change and just discussing what
this means for our future as an institution.
And then you saw that sort of transition into
a little bit of anger the seven stages
of grief that people go through.
Students were at shock
initially and they moved on to the angry phase,
and they wanted to fight against the consolidation.
As a staff member,
honestly, really cool to see.
Our students here at Southern Poly
aren't easily riled up,
and so when the consolidation was announced,
it was honestly really cool to see them be
passionate about the institution
itself and the hornet pride that exist here on campus.
And they rallied together and they
banded together and they started petitions,
they drew on sidewalk chalk around the globe.
They had candlelight vigils and rallies on campus.
And it was really cool to see that,
to see our students take that initiative
and bond together.
>> The day that the merger was announced,
people had very little warning.
They didn't tell,
except for just a few key people
they told just slightly ahead of time.
The rest of us found out when they issued
the present release at noon on a Friday.
And everybody was just in shock.
And Dr. Rossbacher did a impromptu town meeting,
is really what we call them around here.
On the steps of
the student center and
answered questions and took questions.
And I know a lot of people who have
commented to me the same thing I thought.
She was a one person on campus who
absolutely knew she was out of a job.
And she had the poise and the grace,
she just did a phenomenal job,
and her focus was really
on trying to communicate whatever she knew,
help us feel better,
help us be less scared,
and she has played that role throughout.
She has really been there to try to
help the community get through what
is a very big challenge.
>> She's got a very great history
and students are very proud to have
graduated from Southern Tech or Southern Poly,
and I think they're going to try real hard to keep that.
>> When I got here, There were some folks
who actually thought that our mission was a problem,
but it was too narrowly focused.
And another way of saying narrow is well focused.
We knew who we were,
and we knew what we were doing.
And as a result of that,
we were able to use our mission to
grow and to develop in areas that were true to ourselves.
And so I think that's why we were extremely successful.
>> Our graduates make the state better,
not just by contributing to the economy,
but they build things: better roads,
better bridges, better buildings, better systems.
They make the place better
and because of the kinds
of education that they had at this institution.
And I think so not only do the parents
and students get a great return on their investment,
but the state has gotten a wonderful return
on its investment and the taxpayers of the state.
And I feel really good about that.
>> And I really hope that our history and
our legacy can still be incorporated in the new campus,
the new merged University,
and that we'll still be involved.
But I will miss it as
Southern Polytechnic State University.
>> August of 2013,
the board formally designated four universities in
the State of Georgia as comprehensive universities,
the US Gs equivalents of R2s: Kennesaw State,
Georgia Southern, University of
West Georgia, and Valdosta State.
What this means for Southern Poly as we move into
this consolidation process and eventually consolidate
in January of 2015 in a formal sense
is that faculty and students and staff at Southern Poly,
will be part of a comprehensive university,
which also means they can do additional research.
So it's a neat step forward again for both universities.
>> When people think about Southern Poly Athletics
I think they're going to think multiple things.
But Number 1, I think they're going to think
of student athletes that were
really true student athletes with
the high percentage of
our student athletes that have went on to earn
their degree, most importantly.
And two, the
student athletes that we had that the way
they represented this fine institution,
they went about it the right way.
>> When I first got here,
all of our student athletes
were majors that required calculus,
and that's not true everywhere.
>> We have documentation that
the first ever basketball team started in 1949.
So athletics here,
it's been around for over six decades
competing in the junior college
ranks to start out with and
eventually going on to a four year school
competing in the NI for a number of years.
All of our programs have been very successful.
We've gone on to with
the data that we have dating back to 1978,
collectively, the programs have
accomplished 33 national tournament appearances.
We've won 29 regular
season and door conference championships
, multiple all Americans.
>. I wasn't sure that I really wanted to play in college.
I was recruited by some small colleges
and frankly came here and walked off.
I was not recruited by
Southern Poly at that point in time.
One of the things that's interesting about
the basketball program in athletics in general here
then is that it was
a NCAA Division 2 school as opposed to what it is now,
which is NI or what it was, I guess.
That change occurred my sophomore year,
which would have been 1977 year, I believe.
>> I first started here in the fall of 1995.
I came here as a student athlete.
My older brother was actually a student athlete here,
is an industrial engineering major.
I was fortunate to be able to play one season with him.
He was a senior and I was a sophomore.
We both eventually went on to finish our degrees here.
I was fortunate enough after
my senior year to be drafted by
the Chicago Cubs and I
spent two seasons in the Myer Leagues with them.
After that, I came back here to Southern Poly
and got on the coaching staff
and deal with a baseball team.
>> Our school being
a technology and science institution
was a tough school for our coaches to recruit at.
Because there's only a limited number of
students that want to get into those kind of
programs as opposed to a school
that has liberal arts degrees.
Obviously, the majority of students today are
looking for those types of degrees
and not into technology.
And to find an athlete that's into technology and
engineering and architecture and things like that,
there's not a lot out there,
and the ones that are out there,
there's several schools that are trying to recruit them.
>> So we had a pretty rough year
our sophomore year in that transition year.
But interestingly, my junior year,
we went to the national tournament and there was
even we were really a running gun,
hot dog team,
and back in those days, there was no clock.
In terms of a time to
shoot like I think it was 45 seconds,
and there was no three point line.
There was a lot of fewer ahead
with just a few minutes left in the game,
you usually went to a four corners and
that thing used to happen
a lot in basketball in those days.
>> We won a lot of championships.
We started a couple of sports
and we had some all Americans.
We had all academic student athletes.
So we had a win free strong program.
>> This year, head coach Mary Leverage,
going into his second season.
I know they had
hopes at the beginning of the year to
make the national tournament.
It felt like they had a great recruiting class coming in,
but the run that they
made at the end of this season having won
the Southern States athletic conference championship
and the toughest NI conference in the country,
going on to first round of
the national tournament down at Ambry-Riddle
and Daytona Beach, Florida,
and beating Embry-Riddle University
in the championship game,
which is the first time they've ever
been put out of
the championship game in the last seven years.
So that was a tremendous feat in itself.
And then to capture a automatic bid to
the NI World Series for the third appearance
ever in school history was just something unbelievable.
The team really rallied around each other.
Played exceptionally well down the stretch,
and I know Coach Leverage and
his staff and all of our administration is very
proud of what they've accomplished
and verify the problem that they accomplished.
>> I decided as part of
the consolidation that athletics would end here,
which given the consolidation made sense,
there are NCAA Division 1 athletics there were in AI,
there was no way that we could persist beyond this
we could have played a few games in
certain sports next year.
But it didn't make sense,
and it was we wanted to do what was best
for the student athletes and give them time
to find other roles
or to finish their degrees or whatever.
So the decision to eliminate athletics was made.
But again, with a sort of hopefully to the future,
we created a Hall of Fame and
we're going to induct a class this fall.
>> With consolidation, at the conclusion of
the baseball team with the world series,
that that's the final chapter of
athletics here at the university
and their athletic program will
take over at the new consolidated institution
at Kennesaw State University.
>> It's pretty sad, especially,
I've had a lot invested in it.
A lot of the coaches
that were still on staff I had hired,
although I've been out of athletics
for the past two years,
I still stayed close to the coaches and
the programs and the current athletic director.
So it was sad to watch things
happen nut with the consolidation news.
No, I don't there wasn't much we could do about it.
>> On the athletic side,
Southern Poly has not had a Hall of Fame.
So Southern Poly athletic director
and Kennesaw State's athletic director.
Matt Griffin and [inaudible]
Williams are working together.
They've already put a committee together and
after nominations to create
what will be a Southern Poly wing
in the Kennesaw State University Hall of Fame.
So there's a number of
different programs like that that are
going forward with a very conscious effort
to maintain a focus on what has been a great university.
>> There's been a tremendous amount
of success on the field on
the court and the trophy case full to prove it.
So we're very happy what they've accomplished and they've
given us over six decades of memories that lasted life.
>> [MUSIC] So I think what we've really been about here
at Southern Polytechnic with students, faculty,
and staff is trying to create
that environment that has people engaged, excited,
connected with each other and
feeling a sense of forward motion,
seeing the future and
seeing how not only they're part of it,
but how they contribute to it and
how they're able to use their knowledge,
their education to create change.
And if we're successful with that,
it'll be reflected in the retention of
students and staff who love being here,
want to work here and want to stay
here and students who want to stay
here but not forever
because we're also measured by graduation rates.
So we also want to see that the students progress toward
graduation and are successful
at that and then successful in their lives.
>> There's so many other opportunities here
that people just don't realize when you see it on paper.
You're going to go to an engineering school and you're
going to be a slave to the books for
four years and you're going to come out and you're
going to get a great job.
Not only is that true in some aspects,
but there's just so much else here.
There's competition team, which is what I would
probably say dominated the majority of my time later on.
And it requires so much time outside of
the classroom that in
the end when I can go back and look on it,
it really was fulfilling.
And it really helped me to get where I am today.
>> When you look at the curriculum at Kennesaw State,
the big thing that they didn't
have was programs in engineering,
engineering technology and related fields,
architecture, construction, and so on.
And these are, of course,
unique strengths that Southern Polytechnic had.
And so combining the two,
you've now got a university that's truly comprehensive.
Probably more comprehensive than
any other university in Georgia.
>> I see tremendous potential of growth in
the new university through
the College of Architecture and Construction Management.
I strongly believe that
with the new University environment,
we will have a lot more students
because we will have access to
other departments in the new university.
>> I think for the School of
Architecture and Construction Management,
it's going to be a big change in the right direction.
And I absolutely believe that with all my heart.
We are going to become
a college of architecture and construction management.
And there will certainly be
some autonomy there that will let us
set certain goals and directions and have
the responsibility towards carrying
those out as it should be.
But here's the way I see it;
in construction management and architecture,
we are going to now be a part of
approximately 31,000 students university.
And yet we will be able to maintain
the intimacy of our own campus, of our buildings,
our program will stay intact and when
students choose to engage that larger community of,
the new viewers we're calling
at Kennesaw State University.
That opportunity will be there.
>> There is a huge need in
industry for engineering technology graduates.
Our graduates are hired pretty quickly.
We're training them to take
existing technologies and new technologies
and applying those technologies.
So that's not going to go away.
We create things that people need in industry.
Everybody walks around with an iPhone.
That's something that engineering
technology graduates can create.
So we're seeing, a big demand for graduates in that area.
So I think it's going to do nothing but grow.
>> I look back and I see all of the students that have
graduated and I've interacted with,
and I'm just proud that I've been a part of
their education and improving the quality of life.
And I know that all the other folks could have been
involved through here are extremely proud as well.
>> No, where do we go from here?
With 13 colleges in this new institution,
with the new institution
being designated by the Board of Regions,
a comprehensive university with somewhere
between 31 and 32,000 students in the new university.
The future, I think is absolutely off the charts.
>> I think that's really important as
we become part of a consolidated university that folks
recognized that the new Kennesaw State University
is a combination of two great universities.
And one of them was
Southern Polytechnic State University,
a great university in its own right.
>> What I will miss most about
Southern Polytechnic will be the people.
And it's the individuals and it's
just the collective feel of the community here.
I think we've created something really wonderful and
the spirit of the community, the camaraderie,
the way in which people don't
worry about hierarchical structures or bureaucracy
or organization to just work together
to do what's right for the students
and to move the institution forward.
It's a remarkable thing.
And the more I look around higher education,
the rarer I think it is.
And I think it's a really wonderful characteristic
of Southern Polytechnic,
and it's taken everyone here to
help build that and sustain it.
[MUSIC]