Samford University’s Corts wraps up 23-year tenure packed with progress

The day Thomas E. Corts first rode onto the Birmingham campus of Samford University as the institution’s president, he questioned what destiny was marked for him there.
   
“I wonder how I’ll go out of here … would I die in office, would I be here until I retired, would I stay here until I’m an old man,” Corts thought.
   
Twenty-three years later as he prepares for his June 1 retirement, the answer to that is clear. And that destiny is visible in a Samford landscape very different than the one Corts meditated on as the newly elected 17th president of the university. 
   
“Samford is a finer university than it was in 1983,” said board of trustees Chairman Bill Stevens in the spring edition of Seasons, Samford’s quarterly magazine. “Dr. and Mrs. Corts would be the first to say this has been a team effort, but Samford has made a giant leap forward in the past 20 years — proportionally it may have made as much progress as any university in America.”
   
A New Era Dawns — that was the grandiose label given to Corts’ arrival. Those words quickly began to be spelled out in a revived football program; the London Study Centre; the founding of Beeson Divinity School, the first divinity school on the campus of a Southern Baptist university; new libraries; a new science facility with a planetarium; and many, many more campus improvements.
   
But Corts said the most worthwhile part of his time at Samford was putting diplomas in the hands of more than 17,000 graduates.
   
“I’m very fond of saying that behind every student there’s a story — great stories if you just had time to sit down and find out about these kids, where they come from, what makes them tick, what they want to do and be. And to think that you’ve had an opportunity to be a part of this institution which has really helped to shape and make a difference in their lives — that’s the most satisfying thing of all,” he said.
   
Corts’ wife, Marla, said the relationships the couple and their three children have cultivated at Samford are the high point of their time at the school. “It’s been as much of an ideal experience as we could ever hope to have, and the people connection is what we will miss the most,” she said.
   
Her husband agreed. “You really develop strong attachments to people.”
   
The president at Georgetown College in Georgetown, Ky., Corts’ alma mater, once invested in Corts the way he has been able to invest in Samford’s students, helping lead Corts into the position that has become his crowning accomplishment. 
   
Corts said he had known from an early age he wanted to be part of the Lord’s work, but it was this experience that nudged him into higher education. A presidency at Wingate College (now Wingate University) in Wingate, N.C. — where his brother Paul later served as president — lasted for nine years before he arrived at Samford, which he called the “Christian Harvard.”
   
“I loved seeing what the possibilities were. I saw Samford as a place that had a really good chance to be a very strong academic institution and simultaneously a very strong Christian institution,” Corts said. “This institution had overcome some severe crises in its history — changing location three times, being auctioned off on the courthouse steps, changing its name (from Howard College).”
   
Any or all of those events could have been “traumatic,” he said. “In retrospect, it seems a lot of good things were poised to happen, and I was fortunate to arrive at just the right time.”
   
Exuding what his contemporaries called a “contagious example” and “visionary leadership,” Corts earned the respect of his peers, staff and students and began to implement what became Samford’s catch phrase — Deo Doctrinae Aeternitati, or “For God, for Learning, Forever.”
   
William Hull, a distinguished university professor at Samford, said Corts posed that if God is for us, then why shouldn’t Christians — Samford — be for God?
   
“By framing our mission in that manner, he related God to our lives and showed us a God who is a collaborator with us to make a better world,” Hull said.
   
And by casting the vision in the written foundations of the institutions, Corts said he hoped that idea would be the guiding star for years to come.
   
“A university is an ongoing institution … and I’m big on the idea that the mission ought to be the driving force of the institution,” Corts said. “Institutions were created because they need to last beyond our lifetimes. They represent ideals and convictions that we believe in and they are valuable … for the Kingdom’s work.”
   
He said he’s aware he is a runner in a relay, running a few laps and then passing the baton. On June 1, when Corts becomes president emeritus, Andrew Westmoreland of Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Ark., will take the baton Corts has carried for years and go forward. 
   
“Someone once told me that if you stay there until you retire, you’ll be giving them the best years of your life,” Corts said with a smile. 
   
For him, that summed it up.
   
“How blessed I am to be able to invest those years in a cause so noble,” he said. “I think I’m a very fortunate man because I’ve gotten to do what I wanted to do and that’s be a part of an institution that had these kind of values in which I firmly believe.”
   
His is a legacy that state leaders say has bled much further than the geography of Samford.
   
“In many ways, Dr. Corts is the gold standard for leadership in the Christian arena,” said Rick Lance, executive director of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions. “Many of us have learned much from him, and we will continue to cherish his legacy as a leader par excellent.” (Seasons magazine of Samford University contributed)