USC has had 30 presidents, thus far, in more than two centuries of serving as the state's flagship university. But along with a solid president, a university needs great professors, department chairs and provosts. In his 43-year career at Carolina, Jerry Odom served with distinction in each of those roles and beyond.
TRANSCRIPT
Since welcoming its first students in 1805, the University of South Carolina has, thus far, had 30 presidents who have guided the institution through all manner of change, from the advent of electricity and indoor plumbing to world wars, economic booms and busts, campus expansion, desegregation and everything else that's shaped South Carolina’s flagship university.
Some of those presidents were tremendous leaders whose efforts elevated the university to new heights. A few were not nearly so gifted in getting things done. But building a great university has never been the result of just one person’s effort.
I’m Chris Horn for Remembering the Days, and today we look back to the university’s recent past to consider an individual who never served as president during his 43-year career at Carolina, but whose efforts nonetheless brought many substantive improvements to the institution.
University historian and podcast co-host Evan Faulkenbury and I had a long conversation earlier this year with Jerry Odom, whose long career ran the gamut, beginning as an assistant professor and rising to full professor, then serving as department chair, college dean and provost of the university. He completed his time at USC as executive director of University Foundations.
In each of those roles, Odom brought an ethic of hard work, integrity and attention to detail that made him an admired and respected figure on campus.
Odom arrived at Carolina in 1969 as a 27-year-old fresh out of graduate school and not too far from home. He’d grown up in Burlington, North Carolina, and got interested in chemistry when he was still just a kid, writing an essay for a contest about why he wanted to be a scientist.
Jerry Odom: “Very early on, I really loved science. I wrote — there's a company, I don't even know if it's still in existance or not Porter Chemical Co. — and I wrote an essay on why I want to be a scientist, and I won a really nice microscope. Carolina Biological Supply in Elon, North Carolina, sold chemical equipment and chemicals. And to this day, I'm surprised that they sold me some of the chemicals they did because they shouldn't have done that. But I would ride my bike up there and get stuff. And I had a little lab in the basement. And so I knew very early on I wanted to be a chemist.
Chris Horn: “Ever blow anything up in the basement?"
“Uh, no, I had a fire. But I didn't blow anything up. But I did ruin a thing in the sink where it just ate through stuff, which was just not good. And my parents were — they weren't real happy with me some of the time when I was doing stuff, but I loved to just get down there and try different things.”
As a brand-new assistant professor of chemistry Odom was focused on becoming a good teacher, getting grant funding for his research and earning promotion in the faculty ranks. In the laboratory, he was nose-to-the-grindstone six days a week and often on Sunday nights as well. In May 1970, he accidently walked into the middle of a Vietnam War-inspired riot on campus.
Jerry Odom: “I'll never forget one Sunday night, Chris, I was leaving, and I had parked across the street, across Main Street, and I got in the middle of the street and a tear bomb hit right at my feet. And there were all these students running in. This was the Vietnam era, and all these students were just tearing down the street, and I got all choked up.”
You can learn more about that 1970 riot that rocked USC in episode 10 entitled “Month of May.” Odom quickly shook off the effects of the tear gas incident, and his hard work paid off in the years that followed. He moved up to the rank of associate professor, then full professor; his teaching efforts won awards, and his research consistently brought in grant funding. During the course of his teaching and research career, he wrote or co-wrote more than 160 publications for scientific journals along with five textbooks. He was even awarded a patent.
In 1985, he was named chair of the Department of Chemistry, and that’s when Odom realized that, in addition to teaching and research, he also rather liked the administrative side of things.
Jerry Odom: “I really enjoyed the administrative part of it, and I enjoyed interacting with my colleagues in trying to help them solve problems that weren't teaching or research problems. And so I that was when I decided, okay, I'll probably do that. And then I was chair from '85 to '91 — I had two three-year terms — I went back to the department.”
Just three years after completing his second term as chemistry department chair, Odom threw his name in the hat for consideration to become dean of the College of Science and Mathematics, which included the departments of chemistry, biology, physics and astronomy, geology, mathematics and other related disciplines. Several candidates from other universities were interviewed, but Jerry Odom got the nod. As dean, he helped recruit many new scientists and mathematicians to the college and got money to renovate the Sumwalt College building on Greene Street for faculty labs and offices.
He probably would have been happy serving as dean for many more years, but just three years later, in 1997, USC’s provost left to become president of another university. USC’s president at the time, John Palms, enjoyed working with Odom and selected him from a roster of candidates to serve as USC’s new provost and executive vice president of academic affairs.
A provost oversees the academic side of the house, making sure each college or school within the university is achieving its goals — recruiting, hiring and retaining the best faculty members and serving the students well.
During his seven years as provost, Odom was the catalyst for several initiatives, including a new child development center on campus. He also helped pave the way for moving USC’s Visitor Center from an awkward location on the six-lane Assembly Street to its current location on the Horseshoe.
Odom’s leadership of the Strategic Directions and Initiatives Committee in the early 2000s brought many changes to the university at a time when difficult cost-cutting decisions had to be made.
Jerry Odom: “I chaired what was called the Strategic Directions and Initiatives Committee, and we really had to do a lot of stuff that a lot of people didn't like because we had real budget problems. I didn't take a hammer. This committee didn't use a hammer. We used a scalpel. We were very strategic about it, and we talked about it. We combined the foreign languages. You know, we had a department of German, a department of French. We made criminal justice a department again rather than a college. I took the College of General Studies and dissolved it, basically. And there were people there that had tenure that I needed to find a place within the university.
"We said, move the welcome center from down on Assembly Street to McKissick. And I said, you know, you walk out of the place. It used to be a hotel on Assembly, and you got all this traffic and everything. You have to cross that to go up to the Horseshoe. Just imagine coming down the stairs of McKissick Museum and looking out on the Horseshoe as an incoming or a prospective freshman. It's all the difference in the world. We did that. There were people that didn't didn't want that either, because that was going to take their parking spot in front of Osborne.”
In seven years, Odom was involved in appointing 14 new deans to various colleges and schools within the university. In 1998, he helped recruit Harris Pastides to campus as dean of the Arnold School of Public Health. Ten years later, Pastides was named president of the university and became one of USC’s longest serving and most successful leaders.
When Odom first came to USC in 1969, he was a faculty member in the college of arts and sciences, which, in the 1970s, was split into two colleges — one of them focusing on humanities and social sciences and the other on science and mathematics. In the early 2000s, the university decided to put the College of Arts and Sciences back together, remerging what had been split apart for some 30 years. USC needed just the right person who could manage the logistics and the personnel issues of that task.
In the last few months of his time as provost, Odom helped recruit several candidates for the deanship of the reconstructed college, including Mary Anne Fitzpatrick, who remembers his don’t-take-no-for-answer approach to inviting her to seek the position.
Mary Anne Fitzpatrick: “He is an indefatigable recruiter for the University of South Carolina. I can say to you from the bottom of my heart, I applied for this job, that deanship, and I thought, wow, what a challenge that would be, what an administrative challenge. And I was the deputy dean of a large shop in Madison. And then I thought, oh, I don't want to go to South Carolina. So I called and I said, ‘I'd like to withdraw my credentials. You know, I think it's wonderful, but I won't leave Madison.’ He was doing the search so a new provost could choose in September the dean that he wanted to work with, which is wonderful because that's really what everybody wants. You know, he kept me in that search all summer. Every week, he called and it became this enormous thing in my staff. And they'd say, ‘Dr. Odom's on the phone,’ you know, and I would say, ‘Oh, all right, I'll stay in.’
"And he did this every week, every week. Because, you know, independent of whether or not I would be chosen. He was going to keep the pool as broad as possible.”
Fitzpatrick did become dean of the college in 2005, and in the past 20 years she has held a number of high-level leadership posts within the university.
Mary Anne Fitzpatrick: “One of the things that I think is unique about Jerry is he has taken his — a very successful scientific career — and then used that knowledge and as dean of science and math, as our provost. I think it is rare to find someone — he was here 43 years — to find someone of this talent who didn't leave and move on to a presidency or something else. So his dedication to us and his dedication at every level, and his leadership and his ability to connect to people and understand how to move things forward, I think it's fairly unique.
"Certainly every institution has those people, but they make the institution, and they make the institution because they can deal with people across the spectrum from your most elite faculty who, you know, can have needs, as we say, to people working in space and facilities, you know, so that ability to, uh, to work across all those areas and to understand the complexity of how things work.”
After stepping down as provost of the university and returning to teaching for a couple of years, Odom took on his last assignment for USC, serving as executive director of University Foundations, which helps manage the university's endowment and land holdings. He retired at age 70 in 2012 with 43 years of service.
Mary Anne Fitzpatrick: “He's really a role model for all of us as we're thinking about the legacy that we would like to leave. He built through the people he recruited and the people he promoted. He started the nanoscience initiative, and recruited a very elite faculty member group of faculty to handle that. So, he used his intellectual, his academic background in ways that really helped the whole institution.”
In 2014, two years after Odom had retired, USC awarded him an honorary doctoral degree, a tribute to his many contributions to the university over many years. Reflecting back on his career, Odom is grateful for the many opportunities he had.
Jerry Odom: “They've allowed me to do a number of different jobs that usually you have to move. And I never had to move, and I didn't want to move. So when I was a candidate for dean, there were outside candidates. When I was a candidate for provost, there were outside candidates. And even when I was a candidate for executive director of foundations, there were outside candidates. But, you know, the university chose me as an internal candidate, and I'll be forever grateful.”
When Jerry was about to receive his honorary degree during commencement ceremonies in 2014, I asked him what he would say if he could address all of the students that day. Here’s what he told me:
"Live life to the fullest. We do not get to choose how long we will be here. Pay as much attention as possible to family and friends, for those relationships are the true treasures in life."
A good word from a good man.
That’s all for this episode.
On the next Remembering the Days, we go back 50 years to the launch of USC’s Arnold School of Public Health. The Arnold School is the Palmetto State’s only accredited public health college, and its researchers are helping to improve human health in myriad ways. That’s next on Remembering the Days.