Emory remembers President Jimmy Carter
1924-2024
With the passing of President Jimmy Carter, the world has lost a clarion voice for justice and human rights, and Emory has lost a steadfast partner, beloved professor and revered friend.
When former U.S. President Jimmy Carter joined the Emory faculty as University Distinguished Professor in 1982, he became a steady presence on campus. In addition to creating the robust partnership between the university and The Carter Center, Carter visited classes nearly every semester, fielded questions from first-year students at his annual Town Hall and held regular luncheons with small groups of faculty and staff.
Carter, who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981 and governor of Georgia from 1971 to 1975, passed away on Dec. 29, 2024.
He was preceded in death by former first lady Rosalynn Carter, his beloved wife of 77 years, who passed away Nov. 19, 2023, and was memorialized in a national tribute service hosted by Emory.
The Carters worked closely with the university for more than four decades and their impact at Emory will continue for years to come.
Tribute to a beloved professor: Learn about President Carter's decades of collaboration with Emory.
PRESIDENTIAL PARTNER
A conversation with then-Emory President James T. Laney in 1982 convinced the Carters that the work they hoped to do to advance human rights could best be done in partnership with Emory, drawing on its unique resources.
In 1981, when Carter returned to his home state of Georgia, he had a range of options for how to shape his post-presidency career. With offers from a number of institutions, he chose to partner with Emory.
“I wanted the unrestricted ability to speak to the students in a very frank and unrestrained way,” Carter said, “and I felt Emory would give me that opportunity. Since I have been a professor here, I have always been able, in lecture halls and town meetings, to speak without restraint.”
"On my first day at Emory in 2020, I was fortunate to have a phone call with President Carter, and his words of encouragement and advice have stayed with me ever since. He was caring and thoughtful, welcoming me into the Emory family as if he’d known me for years. That was the president — open-hearted and generous. He cared deeply about people — their lives, hopes and dreams — and that was reflected in his years of compassionate leadership and public service."
— Emory President Gregory L. Fenves
From the beginning, Carter was able to build strong ties with university leadership, including then-President Laney and faculty members who shared his vision for global humanitarian work.
From an office on the 10th floor of the Robert W. Woodruff Library, he launched The Carter Center, the organization whose work energized him and Rosalynn Carter for more than 40 years. Created in partnership with Emory to promote peace, democracy and the resolution of conflict around the world, the center’s mission quickly evolved to address critical shortfalls in global health as well.
"President Carter demonstrated to the world, and the Emory community, the basis of all true power — moral authority. His steadfastness of purpose in making a better world won him global admiration, capped by the Nobel Peace Prize. Emory has been truly blessed in its association with President Carter, who has left us a model of a life of international renown devoted to service, the ideal Emory was founded upon."
— Emory President Emeritus James T. Laney
“I knew that the center would be unique, because it was to be a partnership between a former U.S. president with enormous energy and a university on the rise, and nothing like that had ever been tried before,” says Steven H. Hochman, the center’s director of research and faculty assistant to Carter, who was one of the first three staff members assisting the president in the library office. “However, no one imagined exactly how The Carter Center would develop.”
THE CARTER CENTER AND EMORY
The Carter Center occupies four interconnected pavilions linked to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, just three miles from Emory’s Atlanta campus.
Nestled in 37 acres of parkland, The Carter Center blossomed into a thriving organization that reaches around the world. To help support democratic governments in countries where they are nascent or threatened, the center’s peace programs have made it a pioneer in the field of election observation.
The center’s health programs are deliberately focused on preventable diseases that have been neglected or overlooked by other major health organizations. Now a recognized world leader in the practices that can achieve eradication or elimination, The Carter Center is nearly at the end of a long, well-fought battle to eradicate Guinea worm disease — just 13 cases of it were reported in 2023. It also has reduced suffering from river blindness, trachoma, schistosomiasis, lymphatic filariasis and malaria. Enormous progress has come from smartly using health education and simple, low-cost methods. Through efforts led by Mrs. Carter, the center also works to improve access to mental health care in the U.S. and around the world.
The partnership between Emory and The Carter Center resulted in a robust network of connections between the two organizations. Many of the center’s experts hold faculty appointments at Emory, and alumni, faculty and students regularly find pathways to participate in the center’s work. The center offers an internship program that has given more than 2,000 Emory students the enviable opportunity to experience its humanitarian efforts directly.
Harold J. Berman, one of the world’s foremost scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet law, was one example among many of the productive ties between the two institutions. Berman, Emory’s first Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, became a Carter Center Fellow in 1985 and developed a deep relationship with the Carters. At Berman’s passing in 2007, Carter issued a statement calling him a “trusted advisor and friend.”
“We had fellows’ meetings where we discussed not only the future of The Carter Center, but the future of mankind. Jimmy Carter was terrific in those sessions. He ran those meetings with great dignity, imagination and intelligence.”
— Harold J. Berman, Emory’s first Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law
When Carter received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2002, leaders across the university greeted the news with pride. Laney, who had gone on to serve as U.S. ambassador to South Korea, had written a recommendation to the Nobel committee for Carter in 1994.
“It could have come earlier, and it would have been eminently justified,” Laney said. “But now it is a grand capstone of his life and career for which we all rejoice.”
PRESIDENT CARTER ON CAMPUS
His pleasure in the exchange of ideas always evident, President Carter gave generously of his time to visit Emory classes and offer perspective on students’ viewpoints.
His larger-than-life status notwithstanding, Carter was in every sense a full-fledged faculty member at Emory: meeting often with students, advising them about their projects and engaging with other faculty to create the sort of initiatives that can arise only between a nongovernmental organization like The Carter Center and a research university like Emory.
In 2001, Carter and Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing dedicated the Lillian Carter Center for Global Health and Social Responsibility in honor of Carter’s mother, who was a nurse. The center serves as the school’s hub of global education, research, practice and engagement. On the center’s 20th anniversary, Linda McCauley, dean of the nursing school, received a letter from Carter commending the center for honoring the “mission of improving the health of vulnerable people worldwide.”
For Emory’s first-year students, he conducted — despite his busy schedule — an unbroken string of town halls from 1982 to 2019, where they had the chance to hear from him and ask questions. Through the years, the president’s candor, warmth and sense of humor created an unforgettable memory that binds generations of students; since 2020, the time-honored tradition has continued featuring international thought leaders.
View highlights from Carter Town Halls through the years.
When, in lectures over the years, Carter reflected on his Emory career, he liked to playfully point out that he had taught students in every school of the university and published multiple books and articles but had yet to be awarded tenure.
Emory remedied that in June 2019, granting Carter tenured faculty appointments in four schools — Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Oxford College, Candler School of Theology and Rollins School of Public Health — to reflect the breadth of the president’s work and his impact on numerous fields.
Emory students and faculty always found President Carter informed about the issues of the day and unafraid to engage sensitive topics, believing in the necessity of civil discourse.
Hands go up all over the audience, as listeners are eager to share their views with the former president.
RAISING AWARENESS
Known for his boundless energy, President Carter wrote 32 books, taught Sunday school in Plains, Georgia, built houses for those in need through Habitat for Humanity and traveled the world with his wife, Rosalynn, for The Carter Center.
When awarding the pair the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999, President Bill Clinton said, “Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter have done more good things for more people in more places than any other couple on the face of the Earth.”
In summer 2015, Carter revealed that he was being treated at Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute for metastatic melanoma. At the time, Carter thought he might have only weeks to live, but Winship doctors quickly developed a treatment plan for him, beginning with stereotactic radiation to control metastatic tumors in his brain and a new immunotherapy drug that worked systemically.
The open way in which Carter shared his experiences brought public attention to the progress being made in cancer treatment. Carter continued to raise awareness for supporting scientific research. In 2016, he supported Winship’s successful efforts to gain comprehensive status from the National Cancer Institute.
For more than four decades after his presidency, Carter’s leadership of The Carter Center, his association with Emory and his commitment to his life’s work remained steadfast.
“The relationship between Emory and The Carter Center is permanent and it’s virtually indestructible. I have personally gotten more out of this partnership than Emory has. It has made the time since my presidency the best time of my life.”
— President Jimmy Carter
A LIFETIME OF IMPACT
James Earl Carter Jr. was born Oct. 1, 1924, in the small farming town of Plains, Georgia, and grew up in the nearby community of Archery. His father, James Earl Carter Sr., was a farmer and businessman, while his mother, Lillian Gordy Carter, was a registered nurse.
He was educated in the public school of Plains, attended Georgia Southwestern College and Georgia Institute of Technology and received a bachelor’s degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1946.
That same year, he married Rosalynn Smith of Plains. When his father died in 1953, he resigned his naval commission and returned with his family to Georgia. He took over the Carter farms, and he and Rosalynn operated Carter’s Warehouse, a general-purpose seed-and-farm-supply company in Plains. He quickly became a leader of the community, serving on county boards supervising education, the hospital authority and the library.
In 1962, Carter won election to the Georgia Senate. He lost his first gubernatorial campaign in 1966 but won the next election, becoming Georgia’s 76th governor. In December 1974, he announced his candidacy for president and won his party’s nomination on the first ballot at the 1976 Democratic National Convention. Carter was elected president on Nov. 2, 1976.
Significant foreign policy accomplishments of his administration included the Panama Canal treaties, the Camp David Accords, the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the SALT II treaty with the former Soviet Union and the establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. He championed human rights throughout the world.
On the domestic side, the administration’s achievements included a comprehensive energy program conducted by a new Department of Energy; deregulation in energy, transportation, communications and finance; major educational programs under a new Department of Education; and major environmental protection legislation, including the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.
Story: Susan M. Carini 04G and Paige Parvin 96G. Design: Peta Westmaas. Photos: National Archives Catalog-White House Staff Photographers, The Carter Center and Emory Photo/Video.
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