Mounts to Leave CCGA Having Played Pivotal Role

By Taylor Cooper of The Brunswick News tcooper@thebrunswicknews.com

Skip Mounts, the first dean of the College of Coastal Georgia’s School of Business and Public Management, will retire from the post after 15 years effective July 4.

When it comes to himself, Mounts will frequently shy from any insinuation that he has anything interesting to say. But he was the one recruited to build the School of Business and Public Management when the CCGA transitioned from a junior college to a full four-year institution.

The administration needed people to build up the college’s programs and Mounts — then working at Mercer University — was selected as the man for the job in the business and public management realm.

It’s a very interesting and special kind of job for an academic, if one can get it.

“The school of business had two degrees, and the president of the college at the time, Valerie Hepburn, expected me to continue to build the business school,” he said. “It’s rare to be given the opportunity to build a school. You might be hired to build a degree, you might be hired to build a major, but this was a rare chance to come and build something big.

“If when I leave it’s judged to be bad, it’s my fault. The chance to be held accountable as an academic is also rare.”

Mounts was born in New Jersey and spent much of his childhood in Appleton, Wisconsin, not far from Green Bay. He likes to say he arrived there a year before Vince Lombardi took charge of the Green Bay Packers.

“To be a young kid in that world was sort of neat,” he said.

He recalled riding his bike or riding in the car with his mom to see the Packers whenever a new branch of Red Owl, a regional grocery chain, opened.

“I got to actually meet Vince Lombardi and Bart Starr and Paul Hornung. I don’t know how they got them to the Red Owl, but the Packers would show up,” he said.

His father’s job took them to Atlanta, where we attended Lakeside High School. Mounts earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate in economics at the University of Georgia.

“Athens is a hard place to leave,” he said.

But leave he did, taking the job at Mercer and working his way up over 20 years from lecturer to professor, Master of Business Administration coordinator, assistant dean, and then interim dean of Mercer’s business school. He was the interim longer than some people serve in the role in a permanent capacity.

Shortly after the school selected someone to fill the role of dean and Mounts went back to the classroom, he found out about the CCGA job.

What has filled the last 15 years is a lot of work, but plenty of other people came into the picture during his time that played a big role in the development of the business school.

“I think what I’ll miss is the faculty. I’ve essentially hired all except two of them,” he said. “I’ve been lucky being here. You hire good people, you get out of their way, you block and tackle and you achieve great things. I work with a really great group of people.

“There’s something good and inherently honest about good work, and that’s what this group of staff and faculty does. You can extend that to the whole college.”

Perhaps most enticing about moving from a prestigious private school — Mercer University was founded by Baptists and is still affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship — to a newer, publicly managed school in the University System of Georgia is that it was accessible.

By that, he didn’t mean it was necessarily easy to get into, although he described the entry requirements as generous. He met a lot of people who really wanted to be in college and to pursue higher education, but for whatever reason, the typical high school-to-college-to-career pipeline funded by scholarships or student loans was not open to them, did not appeal to them or did not suit them.

“Every undergraduate at the University of Georgia was chosen to be there and there were some students who were told not to be there. So the University of Georgia and larger institutions get to choose their students, and we get students who just want to come. I think that our door is more open than Georgia Tech and UGA, and I think that’s our greatest strength. We’re giving everyone an opportunity,” he said.

“But then I know our programs and I know our faculty, so I know that you’re getting a very good education if you commit yourself to it. It’s not that we admit you and then you show up and you graduate and then you have a degree. Our students … have to work hard to finish.”

The college, regardless of its smaller size, punches well above its weight, he said. Students routinely leave having secured good jobs before graduation at local industries, in the hospitality sector, medical field or with the federal government via the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.

“We have access without apology but excellence without exception,” Mounts said. “… I think we’re really good.”

As for what’s next, he’s already taken a position with the Lucas Center for Entrepreneurship, headquartered in downtown Brunswick, as the new director of business and resource development. The Lucas Center started as an organization within CCGA before re-launching as an independent nonprofit aimed at supporting and nurturing local entrepreneurs.

“I helped create the center and so I want to help it continue. It’s done some amazing work, even if you just look at the number of people that it’s touched,” he said. “Its work needs to continue.”

Photo by Taylor Cooper. Originally published in The Brunswick News. Republished with permission of The Brunswick News.