Contemplating one’s blessings is a good way to bring in a new year – or better, a new day, if you can swing it.
Our From the Murphy Center column in The Brunswick News is into its sixth year. My Murphy Center colleagues – Drs. Heather Farley, Melissa Trussell, Roscoe Scarborough and Skip Mounts – and I are enormously grateful to Mr. Buff Leavy for granting us the column, Mr. Buddy Hughes for his patience with us, and the folks in Glynn and beyond who read us.
Being part of the community through this wonderful space every Wednesday is a privilege, and a ton of fun. We do not take it for granted.
Our columns tend to be serious, but the history of the Murphy Center has some humorous twists.
Dr. Skip Mounts became Dean of the College of Coastal Georgia’s School of Business and Public Administration in 2011. Dr. Mounts is an exceptionally entrepreneurial Dean.
A short time into his Deanship, Dr. Mounts came by my office and said, “The research you do on the local economy should have a home. I am going to propose to the president that we create a center. We’ll give it a name, and you’ll be the director.”
It sounded super to me, except for the director part.
I have no personality, no leadership skills and no aptitude whatsoever for directing anything. Should something arise that needs directing, I understand instinctively that I can best help the cause by hiding deep in some remote, forsaken area until the need for directing has passed.
“Who will I be directing?” I asked.
“Yourself,” he said.
Recognizing that such an arrangement would push my directing capacity to the breaking point, I hesitated, but then yielded to a rare spasm of daring-do.
“Ok, deal,” I said. “But if the center’s personnel roster gets any deeper, we’ll probably need to modify the managerial hierarchy.” The Dean smiled.
Dr. Valerie Hepburn, another exceptionally entrepreneurial person I’m quite grateful for, was the college president at the time. Dr. Hepburn liked the idea. The three of us came up with a name for the center that was so long and awkward that I’ve forgotten it.
In the fall of 2012, Mr. Reg Murphy became the first Executive in Residence of our Business School. He was still our Executive in Residence on October 8, 2015, when we changed the name of the center from whatever it was to the Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies at a gathering in the College of Coastal Georgia’s Stembler Theater.
Mr. Murphy had an extraordinary career in journalism and business. He had been a huge supporter of the College years before and after 2012. But the Murphy Center bears his name for a different reason.
Reg Murphy is a person of great intellectual honesty, integrity and humility. His name sets the standard for the research we do and the columns we write.
That means we do our homework. We don’t twist or cherry-pick data. We don’t misrepresent or caricature people or ideas. We understand the danger of ivory tower hubris, so we stay off high horses. We do careful, thoughtful, honest work.
Our personnel roster is now five deep. Fortunately for me, the best way to direct thinkers of the caliber of Drs. Farley, Trussell, Scarborough and Mounts is not to direct them – to get out of their way, let each do their thing, then cheer each on to do more of their thing.
So, that’s how we operate. “Explore what interests you, explore it full throttle and with Reg Murphy honesty, integrity and humility, then tell us about your exploration” is the crux of it.
Thanks again for reading our column.
Reg Murphy Center