Interview of Jimmy Davis, November 2, 2021

Jimmy Davis, transcript, November 2, 2021

Sarah: I did read a little bit on your bio from the faculty page in the Communications department and just from being in your class you have talked about your background of your life. The first question I have for you sir is what part of your personal biography or background led you to your position? Specifically, why communications?

Davis: It goes back to my second year of college. I started out in college as a history major, because in high school my strongest subject was history. I could nail it. Part of it is when people tell me things I tend to remember well. So in high school when my teacher said stuff in class, I would take notes but mostly they were illegible. It did not matter, because when they said something I would remember it. Whatever they said, I remembered. In history class, I could repeat the stories that we had been told because I remembered the stories. I got to college as a history major. My advisor was Dr. Gonzales, who looking back on it now, probably was not that old, but seemed to me to be really, really old. I would go see him for my advising sessions, and he would take his medicine the whole time. He would get out his little pill bottles and start lining them up, and would never look at me once. He never looked at me once, and would just take his medicine. He would ask what are you planning, and I would tell him what my classes were. He would say ok and sign a form and never looked at me. He never knew what I looked like. It was not a very good impression. Then I took a required public speaking class. The professor was a young dynamic guy. Stan Gwen. He said you are pretty good at this, and do you ever think about majoring in Communications. I said no, and he said you ought to come to my office and let me tell you about it. I went to his office and he told me about it. I said it sounded great, so I switched my major to Communications, and kept history as a minor. I had English as a minor. I had a Bachelor of Arts degree. My interest in Communications was rooted in a teacher telling me I had talent in the area. Once I got to talking about it I thought it was interesting. None of this sounds very planned out and it was not planned out. I finished my undergraduate degree, and the same professor said you are pretty good at this and have you ever thought about graduate school. I said no. He handed me a list of the top ten graduate programs in communications in the country. He said write to all these programs and ask them for an application. I did, and I wound up in graduate school in Indiana University with an assistantship. I was able to finish my MA and PHD while I taught and with no debt. Your question was why communications, and the answer is Stan Gwen.

Sarah: That is awesome. Moving on to the next question, as it also ties in. You did some line in administrative work, too. You were an interview panelist. You hired faculty members. Before that you served about twelve years as a professor. Why did you decide to become an administrator? You eventually made the switch back to teaching.

Davis: My first twelve years at Belmont was faculty stuff. I was involved pretty heavily in faculty governance issues. Example. The mascot at Belmont when I came was the rebels. Except for the mansion, we did not really have Confederate stuff all over the campus. But I made a point to say to Bill Trout who was the President then. You know, we have aspirations to be a regional or national university. You cannot do that if your mascot is the rebels and your campus has a centerpiece of a plantation built by slave labor. I was kind of a primary person about that so I would try to press for changing the mascot. He referred to me once in a faculty meeting as Mr. Stab the Mascot, because I kept telling him you got to get rid of this mascot. In fact, I was on sabbatical in my sixth year at Belmont and he called me at home and said I am going to make a big announcement tomorrow morning at ten and you have to be here. So I went to Belmont during my sabbatical leave and he announced that we were changing from the rebels to the bruins. I say that just to say I was pretty involved in leadership as a faculty member. My second year as a faculty member, I was elected the Faculty Parliamentarian. At that time, we had monthly faculty meetings and all the faculty came. We were small enough that everybody could fit into one room in the library. I knew Parliamentary Rules of Order pretty well and could coach people on that, and they decided to have a Parliamentarian and it was me. I did that for a number of years. Five or six years. I was heavily involved in leadership stuff on campus from the very beginning. Speaking out about things and offering my opinions. Sometimes welcomed and sometimes not. Sometimes offered judiciously, cautiously, carefully, and kindly, and sometimes I was just a jackass. Eventually, the university began to have at one point a third of Belmont students that were over the age of twenty-five. Then we began losing that population. We began to become a more traditional school with more and more young students and fewer older students. The university through research discovered that we were losing adult students. The senior leadership decided we needed to do something to recapture the adult market. They looked around at who was interested in that sort of thing, and I championed it a little bit. They picked me to be in charge of that. I became the founding dean of the university college, which now has adult degree programs, veterans affairs, and the program you are in. What used to be the university college, the leadership program. Mimi Bernard is in that position now. I started that college and did that for twelve years. I did three years as an associate provost for academic affairs. At the end of that, I moved back to faculty full time. That is the history of it. Did that answer your question?

Sarah: That was perfect. I loved that. Based off of that, how was the administrative work different compared to that of a teacher? Specifically, what did you do differently?

Davis: It was radically different. There are mechanical differences. As a teacher, you do not have vacation days. As a staff member or a non-teaching faculty member, you have to accrue vacation days. I was accustomed to having summers. Christmas. Spring break. Easter break. I was not leaving town. I was going to see my family. Suddenly, I am here. As a faculty person, you hold your office hours but you are not in sharp in the morning. So I started working a regular day. Get in at seven-thirty or eight in the morning, work all day, and at four-thirty when Belmont closes up, you close up shop and go home. Pretty often I would stay till five. But I began working a very regular schedule. Being an administrator, there was a ton more meetings. It was just crazy. From one thing to the next. Constant meetings. I guess I should say that part of the reason that job suited me so well was I was not really in charge of much, so I got to be involved in everything else. I was not involved in admissions. I did not work in admissions. But I talked to admissions a lot. When we needed a new slogan for Belmont, the group that decided what slogan to recommend to the President was two people. It was the Dean of Admissions and me. She hired a consultant who came in and said here are the options. We said this is the one to use. Have you heard the phrase from here to anywhere?

Sarah: Yes sir.

Davis: Well I was there. Kathy Moore and I picked that out. She pitched it to the President. I was involved in that. I was involved in student affairs a lot. The adult students needed to be taken care of, so I was friends with the Dean of Students. They were hiring associate dean of students and I was on the search committee for that. I was involved with the University of Marketing Communications, so we hired a new Director of Marketing Communications. I was on that search. We needed a new controller to keep up with the money in the university. I was on that search. None of this has anything to do directly with what I was in charge of. I am a boundary spanner person and I liked to mess around in all sorts of things. To me everything is connected somehow. I got to go and see people and talk about those things. It is a very different kind of job. It was all of that stuff plus trying to work with the staff I hired in my area to have more students. To advertise, market, and figure out how to get more adult students. Before we started the University College, Belmont never advertised before. They did admissions material and sent letters out to high schools. Buying advertising had never been done before. When we started the University College, they handed us a big budget for advertising and we spent it. I was in charge with my staff of radio commercials and TV commercials. For a while, I did live TV spots for Belmont. Early in the morning, when kids are getting ready for school, I would over to channel four over by Nashville State and be on air from six-fifteen to six-forty-five. They would have two or three Belmont commercials and they would pitch Belmont. I would come on as Dr. Davis here and I would do my ten second talk. We would do those two or three times and then go home. Live TV. Belmont had never done anything like that before. That was interesting and fun to go do. We would make commercials all over town. In houses. We would rent a house for the day, go over there, and make a commercial. Just all sorts of things like that.

Sarah: That is so cool.

Davis: It was fun.

Sarah: It sounds fun. This is awesome, by the way. Stepping away from the historical part. In my class we read a book called Leadership in Turbulent Times. We examined how Presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson had faced many struggles until they got to their positions as Presidents of the United States. Have you learned from any obstacles or challenges that you faced at some point in your career that guided you to somewhere you did not think you would go?

Davis: Well, nothing like Abraham Lincoln. Moving from the frontier and making it big. Being elected President and having a war. Nothing like that. When I came to Belmont, there were fourteen hundred students. My first fall we jumped up to seventeen hundred students. The freshman class at Belmont now is eighteen hundred students or more. We are a vastly larger university that it was at one point. Every year the question for us was what will we do with all these students? A constant set of good things because we have more money, more solvent. But where are they going to live and how is going to teach them? What are we going to do for classrooms? The cafeteria cannot hold all these people. What are we going to do for a cafeteria? Just constant set of problems dealing with continuing to grow. Good problems, because you would rather have that than not be growing and not able to make payroll. In terms of the administrative side, it is just constantly feeling like something is about to seriously come unglued and we are really going to have to work on this. Like freshman orientation does not work anymore, or there is no room for freshman. Just constant problems like that that are associated with having more people than we thought we would ever have. We had eighteen hundred students, maybe two thousand students, when I became an administrator. We were up around six or seven thousand when I quit. Every year it was another few hundred students and more to try and figure out. It was challenging because we had to invent and reinvent systems and processes all the time. The way we did it last year cannot be the way we do it two years from now because it does not work anymore. You have to change that.

Sarah: The school is expanding. I do not know if you have noticed the bombings that have been going off over there. It is because they are continuing to build it, right? It is just growing.

Davis: I have been through so many blasts it is crazy. One semester I taught in the basement of Patton Hall. First year seminar. An eight AM Tuesday and Thursday class. When they were building the Johnson building, or the law school? The Johnson building. There is a parking garage down there, and all that rock had to be blasted out of it. Where we were was right across the field from where they blew it up. Usually when they do a blast, you could hear the horn go off. It was a warning sound, but if you are in the basement in Patton Hall, you cannot hear the warning sound. We knew that sometime between eight-thirty and a quarter to nine every morning, there would be a blast. We were right across from there and we were never prepared for it. Right in the middle of class. It was funny, because somebody always shrieked in class. It was scary.

Sarah: That explains why you are so calm whenever the bombs go off now in class because you are used to it.

Davis: If you stand in the middle of the field, in the main part of campus, and look around you see McWhorter and the other side of the JAAC. That part was not there. The law school was not there. The Johnson building was not there. The dorm that sits up on the other side of the Johnson building was there. The Curb Event Center was not there. The garage that is over there was not there. None of those three dorms were there. If you could turn around in a circle, you could see one building that was there when I came to Belmont. That is where the baseball field was. There is a big ginkgo tree right outside of Patton Hall, and that was right behind home plate.

Sarah: That is blowing me away. No pun intended.

Davis: There was a parking lot right there. Do you know about ginkgo trees? They turn beautifully yellow, and lose all their leaves in basically one day. They lose a leaf here and there, and suddenly all fall. People would park their cars under there and come back on Monday and you could not see the car because it was totally covered with six or eight inches of leaves. Watch that ginkgo tree this year by the fountain. It is something to watch. It will turn brilliant yellow here very soon, be gorgeous and suddenly all the leaves will fall off of it.

Sarah: Amazing. I will definitely keep that in mind. The campus is so beautiful despite all the construction that has been going on. They have a pristine job of just keeping everything so nice and classy. I love it.

Davis: Money talks. And as high rated institutions go, Belmont is extremely wealthy. Extremely.

Sarah: It shows. It really does.

Davis: Just the growth has made a huge difference, and Belmont has done financially very well. And those of us who work here have done well, too. The raise is cool. I spent fifteen years on the universitys budget team. And the raise pool every year was at least five percent. Every year. Other universities and state universities were having flat budget years or one percent was lucky. We got five percent raises. And it does not mean every person got five percent, but the raise pool went up every year five percent. We needed it. We were a little small Baptist school and salaries were not up to par. Belmont was not keeping up. Belmont got to where it could keep up, and we could hire good people and keep them here because they were paid well enough. I do not know what question I was answering about being an administrator. Why I did that. What the difference was, but it is very different from teaching. It is really different.

Sarah: Amazing. Going more into the actual idea of a leader. In your opinion, what is a leader? For instance, what qualities do you believe a leader should possess?

Davis: I am going to talk about what I think is good leadership, and not just all leadership. There are lots of people who are appointed leaders or elected leaders who do not actually lead anything. They have a position. When I think about leadership, I do not think about positional leadership. I think about a set of activities that causes things to happen. The first thing is that leaders understand systems. They understand that people live and work and respond to systems. That systems produce behaviors. There are all kinds of systems around us that influences how we think, how we work, and how we act. One of my favorite books is by an old anthropologist named Mary Douglas. The book is called How Institutions Think. Basically, she suggests that there are cultural institutions that influence us and we think the way those institutions think. We believe we are independent individuals, but anthropologists and sociologists say no, we are heavily influenced by these systems. I think a good leader, first of all, understands the systems and how people work in the systems. Then you find your focus not just on trying to get this person and this person and this person to do what you want them to do. But you change the system so it is easier and more natural for those people to do what you want them to do.

Sarah: Interesting.

Davis: I will give you one example of something you are familiar with. Good Faith Effort grading.

Sarah: Lets hear it.

Davis: I want my students to come to class. Now I could be a real butthead about attendance record. What I do is I just make something due every single day. Something due every single day, and you know what happens to attendance? Pretty much everybody is there ninety percent of the time or more. And has done their homework pretty much ninety percent of the time or more. No amount of cajoling or harassment or threatening could do that. I could smile all day. As long as students understand how that system works, they come to class prepared for the most part. I solved that problem because I just changed the system. I think that is what leadership does. It does not try to get you, Sarah, to get motivated. Got to motivate Sarah. Then turn to the next person and motivate them. And then the next person. There are too many people. You cannot motivate one person at a time. If you have a system where the right, easy, smart, and the what I as a leader want you to do, then we do not have that problem any more.

Sarah: Following up, based on what you were saying, do you believe you express or portray some of the leadership qualities you were just describing? Do you believe you fit with what you were talking about?

Davis: In terms of thinking about how systems work, yeah I do. I work on that. I plan on that. I would not have said it if I did not think I lived by that. I think that is just one component of it. Understanding the system. I do think you have to pay attention to how the system affects individuals, because not everybody responds the same way to every system. You have to watch people individually. You do not watch them to get compliance. The primary thing to watch them for is to thank them one day for their good work. Just noticing what people do and saying oh that was good. That was really good. That was great.

(interruption)

For leadership, part of it is understanding systems and the other part of it is noticing people. Noticing they do things well and letting them know you see their work. That you appreciate it and see their work. A third part of it is related to the systems piece, when you look at people and see how they fit inside of those systems. You ask yourself how do we make it better. You start saying things like we need something different. Example, the Well Core. Could you tell me what the purpose of the Well Core is?

Sarah: After learning more about the history of it and why you created it from class, it is hard for me to give a brief summary about it. It is almost like it is forcing college students to get out and learn how to create connections whether it is with the community or how to take care of themselves by getting involved in sports, a job, anything. So they are better prepared to do that when they are not being babied by the college anymore. In the real world.

Davis: What does it have to do with their wellbeing?

Sarah: For instance, there is interpersonal and spiritual Well Core credits, so we attend chapel and such. Some of the events I have attended have really helped me. My favorite one was how to focus in class when you are starting to get fatigued. Literal mental help with understanding yourself.

Davis: You are able to articulate more or less the purpose of the Well Core. It is to help you be well. That is the whole point of it. To be well. It is written right there in the name. The old program was called Convocation. I could ask a hundred students what the purpose of it was, and nobody could tell me. In fact, there was no purpose statement. We had Convocation for thirty years at least. The purpose of it was for students to attend these events. That is not a purpose. That is a method. There was no purpose for it. I gave you this long example to say one of the things I got to work on was that problem. To say there is no purpose for this Convocation program. We need for the cocurricular program we have for our students to have an articulated purpose. Something students themselves can understand. You might not love every event. You might not love the whole program. But at least you know why you are doing it. You have some idea what it is for. It is just an example of looking at a curricular system and asking yourself what about this is broken and how do we get it fixed. Looking at the system, seeing how people interact with it, and trying to make the system better is part of leadership. I guess the last part of that is once you see that, open your mouth and say something about it. Step forward and say I volunteer to work on that. What happened with the Well Core is I complained about it for several years to Noah Boyle who was then the director of Bell Core. When he thought the time was right to fix the convocation, he turned to me and said I think we have an ear in higher administration that would allow us to fix that. Would you do it? I took it on. I spent a year collecting information, rewriting things, getting passed through the faculty committees and passed through the faculty senate. That last piece is pretty important. Most people when they think about leadership, they only think about that last piece. Speak up and step forward. I think that is important, but it is the last step of a longer process of understanding how systems work and how people live inside them.

Sarah: I am so glad you brought up the Well Core, because I think that is so relevant for not even just Belmont students, but all colleges. Even high schools. Going that far back. Trying to teach us actual life skills. It is so important to be able to do that. I think our system is so focused on testing and midterms and exams. What is that really teaching us? What is that forcing us to figure out when we step out into the workforce?

Davis: I would say one more thing about the Well Core. I am under no illusion that we are doing it well. That we are hitting on all cylinders. That everything is working properly. That it is great. I do not think it is great yet. I think it has got good bones and could be made great. I did not think the old system had good bones. I think the structure for the new system has real potential and has been folded into the larger Be Well Be You program which is a great idea to make good use of the Well Core. It is good to see these things permeate throughout the whole system.

Sarah: Moving on to another question. I really liked the story you told in class the other day, though I do not remember what it was. It has to do with your professional strengths and weaknesses. Could you provide a time you felt your teaching style had been challenged or you needed to modify it? There was a story about a disgruntled student you had told. They did not like how it was going, and you were considering it. I do not remember what story that was, but I was hoping you could elaborate on it.

Davis: I do not remember what I was talking about.

Sarah: We were doing a mock interview. You asked us to come up with interview questions.

Davis: The guy who was mad about the graded interpersonal communication exam?

Sarah: I think it might have been that one.

Davis: He came in and slammed the door and yelled at me. That was a long time ago. Is the question really about adjusting my teaching?

Sarah: Not necessarily about adjusting teaching. Do you feel your teaching style has ever been challenged before? Was there a weakness you experienced at any point?

Davis: Every semester, I have a copy of the syllabus for every class. When things suck in those classes, I go to the syllabus and make notes to myself. Boy, this was a terrible day, do not do this again. Or add this next time. Or change this. I keep a running log for myself as the semester goes on of things to change, so every semester is different. In Bus and Prof this time you are not doing a section on negotiations. I took it out of the course. You cannot do it in a short period of time. In the four or five years I did it, no student named that as an important part of their learning experience.

Sarah: In the Handbook?

Davis: Anywhere. Nobody cared about it and nobody told me that. I thought I am spending time on this every year, and it is not having any good impact that I could tell. In theory, you think lets do negotiations, but I would say now Kate Lowes teaches a Communications class in the business school. Go take her class. Cool course, it is great. I took it out of Bus and Prof. In Bus and Prof for several years we did a business simulation, where you were the owner of a business. It is this video game thing and you learn how to do it. You integrate parts and work on communication. How does this part talk to that part of a business? I took that out of it too. Again, none of the students ever said it was horrible. They enjoyed it. It was competitive. But I could not point to it and say that people where learning something important. I took that out. I used to have students years ago in my public speaking class say that I had favorites. Oh, it is clear who his favorites are. I said, what, I do not. What I figured out was when people gave speeches and finished their speech, if it went well I would say great job. Great job. Loved how you did that. It turns out that the best students got the most praise. That equaled that the student was my favorite. I stopped giving feedback after speeches. Did not say anything about a speech or rarely said anything about a speech after it was over. Poof. The idea he had favorites disappeared instantly. Once I figured out what I was doing that caused people to think that was true and stopped doing it, it went right away. They may still think I have favorites, but they do not write it in the course evaluations very much anymore.

Sarah: That is amazing that you would give up doing that. I have always been critiqued after a speech. Always. I just expected it. I got praised, but I also was critiqued.

Davis: It was the fact that the best students gave the best speeches, and I gave them the best comments. Of course it makes sense. But people hated that. It just made that student my favorite student. So, I ditched that a long time ago.

Sarah: We are almost towards the end. It is going to be more wrap up questions and future stuff. What advice do you have with building relationships and trust in organizations? A different way to ask this would be about making this about Belmont. Are there any improvements you would like to make about the Well Core? Any ideas?

Davis: I think there are people working on that right now. I was in a lunch meeting today talking about the new initiative about purpose. Helping students identify and develop purpose. A sense of purpose. I was at the table with Mary Claire. We were talking about some ideas. She said I am on the Be Well Be You Steering Committee. I was able to say to her, great. Here is an idea that we have really fulfilling. I told her that the Well Core that is still like Convo. It is mostly a series of one hour talking hits, but when we put it together, some of the excitement around it was the possibility of longer events where you earn more credit. What if you had a Saturday morning retreat on some topic and people came in at nine and stayed still noon and got three or four or five Well Core credits for their effort in some area? We were talking specifically about mindfulness and spirituality this morning. I said you could do an overnight retreat. Teach them some of these practices and skills and the ideas behind them. Give them all their Well Core spiritual development credit in one retreat. Why not? Better than stretching it out painfully over six hours of hearing talks you do not care about. There are people working on that. The Be Well Be You director, I think his name is Adam Fleeger. He has put together an emphasize month for each of the kinds of wellbeing covered in the Well Core. He has a committee working on each one trying to emphasize that. Do special things each month to focus on each kind of wellness. I think there is really great work going on there, I just do not think we are there yet. I saw when I logged into myBelmont the other day, there was a new app for logging your Well Core credit. One of the biggest problems we used to have was how do you know who is there. I do not think you have ever seen the old big scanners. You had to scan an ID with them. It would work sometimes, and if you had a big event with a thousand people, it would take an hour. Then the scanners would be pooped out, and it was a mess. Coming out with new technological systems to keep up with who came to what and using the QR Codes. Answering questions about the event. All of those are improvements on the system. Just the events themselves need to be sharper. But people are working on it. It is not me. I did my pitch. I am done with that. Passed off to other people with more energy for it now. They are doing really interesting and smart things with it.

Sarah: In a summarized version of what you just said, the best advice you could give is there is always room for improvement. Especially with the expansion of Belmont going on right now, there is always something that is going to need to be modified, that could be improved, built on. In your opinion the best way to do that is to always notice and see the system itself and reflect on that. In order to have people coming towards the Well Core credit events, you need to first look and see the system itself, the design of it.

Davis: We were talking about Well Core, but I think it goes to Bell Core, too. What could we do better in the Bell Core? A lot of things. First Year Seminar could be better. We could improve what happens in first year seminar in lots of ways. How the learning communities work could be better. Junior Cornerstone classes could be better. We could focus on those things more. There is always room for that. Part of the issue though from a leadership perspective is you say to people we could always be better. People will just say kiss my ass. Who wants to hear that? Leave me alone, I am doing a good job. As a leader, you earn your right to help people get better by noticing the good things that they do and having conversations about it, and you do not say to them I think you could do better. You say to them, I think you are doing a great job. Here are some things I think you are doing really good in. If you reinforce the part of what they are doing that is good and that you want more of, then they will do more of that. Without you ever offering any kind of negative critique. Think about that. You could be better, is a really negative thing to say to a person. I believe it. It is inherently an assault on people to say you could be better. For a leader, the thing to say is here is some stuff you are doing great. Do not praise people for things they are not doing well. Do not say to them you are not doing well. Talk to them about every part of what they are doing. I see you are working on this, how is that going? The people will often say to you, that sucks I am terrible at that. Really, you are having trouble at that? What is the nature of the trouble? People will know when they are messing stuff up and it is not going well. They will talk about those things. You engage them in a conversation. And I did not have to tell you that you were doing a bad job. You told me you were doing a bad job. This is good. A good leader sets up those conversations so people can recognize that. There was a person many years ago, fifteen or ten years ago. That might be a long time to you, but not that long to me. They had worked at Belmont, and I will spare you which office she worked in. She worked at Belmont for forty years and was seventy eight or seventy nine years old. She could not keep up. She could not do the computer stuff. The technology will outlive all of us. There will come a time in my life when computers are too fancy, and I will not bother with that. You, too. There will come a time when you are an old person, and I pray you run into that time and you think you do not care about the new technology. I am just not going to learn how to do it. I know everybody else is using it. I know the younger people are using it, but I am old and I do not have to. I am not going to. This person was at that stage. She was not belligerent about it. It was just more than she wanted to do. She was a phone call, go see people kind of person. Not an email person. We needed her to retire. We needed to replace her with somebody who could keep up and could do all the systems we needed to have done. I was not going to tell her to retire. Absolutely not. We went to strategic planning in that department. I led that. We talked about what our goals were and she was a part of that and we put all those goals together. I said I wanted to come and talk to each person about their contribution to achieving these goals we had set. I went around and talked to every person in the office separately. We need to talk about the goals, do you like these goals, what does this mean to you, how do you see yourself moving forward. When I got to her, she said, these are the right goals, but I am not the person to move forward. I am going to retire. I never said a word about it to her. Another vice president who had been in charge of that office before asked how I got that to happen. I said she talked herself into it. It was the right answer and she talked herself into it. I wonder if she is still alive.

Sarah: This was about fifteen years ago, and you said she was in her late seventies? It is possible.

Davis: I think she may have died recently, but I do not remember. I will tell you this one thing about her. Her husband sang with Elvis Presley. He was a backup singer. He was one of the Jordanaires. He sang with Elvis.

Sarah: Oh my goodness, that is so crazy.

Davis: She knew Elvis. Her husband knew him personally, and took his son with him a lot of times. Toured with him.

Sarah: It is such a small world if you think about it. Such a small world. One last question, and then after that I will take no more of your time. We are in the final stages. I am really happy you were able to give me such great and very specific examples of how you define a leader and how you possibly think you fit into that. Gives me an idea for what I want to look for, too. This is the most basic question. In regards to the future, when the day comes that you have to retire, what do you want your legacy to be? Do you want to leave a mark? Or do you just want to do your best and push for other people to be successful and be okay with that?

Davis: I am trying to teach myself not to want a legacy. I think wanting a legacy is hubris. Hubris is thinking too much of yourself. The goal is to do good every single day. Every single class. Every single semester. Do the best you can with these students right now. And then that is what you have done. Having posterity know my name. On one hand, I do not want to be forgotten, on the other, that is the whole point. You tell me one thing about James Buchanan, one thing.

Sarah: Was he a President?

Davis: He was a President. That is the one thing you know right?

Sarah: That is the one thing I know.

Davis: Where was he from? What did he do? How tall was he? Name one good thing he did in his whole life, and nothing. He was President of the United States of America. To have a true legacy, to be truly remembered, I think it is fools gold.

Sarah: That is a nice way of putting it.

Davis: Turn on the Grand Old Opry sometime. Ask yourself, who in the heck are these people? Occasionally, there will be somebody on there who you have heard before, but a lot of them are people who were famous because they had been on the Grand Old Opry. They were not famous people. There is something about wanting to be on the hall of fame and being remembered. Over in the gig, you know the gallery of iconic guitars? Over in the library? You should go over sometime. We have this collection. I think it was Jerome Kern who was a famous Broadway composer. Wrote a million musicals. In the forties or fifties. He was a very famous composer in Broadway musicals. His grandson has their money and was a collector of guitars. He left his guitar collection to Belmont. It was mostly guitars and some other things, too. There is a banjo over there that was played and owned by Uncle Dave Macon. You ever heard of him?

Sarah: No.

Davis: One of the most famous country musicians ever. And you have never heard of him? He is so famous that his banjo has been saved and preserved for eternity in the Belmont library.

Sarah: I am sure if I heard a song by him I would know.

Davis: You would not know. He never had a famous song. He was famous for being on the Opry. He was from Murfreesboro. He played banjo and was a great entertainer, but you never would have heard of him. My point is, the desire to be famous and well know is foolish. I think the better option to be is a different kind of well known. To be well known personally. To be known well by your friends, by your family, by your students. It is better to be known well than well known.

Sarah: That is perfectly said.

Davis: There you go. We will see if that holds up. Probably not. That is the goal, to be known well by people. To be loved well by people. To love people as well as you can. Being famous, having a legacy. In the end, you are dust. All the molecules that make your body up go back to the universe when you are finished with them. They just go back and that is all. In a hundred million years, all these particles go someplace else.

Sarah: That is very well said. I have to say I completely agree about the whole conception.

Davis: Some people think that is just morbid.

Sarah: No, not at all.

Davis: This is how it is. This is how our lives are. When you understand that, they become lovely and beautiful and not frustrated. A lot of people who want to have legacies are angry, frustrated people, because nobody recognizes them for their true value. I am not above having my feelings hurt because people do not notice my work. When I do that, I say to myself, who are you to be noticed? You did your good work, you turned it in, and it is done. It is done.

Sarah: I loved that response. You articulated it much better than I ever could. I loved it. I have no further questions. This was amazing. I will go ahead and stop the recording. Thank you so much for doing this.

Davis: If you have further questions or when you start writing it up and you need to talk more, we can do this again if you need to.

Sarah: Thank you for offering.

Davis: No quota on how much we can talk.

Sarah: Thank you, I will go ahead and stop the recording now.