Presidents

Interim President and Provost

Billy E. Frye, 1954G-1956, Ph.D.

Interim President, 1993-1994
Chancellor, 1997-2001

Following the resignation of President James T. Laney in October 1993, the Board of Trustees appointed Billy E. Frye interim president of the University, a post he assumed while continuing his duties as provost.

Frye graduated from Piedmont College in 1953 and earned his MS and PhD degrees from Emory in 1954 and 1956. He joined the faculty at the University of Virginia, then began a 25-year career at the University of Michigan, where he arrived as an assistant professor of zoology and departed as vice president for academic affairs and provost. He returned to Emory in 1986 as vice president of research and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and was named Emory’s first provost in 1988.

In 1994 he received the Emory Medal, the highest award given to an alumnus, and in 1997 he was the recipient of Emory’s highest honor, the Thomas Jefferson Award, for significant service to Emory through personal activities, influence, and leadership. A citation written in Shakespearean sonnet form paid tribute to Frye:

Sonnet for a University Citizen Extraordinary

Measuring out your work among us here
by slow committee hours, strategic plans,
the master cycle of a budget year,
the role of lunchtime deliberations,
you tend collegial life more felt than seen—
the imperceptible birth contractions
of a community of scholars being
delivered to elegant thought, action,
and a good obscured from our present ken.
The responsibility and choices
you have planted have lately flowered in
the fructified power of many voices.
Integrity, calm reason, goodness, wit
combine in you to make honor most fit.

Frye was the author of Choices and Responsibility, the document adopted in 1996 by Emory’s Board of Trustees as the basis for the University’s long-range planning.

After William M. Chace assumed the presidency in 1994, Frye returned to the provost’s office for three years before becoming Emory’s fourth chancellor in 1997. He retired in May 2001.

Sources: Emory Report, 9.16.96, 6.28.99 and 4.23.01, Sonnet by Gary S. Hauk, Secretary of the University