AFTERMATH OF THE TRIAL : Jan Kemp, Georgia Have New School of Thought

Room 410 in the English building at the University of Georgia seems drab enough to induce inertia. The concrete-block walls, windowless, are painted a dull yellow. There are no desks, only long rows of tables with chairs bolted to the floor. It does not seem to be a creative atmosphere for a remedial writing course.

Just the same, a lively discussion has been engaged, concerning the impending final exam and a standardized basic English test required of all students by the state board of regents.

Presiding over the class, which includes several athletes, female and male, is Jan Kemp--Dr. Jan Kemp in the academic world--looking very much the part of the prim English teacher. She wears a simple print dress, eyeglasses that slide to the end of her nose and a no-nonsense look.

A student in the front row, a prominent Bulldog football player, asks several times about the lowest possible passing score on the standard English test.

“Are you sure it’s a 69 and not a 67?” he asks, genuinely concerned.

“Anything lower than a 69, and that’s it,” Kemp answers with a nod.

Thumbing through her grade book after class, Kemp explains that this is the student’s fourth--and final--quarter in the developmental studies program and that he will become ineligible if he fails the test.

“It’s headlines if he doesn’t pass,” Kemp explains. “But I’m confident he’ll pass. . . . He’s done the work.”

She smiles, closes her grade book and joins the crush of students in the corridor heading for noon classes. But Kemp can never blend into the crowd, and not just because she stands 6 feet 2 inches.

Nearly 3 years ago, Jan Kemp, the soft-spoken English teacher, challenged the university’s administration, and indirectly the powerful and popular Georgia athletic department, with a revealing suit claiming that she was wrongfully fired for speaking out against preferential treatment for athletes enrolled in the developmental studies program in the early 1980s.

Kemp not only won the suit, which carried an award of $1.08 million in damages and reinstatement to her teaching position, but the suit detailed Georgia’s practices of enrolling, and keeping eligible, athletes who could barely read and write but compete in revenue-producing sports.

Sweeping reforms have come to Georgia in the years since the trial and public scandal.

Fred Davison resigned as the school’s president a month after the verdict. Both defendants in Kemp’s suit, Virginia Trotter, vice president of academic affairs, and Leroy Ervin, director of the developmental studies program, were demoted and eventually left the university.

Georgia also instituted an admissions policy for athletes that is stricter than the National Collegiate Athletic Assn.’s guidelines. On Feb. 13, 1986, the day the jury ruled in favor of Kemp, Davison announced that the school would not accept any athlete with a Scholastic Aptitude Test score lower than 700 and a grade-point average lower than 2.00.

And athletes at Georgia now adhere to the same academic guidelines as other students.

Other NCAA schools may admit “non-qualifiers,” student-athletes with either a low grade-point average or a low SAT score, but not both, under the condition that they not participate in sports as freshmen and improve their academic standing. But Georgia decided not to pursue the borderline athletes. Many ardent Bulldog supporters say the policy has put the athletic teams at a competitive disadvantage in recruiting, and they blame the Kemp trial for prompting the change.

But last June, led by new Georgia president Charles Knapp, the Southeastern Conference followed Georgia’s lead and voted to phase out, by 1993, the awarding of athletic scholarships to high school seniors who fail to qualify for initial academic eligibility under NCAA rules. The SEC is the only major athletic conference that has admission rules stricter than the NCAA’s.

Kemp’s life, too, has unalterably changed since the trial. She has returned to her position as English coordinator of the developmental studies program, which offers non-credit remedial courses in English, math and reading for students not prepared for the regular curriculum.

Kemp has endured the scorn of her detractors among the ardent football faction in this community 70 miles east of Atlanta. But although her return 2 years ago generated much publicity, she said she has not been ostracized by the administration or faculty. “I decided to return to Georgia for two reasons, basically,” said Kemp, during lunch at a faculty dining room. “I care about the University of Georgia, and I wanted to see the changes firsthand and be a part of it. And, I also wanted to get away from my husband, who is an abusive alcoholic.”

Kemp was divorced from her husband, William, in February of 1987 after 17 years of marriage. She charged that he had not supported her during the financially and emotionally draining trial and that he physically abused her.

William Kemp, a high school teacher in Atlanta, said: “I have never physically abused her or my kids, and I supported Jan throughout our marriage.”

Added John Wilson, attorney for William Kemp: “My experience is that a jury does not award half of the marital estate as well as liberal visitation to the children (Jan Kemp was awarded custody of the couple’s two young children) to an ‘abusive alcoholic.’ ”

Jan Kemp said she is learning to balance a demanding professional and public career with domestic responsibilities. She also works as a crisis-line volunteer here for Project Safe, an organization that offers support to battered women.

She said she also is in demand as a public speaker and has appeared on panels with Notre Dame basketball Coach Digger Phelps, sports sociologist Harry Edwards and others.

Her face and name still are recognizable throughout the state, and a television movie based on Kemp’s story is being developed at CBS. Kemp said that she also has finished eight chapters of an autobiography.

“Sometimes, when I’m writing the book, I wonder if anyone really cares to read about my life,” Kemp said. “But then, I get so much reaction from people I meet.”

Kemp said she occasionally wonders whether all that has happened to her is real. Her tale might have come out of a short story by Georgia native Flannery O’Connor, one of Kemp’s favorite authors, who wrote about extraordinary events occurring to ordinary people.

Although only 38, Kemp already has lived through a lifetime of personal and professional problems. But she says she has endured all the turmoil and is happy.

Kemp was fired after the 1982 school year, and shortly after, she twice attempted suicide. She freely talks about the attempts, once by stabbing a butcher knife into her chest 16 times and later by swallowing all of the prescription pills in a bottle. After each failed attempt, Kemp was confined to a psychiatric ward.

Supported by her mother, who claims to possess psychic powers, Kemp said she was spiritually cured at a faith-healing service at her church.

Given medication to control depression, Kemp filed suit against the university. She and her husband went into debt and, had she lost the case, would have filed for bankruptcy.

Kemp says those difficult days are behind her. Once described as a survivor, Kemp seems to be considerably more than that. She appears to be thriving as a result of her struggles.

Walking into the faculty dining room, Kemp was greeted in friendly fashion by a roomful of colleagues, all of whom seemingly knew her. She was on first-name basis with the cafeteria workers.

For someone of her height and her reputation, among some former administrators, as a rabble-rouser, Kemp comes off as soft-spoken.

She has a deep Southern drawl, high cheek bones and a pleasant smile.

But Kemp’s manner can also be firm, and she is nothing if not fervent in her beliefs.

This is a typically avid college football town. On Saturdays during the fall, Athens becomes a football mecca. Fans come from all sectors of the state to support their beloved Dawgs. Caravans of red and black mobile homes, replete with flags clamped to the hoods, park overnight on campus. Helicopters carrying the wealthy alumni from Atlanta and points south to home games are common sights a few hours before kickoff.

So, when Kemp filed suit after her dismissal from the faculty, she challenged more than just a few administrators. She challenged Georgia football and all it encompasses.

And she won.

Kemp had maintained all along that she was a football fan, too, but that she wanted to see the program win honestly and without compromising academic competence.

When she returned to teaching in July of 1986, she said she found that many other faculty members--and even some in the community--felt the same way. A silent majority, she said.

“It’s been very easy to come back here, given the circumstances,” Kemp said. “It’s pretty much been a triumphant return for me. I’ve had no problems from the new administration or the faculty. The faculty suffered for 20 years under what was an oppressive police state run by Davison, and now they are as happy as I am to see the change.”

Davison, now the chief executive officer of the National Science Foundation in Augusta, Ga., said he always emphasized academics and tried for several years for stricter admissions for athletes.

“It really wasn’t tied to (the Kemp decision),” he said. “Sometimes, change takes a while.”

After the judgment and Davison’s resignation, a faculty committee was formed to dictate academic policies. The committee took a hard stand to end preferential treatment for athletes. Kemp had said to a reporter on the 1-year anniversary of the trial: “This faculty has had a taste of what it’s like to have a voice and make a difference, and I don’t think it will give that up. A few professors have said, ‘We were asleep, and we apologize. We won’t go to sleep again.’ I think the faculty is maintaining a watchful vigil over academic integrity and academic freedom.”

Kemp has learned, though, that it is difficult to break new ground without upsetting a lot of people with the flying dirt. And she still is perceived as an enemy of Georgia athletics by most Bulldog fans in the state. Mark Bradley, a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, recently wrote a satiric column in which he expressed Bulldog reaction toward Kemp as it pertains to recruiting. “She’ll haunt this program for a thousand years.”

Kemp said she has heard the complaints from fans that she is responsible for the stringent admissions policies and, as a result, has hurt Georgia athletics. But she said she has not been harassed by the football zealots.

“It’s very rare for anybody to be bold enough to say anything to me directly,” Kemp said. “I see some of the looks I get. But people with that low-level mentality, they don’t know what to say to really get me.”

Kemp recalled an incident 2 years ago at an Octoberfest celebration in Athens’ main business district. A group of men--”rednecks,” Kemp said--rode by Kemp and taunted her.

“They were screaming obscenities and called me all sorts of things,” she said. “Then, they all went by and (made an obscene gesture). You know what I did? I waved at them and then went like this (blowing a kiss). They didn’t know what to do, so they left.”

Kemp said that although she sometimes feels “set apart” from others, the reaction from most is positive. A native Georgian, Kemp said that reaction is just typical Southern hospitality. Still, she has an unlisted phone number, and her secretary screens her mail.

“I remember the first time I walked into the (supermarket) after I moved back (to Athens),” Kemp said. “I had my two kids with me, and I just wanted to get some tea bags or something. This woman, a total stranger, came up to me and gave me a hug. She just threw her arms around me and said she was proud.

“(Recently), I was returning Halloween costumes for my kids, and some people stopped me and said that it was about time somebody started glorifying academics at Georgia.

“Once, I remember that somebody came up to me and called me Jan of Arc for what I did. Can you believe that?”

Kemp said she has never seen herself as an activist. She said she filed suit against the university primarily to regain her job. But she said an additional concern was to expose and change the system.

Both goals apparently have been achieved. Georgia’s treatment of student-athletes changed immediately after the trial with the new admission and eligibility policies.

In the first year after the trial, an investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed that 23 football and basketball players had become “academic casualties.”

The newspaper reported that 11 had been refused admission after accepting scholarships because they did not meet the requirements. Eleven others, including several prominent players, were dismissed from school for failing to advance from the developmental studies program in the 4-quarter limit. The other athlete, basketball player Toney Mack, was ruled ineligible because he did not pass enough courses.

At the time, Kemp noted with satisfaction--and athletic department officials noted with resignation--that a message had been sent that the university was trying to cleanse its academic standards and image.

Since then, as the weeding-out process has continued, fewer athletes have been ruled ineligible and coaches have ceased trying to recruit athletes with substandard grades and SAT scores.

Hugh Durham, Georgia’s basketball coach, said he had lost five players who had signed letters of intent the last 2 years because they could not meet the minimum standards.

And although Athletic Director Vince Dooley has publicly said he agrees with the stringent admissions policies, Durham has been an opponent.

“We’ve been laughed at and ridiculed,” Durham told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in February, 1987. “When prestigious institutions across the country have taken (students with SAT scores below 700) and we don’t, we haven’t established ourselves as a leader. . . . I’d like to see us be able to take non-qualifiers.”

Last June, when presidents of the SEC voted, 9-1, to adopt Georgia’s admission policy, Dooley told the news services that “this sends a message nationally that this conference . . . is taking some steps forward to show by example.”

The conference will phase out admitting non-qualifiers by 1993. Next year, for example, SEC schools will be allowed to enroll only 3 non-qualifiers.

But the uniform conference policy has not come quickly enough for some Georgia fans. They say the football team, which hasn’t won an SEC title since 1982, will be set back for years. One of the most vocal critics is broadcaster Larry Munson.

After Georgia’s recent loss to rival Auburn that eliminated the Bulldogs from title consideration and a trip to the Sugar Bowl, a disheartened Munson wrote in a column in an Athens newspaper:

“As always, they (Auburn) were much bigger and much, much deeper than Georgia. They always will be, too. You can count on that, I’m afraid. . . . Two of the (reasons are other schools) recruiting a certain type of athlete that Georgia cannot talk to, and also keeping the athletes in school once they get them there. Those two things are impossible to overcome.”

Still, Georgia finished 1988 with an 8-3 record and earned a berth in the Jan. 1 Gator Bowl against Michigan State.

Said Davison: “I don’t think the policy has made much of a difference in the team. I thought if we’d do it, we’d get support from other conferences. But that didn’t happen.”

A quality football team seems as important as it ever was to school administrators. But with the national publicity generated by the trial, the new administration felt compelled to try to improve the school’s academic reputation.

As late as 15 years ago, perhaps the student body’s proudest accomplishment was that Playboy magazine consistently ranked Georgia as one of its top 10 party schools. Since then, though, Georgia has tried to shed its football-factory image by developing a respected library, becoming a national leader in biological sciences and vastly improving its law school.

Yet, when testimony confirmed that, in the early 1980s, Ervin asked Kemp to persuade a fellow professor to change the grades of five athletes, and that Trotter promoted nine failing football players from developmental studies into the regular curriculum, that football-school image was reinforced.

Perk Robins, the school’s vice president of development at the time, was quoted as saying, “The trial will set back our PR image 5 years.”

Nik B. Edes, who replaced Robins as vice president of development and university relations 14 months ago, said that Robins’ gloomy prediction has not come true.

“I don’t find that to be the case,” Edes said. “Indeed, the facts call to the contrary. Georgia is now in competition to become one of the outstanding universities in the United States.”

Edes said the school is ranked as the top research institution in the Southeast and that enrollment has reached an all-time high of more than 30,000.

“There is renewed excitement by our alumni,” said Edes, in charge of fund-raising efforts. “Last year, despite the stock-market crash, commitments from contributors were up. . . . I think the public image of the university is higher than ever.

“It’s always unfortunate to have a situation like the Jan Kemp affair. But I think almost every institution has some type of skeleton like that. I wasn’t here at the time, but I know that mistakes were made. I’m a great believer in learning from your mistakes.”

Repercussions from the Jan Kemp affair, as people on campus refer to it, still are being felt. Recently, a member of the Student Judiciary proposed an academic honor code similar to the one used by the University of Virginia. Scott Schoenberg, a senior political science major, mentioned the Kemp trial as one reason to implement an honor code.

“People think we’re either a party school or a we’re a school of athletes,” Schoenberg said.

Kemp does not agree with that assessment. Not anymore, at least.

She said she does not work directly with Dooley or any coach in the athletic department. She said that her dealings with academic counselors working for the athletic department mostly have been productive.

If anything, Kemp says, the counselors have been too concerned with keeping track of the athletes. Kemp said that counselors had called her department to check on athletes’ progress in class so much that she finally advised that she would contact the counseling office if she had a problem with a student.

“I have no problems dealing with her,” Robert Miles, an academic counselor in the athletic department, said. “We in counseling were just trying to get as much information as possible on our students, but she felt her staff was enough to help the students.

“I think we in the athletic department have no adverse feeling toward her. In fact, one of our football players who is in one of her classes recently invited her to lunch in the Bulldog Room (normally reserved for athletes).”

Kemp said she enjoys teaching athletes as much as any other students in her remedial English and writing classes. She said her student-athletes are more motivated than before, because they realize they will not automatically be passed.

“They are doing very good work,” Kemp said of the athletes she teaches. “Last spring, I taught one class exclusively made up of athletes. They do not fail to do the work in my classes, I can assure you. They sometimes make jokes with each other about being in Kemp’s class, so they have to do work.

“I make them keep a journal, and I remember one athlete wrote, ‘I have to admit that when I learned I had Jan Kemp as my teacher, I thought I’d die. But you’re not anything like I heard you were.’ ”

During the trial, attorneys for Trotter and Ervin maintained that Kemp was fired because she could not work with other faculty members. They described Kemp as mean, vicious, abrasive, intimidating and caustic.

From all appearances, Kemp is hardly the classroom tyrant depicted by the defendants during the trial.

But she is feisty, possesses a biting wit and will not back down from a challenge. In fact, sometimes it seems she enjoys confrontation.

Kemp laughed as she recalled a chance meeting with Trotter recently. It was at a retirement party of a university vice president.

“I was just standing around at the picnic and I found myself right behind (Trotter). I noticed that she was really uncomfortable and angry and she moved. So, I moved, too, so that I was standing behind her again. She didn’t even want to be near me.”

Trotter, now semi-retired and working as a consultant to the college of home economics, said she did not recall going to a party in which Kemp was present. She said she has had no contact with Kemp.

“My only comment on her is that she’s just not a well woman,” Trotter said. “Of course, in my opinion, I don’t think she should be teaching there. That’s why we fired her.”

Kemp also told of a chance meeting with Davison on campus. Kemp and a colleague, who also is a friend of Davison, were walking to class when they met Davison on the steps.

“He ignored me the whole time, and then he swung his briefcase around and just barely touched me on the leg,” Kemp said. “I’m a former basketball player, so I did it good (faked an injury). I grabbed my leg. It was funny. He didn’t look.”

Said Davison: “I think the only time I ever met the woman was in the courtroom. Just that one time.”

Kemp said her only problem with the athletic department occurred when two counselors took her to lunch under what she said were false pretenses.

“Right when I returned (in 1986), Curt Flood and Glada Gunnells took me to lunch, saying they wanted me to get to know Glada, who was new. I went and had a good time, but later I learned that Glada just wanted to get my mannerisms down so she could mimic me at an athletic banquet.

“I took that as a personal affront. Maybe if they had invited me to the banquet and then done it, it would have been different.”

Gunnells declined to comment on her impersonation of Kemp at a banquet honoring Georgia’s 1987 NCAA women’s tennis champions, other than to say that it was meant in fun.

“We had other people imitating President Reagan and (singer and Athens resident) Kenny Rogers, and I imitated Jan,” Gunnells said. “All I said was something like, ‘I won in court, and you guys (on the tennis team) won on the courts, too.’ ”

When an account of the incident appeared in the local newspaper, Kemp wrote an angry letter to Gunnells, who did not respond.

Kemp’s sense of humor, it seems, does not extend to jokes about her trial. It was a very trying time for her and, although she says she settled it in her mind a long time ago, it still is a big part of her life.

“For me, really, the emotional and psychological drama ended in 1984, even before the trial started,” Kemp said. “The trial was a picnic (compared) to what happened after I was fired. We knew we’d win the trial. Now, when I write about it, I realize all that happened.”

Kemp said she basically endured the firing and trial alone. She told a Fulton County jury in the divorce proceedings that her husband provided no moral support and frequently abused her during the trial. She testified that he tried to choke her at least once and shoved her against a wall.

William Kemp denied the allegations, both in court and in a recent telephone interview.

“I supported her throughout the litigation with Georgia, and she was absolutely right in suing them,” William Kemp said. “We did have some (marital) trouble about the time of the trial. But I never physically abused her or our children.

“To make further comment on that would be a violation of our court agreement and final judgment.”

William Kemp, awarded $158,000 in an equitable division of the marital estate and liberal visitation rights to his children, said the firing and trial put an unbearable strain on their lives.

“Before Jan was fired, we were a 2-income family with moderate expenses,” he said. “Then, we were a 1-income family with tremendous debts. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t pay the bills. That was pressure. We borrowed $40,000 from my mother to pay legal fees.”

William Kemp described his wife, after she was fired, as “a mess, totally psychotic. . . . I supported her. I was the one who took her to the hospital when she stabbed herself in the chest 16 times with a butcher knife. I took her to get her stomach pumped when I walked in the house and she, in a very lackadaisical way, said, ‘I did it. I took all the pills.’

“Sometimes, when Jan dips into the past, she is remembering a distorted reality.”

The past, though, is unavoidable for Jan Kemp. She is reminded of her trial and tribulation whenever she steps into a classroom, whenever reporters request interviews and whenever she is asked to make a speaking appearance.

She says, however, that her life now is good and that the future is promising.

She bought a house in Athens with part of her settlement from the university, and started a college fund for her children with the rest of her half of the court award. She says she lives comfortably on her university salary, and augments it with speaking engagements at high schools and seminars on athletics and academics.

“A lot of times, I’ll leave town on speaking engagements and nobody knows I’m gone,” she said. “I’ll leave at noon, fly somewhere and get back and 3 a.m. and be in class the next day.”

Kemp is most happy and at home in the classroom, she said.

“Every student I’ve had since I’ve been back, with one exception, has done the work and been able to compete in athletics,” Kemp said. “Back (in the late 1970s), there were a couple (of athletes) I had, even trying to teach them was hard. One student, he could barely write words on a piece of paper.

“Today, (an athlete) in one of my classes got a B on a paper, and he was so excited he wanted to get out of class early to call his mother. He said it was better than the interception he had last Saturday.”

After one recent class had cleared out, a reporter told Kemp that it had been 8 years since he had last been in a college classroom.

Kemp looked around and said: “I don’t know if I could exist outside of the classroom.”