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profile
‘There is some magic that occurs here’ Willis B. Sheftall Jr. ’64
Inside the Office of Academic Affairs, there are three rows of photos of all of the past provosts for the College. The last one is of Willis B. Sheftall Jr. ’64. Had he had his way, Sheftall’s photo never would have been there. “If you had asked me when I was coming here whether I wanted to be an administrator or not, I would have said ‘no’” he said. “I wouldn’t have been hesitant about that. It just wasn’t an aspiration that I had.” Having three times served as Morehouse’s provost (1999 to 2005; 2007-11 and 2012-13) and once as acting president (2013), Sheftall now sees his move into administration as answering his alma mater’s call to service, for which he says he has always been proud to do. Sheftall has long been a respected economist with a particular interest in the economics of higher education, local public finance and U.S. economic history. He’s served on boards of institutions such as Fisk University, American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, Junior Achievement of Georgia, Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital, and SOLINET (Southeastern Library Network). He also served on the Atlanta Mayor’s Council of Economic Advisors. He taught at Alabama State University and Georgia State University before returning to his alma mater to teach in 1974. He became chairman of the Department of Economics at Hampton University in 1981 and later dean of Hampton’s School of Business. Sheftall returned to the classroom in 1986 when he came back to Morehouse as a professor of economics, and also as the
MOREHOUSE MAGAZINE
28
Commencement 2013
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Commemorative issue
Charles Merrill Chairman of the Department of Economics. Along with first becoming provost in 1999, he also served in other administrative capacities at the College, including special assistant to the president with oversight responsibilities for institutional advancement and budgeting. No matter what he was doing, student development remained a primary focus for Sheftall. Teaching is the first love for the Macon, Ga., native. “Watching young men develop into full manhood is one of the truly exciting experiences that you have here at Morehouse,” he said. “I have now almost thirdgeneration students. I have the father whom I taught and then the son, and now I have the grandson. Certainly, I have the grandsons or grand nephews of classmates I was in undergraduate school with. That’s what I’m going to miss – the day-to-day interaction with these young guys and watching them grow up.” For a pragmatic academic, even Sheftall admits there is some undefined part of the Morehouse experience that has made his time at the College special. “I’m a hard-boiled economist,” he said. “I’m not one of those people who believes a lot in mystery. But there is some magic that occurs here. We can talk about what we do with respect to 90 percent of the experience a student has here. We can say this is what he’s doing. He takes this course; this is the outcome we expect. But it’s about 10 percent magic. That’s the mystique. That’s critical. It’s not just the icing on the cake. It’s more like the icing throughout the cake. That Morehouse mystique is real, and I think its one of the things that sets us apart.” n