What President Carter Taught Us
When Joe Crespino first began teaching at Emory, he never imagined that one day he'd be introducing students not only to the study of modern American history, but also to history itself, sitting just a few feet away.
As the inaugural Jimmy Carter Professor of History, Crespino had the rare privilege of working closely with Carter for more than a decade. In his classes, students researched Carter’s life and presidency, then met with the former president at the end of the semester to discuss their findings.
“Students would go into the archives, do this original research and then President Carter would come at the end of the semester. They could ask him about their research, have these brief oral history interviews,” Crespino recalls. “Those were some of my favorite moments in my teaching career.”
President Carter’s legacy at Emory, as Crespino sees it, is not bound to spaces where he taught and listened or even to programs that bear the Carter name — though his influence is deeply felt in both. Instead, it lives in the spirit of inquiry, humility and public service Carter embodied in his more than 40 years as an Emory Distinguished Professor. “He was consistently on campus,” says Crespino. “He brought incredibly prominent global figures from around the world to Emory, and he interacted with students humbly. He allowed himself to be questioned — even interrogated — on controversial things, and he spoke freely and honestly.”
“As a historian, I believe that the values that I saw President Carter practice in an Emory classroom — values of humility, of optimism, of faith in the potential of his fellow human beings to act with reason and goodwill — are the same values for which Jimmy Carter will be remembered as a president and as a statesman.”
— Joe Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History
That authenticity made a deep impression on Crespino. “He didn’t have to keep showing up,” he says. “He didn’t have to be working in his 80s and 90s, traveling the globe, building houses for Habitat for Humanity or continuing to teach and engage students at Emory. But he did — all the way up until he physically couldn’t do it anymore.”
Crespino acknowledges that Carter’s death left a void. “It’s a huge loss,” he says. “To the university, to the world.”
As Emory looks ahead, Crespino believes that the best way to support Carter’s legacy is not by trying to replicate it, but by living the values Carter stood for. “He was a plainspoken person,” Crespino says. “He got in trouble sometimes — both as president and afterward — for saying what he really thought. He didn’t always follow the unwritten rules of the fraternity of former presidents. But his commitment to honest inquiry and open debate — that was unwavering.”
This, Crespino insists, is where Emory can lead. “We honor President Carter by staying true to our values of open inquiry, serious scholarship and great teaching,” he says. “That’s what we do as a great research university. And that’s the core of who he was.”
In many ways, Carter’s spirit remains woven into the fabric of Emory’s intellectual life: tireless, hopeful and devoted to the belief that truth, humility and dialogue can bridge even the oldest divides. “It’s that indefatigable commitment to peacemaking, to being a good citizen of every community he belonged to — from Plains, Georgia, to the world at large,” Crespino says. “That’s the spirit of President Carter. And that’s what we must carry forward.”
