Khayat suits up for toughest challenge
By By Buddy Bynum / editor
Jan. 19, 2003
Seven years before the first Super Bowl, the 1960 College All-Stars suited up against the National Football League champions. That year it was the Baltimore Colts.
One of the outstanding college players on the field was Robert Conrad Khayat, a standout in two sports during the glory days of Ole Miss athletics. He played tackle and guard on Coach Johnny Vaught's best teams, but excelled as a placekicker.
Khayat had been signed by the Washington Redskins as a placekicker and was anxious to prove he had what it took to win against the best players in a most competitive sport.
Khayat remembers lining up against a Colt named Eugene Johnson, a 6-foot, 8-inch lineman who weighed about 315 pounds in the days when a player of that size was still fairly unusual. Khayat played at about 6-foot, 2-inches and 215 pounds.
As he faced Johnson, who sported a bushy beard that gave him a mean, larger than life appearance, Khayat said the NFL veteran looked down at him and asked in a quiet voice designed to intimidate, "Boy, does your mama know where you are?"
The Colts won the game, 32-to-7. But Robert Khayat not only survived, he went on to a sterling career with the Redskins, where he was a scoring star. He was selected to the 1961 Pro Bowl and, despite a series of surgeries that periodically sidelined him, Khayat completed his career with Washington.
Part of the story
But athletics were only a part of Robert Khayat's life. He was also an Academic All-American who pursued his law degree at the Ole Miss Law School while playing in the NFL. He finished third in his class and earned his law degree in 1966. He was a Municipal Court judge in his hometown of Moss Point and, later, a law professor at the Ole Miss Law School. He earned his master's of law degree from Yale Law School on a prestigious Sterling Fellowship.
He was vice chancellor at Ole Miss when he left to take over as the first president of the NCAA Foundation in Mission, Kan. His duties involved creating projects to fund scholarships for student athletes who had exhausted their eligibility and still desired to earn their undergraduate degrees.
For three years, Khayat developed fellowships to allow student-athletes to have a career in sports administration and also found funding for a major drug education program. Following a three-year stint in this landmark NCAA position, he returned to Oxford to teach law once again and served as interim athletic director in the fall of 1994.
On July 1, 1995, Dr. Robert Conrad Khayat was named the university's 15th Chancellor. As Ole Miss' chief executive officer he oversees the Oxford campus, the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, and degree-granting centers in Southaven and Tupelo.
Fast forward
This abbreviated biographical sketch is necessary to why Khayat should be appreciated now for taking the leading role in another challenge that may be the toughest of his career: Persuading Mississippi legislators to really make education a priority.
No one in this state is better suited for the task.
This job isn't based on physical size or athletic ability. Chancellor Khayat must play this game mentally using a power invested only in the best of us: the power of persuasion.
And he must win not for himself but for all of us and for future generations of Mississippi students who are being shortchanged by legislative shortsightedness that keeps cutting budgets for higher education.
In October 2000, Ole Miss achieved what no other public university in the state has it was awarded a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the most prestigious liberal arts honorary society in America. The reward came after four years of perseverance and persuasion on the part of Khayat and others whose vision could not be sidelined.
While only a fraction of Ole Miss students will be awarded the coveted Phi Beta Kappa key, earning the chapter was one of Khayat's top goals as chancellor, and he has incorporated that goal into a national fund-raising drive that has generated more than $228 million for the university over the last five years.
Mindset
Phi Beta Kappa takes Ole Miss to a higher academic level, even more remarkable since it was achieved in an era of declining public funding for higher education. Private donations helped Ole Miss eventually meet four crucial Phi Beta Kappa tests involving improving library holdings, strengthening the Honors College, improving laboratories and enhancing liberals arts faculty salaries.
But the trend toward less state funding for higher education in Mississippi is dangerous and simply cannot continue.
Khayat makes a strong case that there is a direct link among education, economic development and quality of life.
As Ole Miss pursued the higher standards required for Phi Beta Kappa status, so must Mississippi pursue excellence in higher education. And that either means putting the time, effort and money into a system that can be persuaded to excel, or changing the whole mindset by which education is delivered.
Just ask Robert Khayat.
