It’s a Monday afternoon in early summer, and Col. Michael Hughes, superintendent of Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville is showing off the school’s artillery. Through a warm haze, the mountains of north Georgia rise past Lake Lanier as Hughes, an amiable man with a firm belief in his mission shows visitors the vintage—and long mothballed—weapons that seem to defend a memorial plaza dedicated to Riverside’s best and brightest, including those who died in World War II.

Hughes hates talking about himself, steering personal questions back toward Riverside, the 235-acre campus that starting in the late Nineties underwent a $95 million renovation and building program. On this day, the halls are quiet, since summer session has barely begun, but during most of the school year nearly 500 cadets are in residence at the school, whose crenellated battlements look like a neatly kept castle.

Riverside and the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences have had a close relationship since Riverside’s trustees in 1978 set up an endowment in the college in honor of Gen. Sandy Beaver, a 1903 UGA graduate who became president of Riverside in 1913 and directed it for a record 56 years. Each year, the school awards faculty members in the Franklin College Sandy Beaver Awards for Excellence in Teaching and Sandy Beaver Teaching Professorships. These honors are highly coveted in the college, and the relationship between Franklin and Riverside has only strengthened since Hughes was named superintendent of the academy in 1999.

Evidence of Sandy Beaver’s long tenure at Riverside is everywhere at the school, from his portrait over an entrance-foyer fireplace to his awards, preserved in an elegant glass case. Beaver’s antique desk has remained in the place in what is now Hughes’s office, as has the lovely corner-cabinet behind it.

Hughes’s relationship with the Franklin College goes deeper than his leadership at Riverside, however. He is the inaugural chairman of the Franklin College Board of Advisors and has worked closely with Dean Wyatt Anderson to strengthen ties between the college and Riverside. In this additional role, Hughes will be leading a group of alumni, donors, government officials, and faculty representatives to advise the college as it grows into the 21st century.

The Franklin College Board members will tackle tough issues -- such as increasing diversity -- that face the college as a whole, and in addition, each member will serve as an advocate for change and improvement in particular departments and areas within the college.

Hughes is pleased about the Riverside’s relationship with the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

“ I’m really excited about that partnership,” he says. “It’s a great idea for us to be involved with teaching at the college level. Wyatt Anderson plans to come to Riverside to do a seminar on bioinformatics for our faculty.” Anderson, longtime dean of the college, is a geneticist and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Hughes and Anderson both look forward to increasing this exchange as several of the Sandy Beaver Professors will share their expertise with Riverside faculty through a new on-campus faculty development initiative.

“ I consider being superintendent of Riverside the opportunity of a lifetime,” says Hughes. “This is a different kind of military school, and we’re proud to be known as the West Point of the South.”

While military schools have, in the past, sometimes been the final destination for students who cannot or will not work in a traditional public school, Riverside is the exact opposite. Not only does it refuse students with disciplinary or social problems, it won’t take any student who doesn’t want to come. This strategy has been enormously successful, and Riverside’s college-placement rate is impressive.

The school’s philosophy of student character development is crucial to its mission, as is its intensive faculty development program. Combined with the school’s new campus, the future seems bright for Riverside.

Col. Hughes—he’s also Dr. Hughes—is standing in the Dining Hall of Riverside, though to call it simply a dining hall is to diminish its grandeur. In fact, it would not be out of place at the Biltmore House: a vast, beautifully built room with a high ceiling and state flags hanging majestically around the sides. At one end is a triple-fireplace that adds to the Old World charm of Riverside.

Sometimes it seems Hughes can’t contain himself, amazed at what the campus has become during his tenure, though he would be the first to praise others. His love of the military and excellence in teaching come naturally.

Hughes grew up in Florence, Alabama, the son of a WWII Navy veteran who was wounded at the Battle of Guadalcanal. His parents both worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and he took a step toward fulfilling his own military dreams when he was accepted as a cadet at West Point. He had traveled little from home and had never been on an airplane when he left for the fabled installation on the Hudson River.

“There was a bit of culture shock,” Hughes says. He turned 48 in late July but still looks trim and much younger. “I managed to get on the track team, and before long we had a meet with Harvard, and I found myself in a hotel in Boston. Amazing.”

He graduated with a bachelor’s of science degree from West Point in 1977 and received awards for both academic excellence and leadership. This was the beginning of a 22-year career as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army, with postings in Korea, Germany, and the U.S. Along the way he earned a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a doctorate in counselor education from the University of Virginia.

In his role as an infantry commander during a 16-month assignment in Korea, most of it in the extremely dangerous Demilitarized Zone, Hughes gained invaluable leadership experience and appreciation for the valor and ability of the American soldier. It was then that he was first inspired to consider a career in teaching leadership.

From 1985-88, he was a teaching officer at West Point then served as joint staff officer at U. S.-European Command in Stuttgart, Germany from 1989-91. He thus saw the unraveling of the Soviet Union from a close perspective. When a permanent position came open back at West Point for graduate level teaching, Hughes accepted it and taught, then heading off to UVA for his doctoral degree. After finishing his degree, he returned to West Point as a member of the senior faculty, and in 1994-1996, he served as director of the psychology majors program and director of the Leader Development (Counseling) Laboratory in the department of behavioral sciences and leadership.

It was while at West Point that Hughes planned and taught a seminar course in the “Human Dimensions of Leadership” for MIT’s Sloan Graduate School of Management. From 1997-99, Hughes served as director of West Point’s Center for Enhanced Performance, leading a 16-member professional faculty and staff group in providing a student success course.

Along the way, he married, and he and his wife Jan became the parents of Grace, now 21, Lauren, 19, and Logan, 11.

When he arrived on Riverside’s campus in the summer of 1999, the school was at a crossroads. Hughes brought with him, however, a graduate education in counseling, a career in the military, and a determination to bring new energy and a strategic shift in educational approaches to the school.

His three-pronged approach included the establishment of an intense faculty development program that emphasizes student-centered, active learning approaches in the classroom. Walk into any classroom at Riverside, and you will immediately notice one thing missing: a teacher’s desk. The teachers, in fact, stand in the middle of a U-shaped arrangement of tables, interacting closely with the students. (Classes are small, so such interaction is possible.)

He also adapted the state-of-the-art student success program that he helped develop at West Point’s Center for Enhanced Performance. As the school’s materials note, this program teaches RMA cadets “self-confidence, mental toughness, personal organization, goal setting, time management” and much more. The third part of his new program was the establishment of a character development model program for the cadets.

The success of these new approaches hasn’t been lost on anyone in Georgia or in the military academy community. The school’s class of 2002 earned an amazing $2.8 million in merit scholarships for college—this for a class of 72 cadets. The class of ’03 earned nearly $2 million as well, making clear that the program’s success is unquestionable.

The all-boys school, which encompasses grades 7-12, had 460 students in the ’02-’03 academic year, and though students are required to live on campus, those in good standing are allowed to go home most weekends. Of course, that’s not possible for every student, since Riverside typically has students from all over America and from many foreign countries as well.

While walking across the memorial plaza, Hughes remembers the sacrifice of those who have served America in the military.

“Seventy-one graduates of Riverside were killed in World War II,” he says quietly.

But while he pays tribute to the school’s past and remembers his own, Hughes firmly faces the future and sees better things to come. Riverside Military Academy’s campus—from its bright classrooms and orderly dorms to its dining hall and athletic fields—is dazzling. The John L. Beaver Field House is state of the art, and the school’s weight room has drawn attention from coaches all over the area. The new Sandy Beaver Center for Teaching and Learning, scheduled for completion in December, will house the school’s library and fine arts center, as well as a faculty development center.

Though Hughes is a mild-mannered man who laughs easily, he takes his job seriously. Every neat corner, every formation drill, every A on a test, says the same things to him: duty, honor, country. He deflects pride, but you can’t visit Col. Michael Hughes or Riverside without seeing it everywhere.

by Phil Williams