Education: Trouble in Texas

Quick to honor a hero, quick to resent a slur are the rangy sons of the Lone Star State. Last week, quickened by both these emotional spurs, hot-hearted Texans rallied in droves to the banner of scholarly, pious Homer Price Rainey, president since 1939 of the sprawling University of Texas at Austin. Balding, unprepossessing Dr. Rainey, who worked his way through school and college to become one of the leading U.S. educators, was locked in battle with the Texas Board of Regents.

Dr. Rainey’s long-standing squabble with the Regents has sometimes flared into the open: in 1942 three economics instructors were dropped by the Regents against his advice for expressing opinions “;unbecoming a faculty member”; in 1943 Arthur L. Brandon, a Rainey appointee, was summarily fired from his publicity directorship, without charges and without a hearing. But mostly it has been a private battle.

“I am going to fight you like hell,” Regent H. J. Lutcher Stark told Rainey in 1940 when the latter refused to remove three members of the faculty without a hearing. “I doubt the wisdom and propriety of you, as president of the University, urging or suggesting that a member of the Board of Regents refrain from doing anything whatsoever,” wrote Regent D. F. Strickland in 1943 to Texas’ president. Under the Board’s rules a university president is supposed to be the professional adviser to the Board, but for several months Texas’ Regents excluded President Rainey from their sessions.

Last September the Regents’ interference with their president became more than Texas’ students could stand. President Rainey received a message from Regent Strickland to stop making so many speeches. Although the Regents promptly denied that they had made any such official request, the Daily Texan, campus newspaper, hit right back: “Instances of smalltown ‘school boardism’ . . . have been too many to overlook the report of a ‘shut-up’ rule to the president of the institution.”

No Time for Timidity. Onetime pro ballplayer, onetime Baptist minister, Homer Rainey felt that he had been pushed too far. At a special faculty meeting on Oct. 12, he made an hour-long speech, cataloguing his troubles with the Board. “The whole matter boils down to two major issues,” he said: “The issue of the freedom of the University . . . and the issue of the recognition of the proper relationship between a governing Board and the executive and administrative officers. . . .” He hoped the breach was not “so wide … it cannot be healed.”

Asked what he had to say about the quarrel (the Regents were appointed by him and his predecessor), Governor Coke Stevenson announced, “I do not think it would be proper to express my views on Friday the 13th.”

“The time for timidity is past,” clarioned Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, president of the Texas Students Association, at a mass meeting of 4,500. “We shall speak in a clear ringing voice, placing the blame where it belongs.”

Mac Wallace’s fellow students cheered wildly, then let loose a blizzard of free speech. Pro-Rainey leaflets, reprints of editorials, cartoons, letters came flying off the presses. Students were urged to mail these to parents, Congressmen, friends, home-town newspapers. A “Spread-the-Facts” fund was instituted with the motto: “Give until it hurts—the Regents.”

Faculty and alumni committees were organized, the State Senate’s Committee on Education perked up its ears, and from Washington came scholarly Dr. Ralph E. Himstead, executive secretary of the august American Association of University Professors, to suggest that the Board “take another look at these three young men (the fired economists).” When the Regents declined to take the hint, Himstead reminded them of “what happened” to the University of North Dakota when Governor Langer fired four deans and 16 professors. “Our degrees are at stake,” howled Texas’ students, who knew, if the Regents did not, that disapproval by the A.A.U.P. would mean a mass emigration of Texas professors and an irrevocable loss of prestige to Texas.

The Regents met in executive session, fired President Rainey.

The Boiling Pot. Said Frederick Duncalf, faculty committee head, “The fat’s in the fire now.” “It’s hell,” agreed alumni spokesman Robert Bobbitt. On the Texas campus, 6,000 irate students promptly cut classes, shouldered banners proclaiming NO CLASSES TILL RAINEY; RATS AND REGENTS LEAVE A SINKING SHIP. Dark-clad and solemn, they marched in a parade twelve blocks long to plant in the Capitol rotunda a crepe-draped coffin labeled “Academic Freedom.”

Meanwhile Mac Wallace handed the Governor an ultimatum: Coke Stevenson must telegraph each Regent requesting that he explain in open meeting the basis of the Board’s decision. If not, the students would “sit down” on the Capitol lawn. Said Coke, “I’ve been around the campfire long enough to know you can’t drink coffee out of a boiling pot.”

At the University Dr. T. S. Painter accepted “under protest” the proposition of acting president. On the campus the Lone Star flag hung at half-mast. Said Homer Price Rainey, “I have great faith in the future of the University of Texas. . . . I’m going to take a good rest and get in some fishing.”