Education: My University

“This is my university,” bellowed Senator Huey Pierce Long last month. ‘I can fire a thousand of these students and get ten thousand in place of them any time I feel like it.” Last week Senator Long had made a start toward carrying out his boast. Twenty-six students were summarily suspended.

That Louisiana State University really belongs to Huey Long no sensible Louisianan doubts for one moment. As Governor and as Senator, the “Kingfish” has made it his biggest, most expensive plaything. In small part his interest is due to pride in the educational and athletic advantages of his Kingdom. In large part it is due to his personal feud with Tulane University.

In 1914 Long slipped through a cranny in the entrance requirements of Tulane’s law school, tried to do three years’ work in nine months, left with no degree. In 1928 Governor Long sent a henchman to Tulane to notify that university that he expected to receive an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. President of Tulane’s Board of Administrators was and is Es mond Phelps, part owner of the anti-Long New Orleans Times-Picayune. The Board voted to bestow no degree on Governor Long. “Is zat so?” the Kingfish is reputed to have howled when the henchman brought back the news. “I’ll make Tulane look like a goddamned cross-roads country school.”

Louisiana’s State University, by virtue of a grant from the State Legislature, first opened its doors in Rapides Parish in 1860. Its first head was that ill-natured old war dog, General William Tecumseh Sherman. Ever since that time Louisiana State has been proud of its military tradition. Its two most famed alumni are military men, Major-General John Archer Lejeune, onetime commandant of the U. S. Marine Corps, and Major-General Stephen Ogden Fuqua, chief of infantry in the U. S. Army. Many L. S. U. students live in barracks on the campus, wear R. 0. T. C. uniforms. Tuition is free, living expenses at a minimum. Like most co-educational universities in the deep South, where a large proportion of the female students are farmers’ daughters, L. S. U. keeps a firm hand on its students. Forbidden are drinking, hazing, card-playing, visiting “objectionable places of resort.”

Governor Long lost no time in building up L. S. U., which in 1926 had been transferred two-and-one-half miles out of Baton Rouge to a bluff a short distance back from the Mississippi River. From the State Treasury he contributed $3,000,000, gave the university to understand that it could borrow more. He built a $1,250,000 medical centre, conducted raids on Tulane’s medical school to staff it (TIME, Aug. 1, 1932). Today L. S. U. has a Huey P. Long Field House, a Huey P. Long swimming pool, a music building with 80 concert grand pianos, a football stadium enlarged to seat 35,000.

With Long’s virtual ownership of the university went control, thorough, absolute, unquestioned. Of the 15 politically appointed members of the Board of Supervisors, not more than two can be counted anti-Long. The meeting of the Board which elected James Monroe Smith president was held in Long’s office, and all Louisianans firmly believe that President Smith’s undated resignation reposes in a drawer of the Kingfish’s desk. Slow of motion and speech, bald, chunky James Monroe Smith gets a salary of $10,000, an automobile, a house. In 1930, when a student protege of Long’s was suspended from the Law School for publishing obscenities in a burlesque newspaper, the Kingfish created a prime scandal by reprieving his young friend from a year’s jail sentence, forcing Puppet Smith to grant him a “special diploma.”

As a means of advertising himself, Senator Long has taken over Louisiana State’s football team which he conducts about the country with the maximum of political hullabaloo.* One of his most inspired pieces of rooting was to declare Louisiana’s star halfback, Abe Mickal, a State Senator (TIME, Nov. 19). But Footballer Mickal’s Syrian sense of humor did not encompass such stunts and he failed to appear for the ceremony of his seating. Shortly thereafter the semiweekly campus newspaper Reveille, published by L. S. U. journalism students, received a letter from a sophomore in praise of Mickal’s good sense, in mild rebuke of Long’s governmental burlesque. No sooner had the letter been set up in type, ready for publication, than an exuberant junior editor whisked a proof to the State Capitol, where it fell first into the hands of a newshawk named Helen Gilkison, then into those of the Kingfish. Long seized a telephone, bellowed his disapproval at President Smith who, in turn, ordered the Reveille’s slim, sandy Editor Jesse Hardy Cutrer Jr. to stop the presses, kill the letter. As a further precaution, Senator Long sent a squad of highway police to stand guard over the Reveille office. Then he appointed Newshawk Helen Gilkison to censor future issues.

Last spring President Smith publicly boasted that the Reveille was “an absolutely uncensored publication.” But last week the Reveille staff was informed that faculty supervision would be permanent. Rather than submit to it, Editor Cutrer and his five chief associates resigned. Next noon 60 of the 228 students in the School of Journalism held a mass meeting. Of that number 26 signed a petition threatening not to write another line for any campus paper unless the Reveille staff were reinstated. That night President Smith suspended the 26 pending apologies. Twenty-two handed in regrets, were reinstated. The other four refused, were suspended indefinitely.

*Last week Tulane beat Louisiana State 13-to-12.