Wichita Worries

On their pell-mell way to join the New Deal in the spring of 1933, the professors of the Brain Trust might have noticed one of their former colleagues proceeding in the opposite direction. The tall, bald, rangy gentleman with the glum expression was William Marion Jardine, who had deserted his books to be Coolidge Secretary of Agriculture and Hoover Minister to Egypt. After a brief stay in the Kansas State Treasurer's office, Republican Jardine was offered and accepted the presidency of the Municipal University of Wichita. (Enrollment: 1,662.)

Even before he went to Washington, Republican Jardine had had a better job as president of Kansas State Agricultural College. The University of Wichita's only claim to fame was its Omnibus College, which enrolled 700 students each summer for a study-junket about the U. S. and Canada (TIME, July 17, 1933). Upon taking office, Mr. Jardine found that among solid Wichitans the university was considered a bit uppish. Forthwith he announced that the university would consider it a prime function to acclimate its students in the regional culture of Wichita, Kans. The Omnibus College was disowned.

By last week the Jardine policy had resulted in the dismissal of three members of the faculty and President Jardine had run afoul of the American Association of University Professors. The A. A. U. P. had sent its Committee A and Committee A reported that Mr. Jardine apparently believed that Wichita culture was to be found chiefly in the offices of downtown businessmen. In explaining his reasons for dismissing two of the three professors, President Jardine told the committee that, besides being incompetent, the pair failed to make friends among influential Wichitans. The university regarded the third man with disfavor not because he had been to Russia and lectured on his travels but because he had failed to live down the unfavorable reputation thus gained in Wichita.

Pleased with Mr. Jardine's frankness, the committee refrained from giving him its Class-A bawling out, let him off with a "condemnation." "The problems of public relations," it declared, "have been solved by sacrificing the freedom of the entire university."

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