"Talmadge, Phooey!"

Students gaily gathered on the campus of the University of Georgia last week, marched up "Ag" Hill shouting "To Hell with Gene," hanged and burned Governor Eugene Talmadge in effigy not once but twice. Women students at Lucy Cobb dormitory had a third private hanging of their own.

Next day, at a mass meeting, students got up a petition demanding that the Talmadge-packed Board of Regents be unpacked. The students rounded up a caravan of 108 cars, rolled out of Athens bound for the Capitol at Atlanta, 70 miles away. At their head was a jalopy flying red and black streamers and bearing Student Leader Alpha Fowler Jr., son of a State legislator. Behind came placards: We Don't Want a Discredited University. . . . Keep Politics Out of the University. . . . Talmadge, Phooey!

With horns blowing and a sound truck blaring Dixie, the caravan circled the Capitol twice, then halted at a statue of oldtime Populist Demagogue Thomas E. Watson. A student jammed a wax bust of Talmadge over the statue's head. Up jumped Cheerleader William Malone and bellowed through his megaphone "Are we afraid of Talmadge?" The mob roared: "Hell, no!"

"Sinkwich [star halfback--see p. 62] for Governor!" shrilled Co-ed Betty Verdi. The crowd took up the cry.

Finally, singing "Glory, Glory to old Georgia," and cheered by thousands of Atlantans in the streets, the caravan whooped back to Athens.

The student demonstration last week was touched off by word from a meeting of the Southern University Conference (41 leading colleges of the South). Meeting in Birmingham, Ala. to ponder Georgia's grievances against its Governor, representatives of the other colleges found a clearly evident case of political interference: Talmadge's ouster of University of Georgia's Dean Walter D. Cocking on the charge (denied) that the dean had advocated coeducation of Negroes and whites (TIME, July 28). Though the Governor himself showed up to harangue the conferees, the Conference dropped Georgia without a dissenting vote.

Governor Talmadge sputtered: "No out-of-state agency has the authority or the right to dictate to the Board of Regents. . . . No outside influence in the United States or on the face of the earth can dis credit the University of Georgia." The Atlanta Constitution cracked: "Certainly . . . the regents can, if they desire, employ a faculty composed exclusively of imbeciles."

The Conference decision was hard on the feelings of Georgia students and Governor, but in practical terms it did not affect in the slightest the college operation, nor fortunately its standing in the Southeastern football conference. But repercussions may be serious.

For as Governor Talmadge started a tour of the State making speeches charging that most of the members of the Southern University Conference favored coeducation of blacks and whites, the Southern Association of Colleges & Secondary Schools, an official accrediting agency, prepared to meet next fortnight to consider blacklisting Georgia. That action would mean that college credits obtained at Georgia would not be accepted as valid at other accredited institutions. Georgians feared the worst, for the chairman of both the Conference's and the Association's committees investigating Georgia is the same man, Dr. Alexander W. Guerry, vice chancellor of the University of the South.

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