Tempest in Mississippi

As far as Criminologist Alfred C. Schnur of the University of Mississippi could see, the topic of his talk before the Oxford (Miss.) Rotary Club was a perfectly natural one: criminology. For some time Professor Schnur had been studying Mississippi's big penitentiary farm at Parchman. Speaking to the Rotarians as an expert, he expressed some serious doubts about its use of the lash, its lack of an adequate rehabilitation program and the fact that young first offenders are thrown indiscriminately among hardened criminals. But as soon as the news began to spread that he had called Parchman "a training ground for criminals," the university found itself the center of one of the strangest tempests ever brewed inside an academic teapot.

A day or so after the speech, the state legislature's House Penitentiary Committee sent off an angry letter to the university's Chancellor John Davis Williams. Schnur's slur on Parchman, said the committee, "puts the university in the highly embarrassing position of publicly attacking another state-owned institution." Furthermore, Schnur's conduct was "unethical" and could have "repercussions upon the consideration of the needs of the university" by members of the legislature. The general tenor of the letter: unless Schnur kept quiet, the legislature might cut the university's funds. Governor Hugh White, 72, "certainly concurred . . . The whole thing could react disastrously on the university."

Chancellor Williams blandly replied that he regretted "the situation that has developed and shall do all I can to improve it." Other spokesmen, however, were less temperate. Cried the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times: "An arrogant and contemptible assault upon academic and individual freedom." The Memphis Commercial Appeal called it a "threat to the present and future standing of the University of Mississippi if politicians endeavor to dictate who shall be faculty members and what they may or may not do and say."

But last week Professor Schnur was keeping rather quiet. Once before, in the days of Governor Bilbo, politicians had bullied the university and so demoralized it that Ole Miss lost its accreditation. Besides, huffed the Jackson Daily News, "what the hell business has Ole Miss with a criminologist, penologist, or whatever he sees fit to call himself . . . We need criminologists in our institutions of learning just like the average man needs seven more holes in his head."

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