"A Monstrous Thing"

While Ole Miss seethed with unrest last week, Texas Technological College (enrollment: 8,000) suddenly erupted. On the campus at Lubbock, 300 members of the faculty gathered in angry mass meeting to denounce the board of directors. Reason: the board, meeting in closed session, without giving reasons and without a hearing, had fired two respected members of the faculty. The board's motives for the dismissals were all too obvious. Both Professor of Government Byron Abernethy and Assistant Professor of Psychology Herbert GreeHberg had publicly expressed opinions that the board members--political appointees of former Governor Allan Shivers and his successor Price Daniel--did not like.

Long active in state politics. Abernethy committed his major sin last May when he keynoted a meeting of the Democrats of Texas, a new liberal faction of the state Democratic Party. He bluntly charged that the followers of Shivers and Daniel had tried to suppress the liberals by refusing to grant their delegates official status at the 1956 state convention. "We insist," said he. "that there must be no more rigging and stealing control of Democratic Party conventions by cynical and ruthless political manipulation." In spite of his political activities, Abernethy has never been known to propagandize on campus, was up for a raise when the board of directors fired him.

Greenberg, a young (27), blind Ph.D. from New York University, had aroused the wrath of the directors over another subject: he has never made a secret of the fact that he believes that racial integration should come "as fast as each area of the country can do it." With two colleagues, he conducted a survey of Texas high-school students' attitudes toward school integration (and found that most students favored it). Like Abernethy, he was also up for a raise, and, according to the head of his department, "there is no question of Dr. Greenberg's professional ability."

Tech's President E. N. Jones protested bitterly to his directors. Students began circulating a petition that accused the board of denying the "right of all men to freedom of speech and the right to voice opinions." By week's end the storm had spread far beyond the borders of the campus. Said the conservative Beaumont Enterprise: "The practice of firing teachers who express opinions on pertinent questions of the day can become a vicious and monstrous thing in any state."

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