Football, Anyone?

Probably nowhere in the world is there a college president quite like Frank Beu (rhymes with cue) of Western Illinois University. A skinny, owlish man of 59, he runs his compact (2,600 students) campus in Macomb (pop. 10,592) as if he, and not the state, were the owner. When he is not enjoying his paneled and well-equipped office (TV, hifi, radio, air conditioning), he is apt to be stomping about outside, shooting at pigeons with a shotgun, or scaring away stray dogs with a BB gun ("I don't see anything wrong with that. Some have hydrophobia"). One apocryphal story has it that on one pigeon shoot he accidentally pinked a member of the Teachers College Board of Illinois.

Since his college has a good academic reputation, at least in official state circles, Beu has been allowed to go his arbitrary way for 15 years. But last week one of his eccentricities had him in trouble. A onetime high-school principal and football coach, Prexy Beu is obsessed with having a winning football team, and he will go to unusual lengths to get one.

Faculty members have long complained among themselves about the way WIU treats its athletes. They get juicy "state scholarships," live in three dormitories of their own, are allowed to come and go as they please, play on Saturday afternoons against such bush-league teams as Southern Illinois University and Central Michigan College. But it was not until last fall, when Star Halfback Bobby McCue and two teammates confessed to burglary, that the situation at Western Illinois came out in the open.

Each of the three players eventually got five years on probation, and on the recommendation of a probation officer, was banned from intercollegiate football. At Western Illinois, said the officer, "thefts are rife" among the athletes. "No comprehensive effort is made to screen the backgrounds of students coming into the institution, and the result has been a singularly unsuited group of men since the war at the institution to participate in athletics. One of them ... is now serving a term of one to 20 years for armed robbery." But, in spite of the scandal, in the two months before sentence was actually passed, McCue was out there on the Western Illinois gridiron, complete with scholarship and the personal approval of President Beu.

That Beu would welcome back a player guilty of grand larceny was too much for the faculty. Professors began writing the Macomb Journal all sorts of reports about the Beu administration. Beu angrily called a faculty meeting, threatened to fire all informers, ordered his professors to stop calling his players stupid. It was the professors, he said, and not the players, who were stupid. But the letters to the Journal kept right on coming in, one complaining of "the young scholars who spend their afternoons on the gridiron and their evenings with their fingers in somebody else's cashbox."

Last week Chairman Lewis Walker of the Teachers College Board got an anonymous letter, warning: "The lid is about to blow off at Western Illinois. The faculty is ready to walk out." If the lid does blow, the board will finally have to step in with the full-scale investigation that the faculty has long wanted.

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