Bushwacked in Texas

The University of Texas regents were going through the motions of a public meeting last month, just one day after Chancellor Charles ("Mickey") LeMaistre had fired Stephen Spurr as president of the Austin campus. Student Body Vice President Bill Parrish rose to ask a question: Why was Spurr dismissed? For long seconds the regents stared down at their papers in total silence. "Isn't anybody going to respond?" asked the student. No one did.

Last week LeMaistre was under pressure from Governor Dolph Brisco to justify Spurr's firing--the latest in a series of power plays at a highly political university. LeMaistre had, in fact, already told Spurr why he was dismissed. But the information was delivered during a private meeting and never put in writing. With good reason. The real charges according to Spurr: he had cut back on the lavish cocktail parties the university threw for wealthy contributors before football games; he had not cracked down on the student paper, The Daily Texan, which treats the regents with a notable lack of respect; he had refused to admit into the law school regents friends who were unqualified; he had started a minority recruitment program, which the regents did not want.

Spurr's firing touched off a ruckus on Texas' Austin campus. Several days later, some 3,000 students attended a rally to protest the regents' action. The university faculty voted overwhelmingly for LeMaistre's resignation. Said History Professor Standish Meacham: "It was done in the best Texas bushwacker tradition. He was fired in the wrong way on a trumped-up charge." Lady Bird Johnson, the only regent who abstained from the 8-to-O vote upholding the ouster, said in a choked voice, "No great educational institution can sustain its greatness with the frequent and sudden firing of its presidents and deans."

A Perilous Job. True enough--but the Spurr affair was an eloquent reminder of recurring campus politics at Texas, the second richest (after Harvard) and fifth largest university (73,000 students) in the nation. The firing typified the style of the man who forced Chancellor Le-Maistre to do it: Regent Frank C. Erwin Jr., an ex-Democratic national committeeman and crony of Lyndon B. Johnson and former Governor John Connally. Erwin has really run the 16-campus university for more than a decade. Four years ago, for example, he personally fired Liberal Philosopher John Silber as dean of Austin's College of Arts and Sciences, telling him, "You scare the hell out of the incompetents above you." Silber went on to become president of Boston University, and more than a dozen other top scholars left Texas soon after he departed.

Ironically, Spurr, whom the regents hired away from his job as graduate dean at the University of Michigan in 1970, was not very popular at Austin. The faculty and students thought that he did not stand up to the regents enough, though he did win some respect with his largely unsuccessful efforts to raise faculty salaries--while the regents were spending $27 million for a new basketball arena, $11 million to enlarge the football stadium's seating capacity and $6.6 million for a swimming pool.

The regents' first choice for president in 1970 was a piccolo player with an academic specialty in musicology; it was after students and faculty objected to nun that the regents turned to Spurr, although they were not overly enthusiastic even then about their selection. The regents' new choice to act in what has become one of the most perilous jobs in higher education: Lorene Rogers, 60, a professor of home economics.

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