ustxtxb_obs_1957_08_23_50_00001-00000_000.pdf

10c per copy THE ACCUSERS These are the Texas Tech directors who fired three Texas Tech professors but now refuse to acknowledge in public what their reasons were. Top row, from the left, Douglas Orme, oil company vice president; J. Evetts Haley, rancher and writer ; C. I. Wall, gas company president; P. C. Callaway, rancher and businessman; Floyd A. Wooldridge, oil field service company employee ; Harold Hinn, grain elevitor firm president; Torn Linebery, rancher. Seated, from the left, Winfield D. Watkins, cotton oil executive; James Lindsey, newspaper managing editor; and E. N. Jones, Texas Tech’s president. Jones criticized the firings, but the board members were unanimous. A Long Day in Lubboc The one great rule of composition is to speak the truth. Thoreau Vol. 49 -5c..e1,4.vaS 13,N%,..-C47 nrrurr 5.0 …eta Liberal Weekly Newspaper TEXAS, AUGUST 23, 1957 We will .serve INC group Of party bit will hew hard to the truth as we fend it and the right as of, see it. No. 15 SA Cheaters Get Off Hook John White Cites City’s ‘Precedent’ AUSTIN Agriculture Commissioner John White has sent letters of warning to, but will file no charges against, San Antonio merchants whose pre-packaged goodsmostly meats were found by White’s weights and measures inspectors to be mislabeled as to weight. The letters went to 246 merchants, White said, and warned that “repeat violations of the law will be vigorously prosecuted.” White sent a team of 23 inspectors into San Antonio last week at the request of city officials. The request followed abolition by the San Antonio City Council of the city’s weights and measures division. After a week of checking, White said: “We have found the most deplorable situation I have ever seen. The housewives of San Antonio ought to know what’s going on. I’ve never seen it so bad. When you never find an error in the consumer’s favor, it isn’t carelessness.” San Antonio’s mayor and several city councilmen urged White to prosecute violators. Said Mayor Pro Tern Elmer Crumrine: “If they catch any guy violating the state weights and measures law deliberately, I feel he should be prosecuted.” Councilman Reuben Dietert said: “I regard instances of shortweighting as just plain cheating.” However, White said he believed he must take into account a “precedent” set unofficially by San Antonio’s former inspectors of allowng a degree of tolerance between labeled weight and actual weight. He said this had been going on for “a long, long was dissolved.” “Since the inaccuracies were so widespread in San Antonio, I have only two choices: file complaints against almost every retail meat outlet checked in the city, or, issue notifications as to change of policy and continue the investigation to determine repeat violations. “The second course will be taken.” He promised future violators would be filed on. Wage Violators Are Not Named DALLAS During U.S. Fiscal 1957, which ended June 30, the U. S. Labor Department found 3,245 Texas firms w hi c h underpaid their workers a total of $2,307,000 during Fiscal 1956 and 1955. But the department’s wage and hour division this week refused to name the firms involved. “We, just as a matter of policy, don’t give out that information,” said William J. Rogers, the divi LUBBOCK For five weeks the words had flowed in anger. For five weeks three men and their families had waited to find out why they had been fired from the college. For five weeks citizens of the plains had been writing to the newspaper, most of them angry at the three men’s firing, or the way they were fired. Saturday dawned clear, with a high blue sky. Downtown was quiet, the city’s n e w buildings as linear, curveless, relentless as they are every morning. But the paper in the rack at the Caprock Hotel said the five weeks’ wait was ended. “You will get reasons. I say you will get reasons,” said M. D. Watkins, chairman of the board of directors of Texas Tech, and general manager of Western Cotton Oil Company of Abilene. I The press, who had been barred when the three were fired five weeks before, were welcome, and they were ‘there, enclosing the nine directors, the president, the secretary, and the comptroller seated . at their polished meeting table in the high, finely paneled room with the parqueted floors. At 9:35 in the morning the president, Dr. E. N. Jones, a tall but solid man with a rectangular face and a wide mouth drawn taut, prayed gravely that God might help them do “that which is good for the interests of Texas Tech.” Quickly the directors agreed not to have any more executive sessions unless a majority of them so voted. Then Watkins said the college had “no manual or procedure on tenure and outside activities and so forth” and he would like to appoint a committee \(two directors, two faculty, one or two from the admin”I trust you understand what I’m getting at,” he said. “We’re groping in the dark on some of these things. In fact I’m not fully read on it myself.” C. I. Wall, a Tech director and president of Pioneer Natural Gas Co. of Amarillo, made a motion that Watkins set up the study. Another director, James Lindsey, who is managing editor of the Midland Reporter-Telegram, se onded the motion. J. Evetts Haley, rancher, cowboy, writer, recipient of one vote out of every 20 cast when he ran for governor last summer, and a member of the board of directors of Texas Tech, shifted forward tensely in. his sharply styled Western. gentlemen’s clothes. He began reading from a statement. “In view of the public need of determining whether the State of Texas wants these alleged ‘professional rights’ of Professors legally confirmed as the ‘special privileges’ they actually are, and whether incompetence and indiscretion generally can continue to enjoy immunity from accountability under the unctuous and dishonest cloak o f ‘academic freedom’,” Haley read, “we urge the legislature to define, by law, whether or not any college employee has a vested right to a job, and hence whether or not anyone can be fired fOr any just cause without danger of turning the institutions of Texas, willy-nilly, into public sounding boards for radical elements everywhere …. “We pledge the tax-paying parents of Texas, that this board of directors will continue to run End of an Argument A day in Lubbock, in five parts. I. Mr. Haley. IL Mr. Watkins. III.Dr. Greenberg. IV.Dr. Stensland. V.Dr. Abernethy. this school … for the true moral and educational benefit of the young men and women of this sovereign State; irrespective of the left-wing clamor, innuendo, and agitation.” “Couldn’t it be considered by the committee?” Watkins asked. Harold Hinn, president of Harvest Queen Mill & Elevator Cornpany of Plainview, moved the statement be turned over to the committee. Tom Linebery, a rancher in Kermit, seconded the motion. Wall did not want Haley’s statement to be a part of his motion. “I am agreeable to the statement being filed,” he said. “I want it more than filedI want it studied!” said Haley. “It’s not a part Ronnie Dugger of my moion,” said Wall. “Do you mean to put yourself in the position,” Haley asked angrily, “that you don’t want this studied by the representatives of the people of Texas?” “I didn’t say that.” Haley voted against the committee being appointed. The others said yes. Watkins said he would give the committee Haley’s statement. Then they turned to routine business. Lindsey, “very concerned about the lack of space in the student newspaper for the expression of student opinion,” said the budget for the paper was being doubled. Before approval of a contract with the Air Force for the technical training of Air Force students at Tech, Haley, “suspicious of any federal contract,” demanded assurance that Negroes would not be admitted to Tech in. this manner, and Dr. Jones gave it to him. A Student Council program for a group health and hospital insurance plan for students was sidetracked, on Haley’s motion, because, as Dr. Jones said, “the contacts with our local insurance groups … have not been fully carried through.” Wall asked to be recorded not voting on approval of Tech’s contract with the Pioneer Natural Gas Co. for natural gas for the next two years. Haley voted no on. the board’s approval of its electric power contract with the city of Lubbock because “I think these contracts should be subject to the laws of Texas. This was let without competitive bidding.” “Well, we won’t go into that,” Watkins said. Discussing an engineering firm, Hinn said to Wall, “We \(meaning Harvest Queen Mill & Elevator and they’re a good outfit. You’ve used them too I guess?” “Yes, we \(meaning Pioneer Natural Gas fit,” Wall replied. It was 10:20 in the morning then. Watkins, a plain man in his fifties, told his colleagues he had been “working day and night” on “the situation we find ourselves in.” At Jones’s urging, he said, ‘”I agreed to talk to anyone about why their contracts weren’t renewed, except whether it was ; Fear Versus Citizenship LUBBOCK Three Texas Tech faculty members named by Mayor S. S. Forrest to a local committee on United Nations Week have declined to serve on. the grounds the UN might be considered controversial by the college. The Lubbock Journal said it was told by the three professors that recent actions by Tech’s board of directors made them fearful of serving on the committee and that they indicated they wished to avoid “controversy.”