ustxtxb_obs_1969_11_21_50_00010-00000_000.pdf

Actually, Arrowsmith said, he has been absent three and a half years, two of them \(at the Center for Advanced Study at Wesleyan and the Battelle Memorial semester doing the Italian issue of the Texas Quarterly; one year tape-recording remarks of 300 Italian writers. Arrowsmith said, “Everybody thinks [Harry] Ransom says, ‘Sure, Bill, take a year in Italy. You’re my boy.’ That’s batshit.” Sullivan, Arrowsmith said, at once addresses remarks to “faculty cliches about how the faculty should be in control and that people like Harry’s Boys are backstairs jobbers,” while at the same time lauding what Harry’s Boys have done. “He wants it both ways, typically,” Arrowsmith said. “An alliance of lively faculty people, lively administrators, and intelligent and noisy students is the only way to reform a university. \(Intelligent and quiet ones don’t C ONTINUING, Arrowsmith said: “The general impression of Sullivan as a hero of the liberal imagination and a man of real courage strikes me as not wholly in keeping with the record. The whole piece to me bears the marks of wounded vanity. In point of fact Sullivan had to be eased out of every position of power in this department. “I nominated him [for chairman of classics] , and I helped overthrow him. Sullivan in my opinion made a botch of the chairmanship because he was unable to win from the dean [then Alton Burdine] the privileges earned by increased enrollment. Burdine told me once, ‘You know, Bill, I like John Sullivan. He always sees my point of view,’ Sullivan’s real weakness is his 10 The Texas Observer CLASSIFIED BOOKPLATES. Free catalog. Many beautiful designs. Special designing too. Address: BOOKPLATES, Yellow Springs 8, Ohio. YAMAHA: For the best soundpianosorgansguitars available at Amster Music & Art Center. 17th & Lavaca, Austin. 478-7331. ANNE’S TYPING SERVICE\(Marjorie Anne Binding, Mailing, Public Notary. TWenty years experience. Call 442-7008 or 442-0170, Austin. OKLAHOMA LIMITED. A Journal of Political Opinion. Published Monthly $5 Per Year. Box 2777-TO, Norman, Okla. 73069. PEACE FLAG DECALS. Red, white & blue with Peace Dove. 50c each; $3.60 per dozen. Also, send for list of peace-oriented xmas cards, jewelry, records, etc. Women for Peace Room 1416, 343 S. Dearborn, Chicago 60604. MUST HAVE QUIET. The Observer’s subscription clerk needs a house or apartment near Austin, doesn’t mind minor inconveniences. $50-60/mo. max. Contact Robt. Bogan at the Observer office. unwillingness to make enemies. He’s afraid of making enemies. He’s always deferential, always egalitarian, relying on this English method of handing people martinis and caressing their weaknesses.” Arrowsmith then discussed faculty personnel fights in the department. As Arrowsmith saw them, Sullivan failed to fight for merit increases for fear of offending older professors who would be getting less, then, than younger men. Arrowsmith favored “creating inequities upward,” relying on the dean to come along a year or two later and raise the older men’s salaries, too. Sullivan was also often angry, Arrowsmith said, because articles by English friends of his, which Arrowsmith regarded as discards they thought they Buffalo It is naturally depressing to learn that my ironic English style is to be dismissed as “feline.” No man was ever written down except by himself, and in the future I will try to be more direct when writing for an audience of Texas tigers, paper or not. I find the charges a little difficult to focus. On the one hand, “principle was never the guide of [my] life”; on the other, I am a “doctrinaire liberal,” “always egalitarian,” who tries to help his former Oxford friends to get published in Anion [the publication of the classics department at Austin] , and who protects old professors from mistreatment. 2 Since Arrowsmith never knows where Silber will come down on an issue, the implication is that he regularly knows where I would. Such prediCtability strikes me as odd in a man never guided by principles! I am accused of being “singularly costive” \(if I may repeat the significantly anal imagery while at UT-Austin except of course before the Senate and House committees on drug legislation, which doesn’t count, because I was “circumspect.” 3 Oddly enough, it is difficult to accept an invitation to write a valedictory before one MEETINGS THE THURSDAY CLUB of Dallas meets each Downtown YMCA, 605 No. Ervay St., Dallas. Good discussion. You’re welcome. Informal, no dues. CENTRAL TEXAS ACLU luncheon meeting. Spanish Village. 2nd Friday every month. From noon. All welcome. ITEMS for this feature cost, for the first entry, 7c a word, and for each subsequent entry, 5c a word. We must receive them two weeki before the date of the issue in which they are to be published. were shipping to the boondocks, were rejected by Anion, the UT classics journal. “I don’t think principle was ever the guide of his life. This is the essential reason why he had to be eased from these jobs. On the question of quality, John was unreliable . . . He made decisions, I thought, on an alarmingly personal basis .. . “Throughout his nine years in America Sullivan’s central values have remained rooted in Oxford and in England. I don’t think he’s ever adjusted to the American scene. He, I think, still writes for Oxford approval, and I’ve never found him very perceptive about professional, academic, and civil ‘life in America. John, I fear, has a rather Oedipal relationship to Oxford; he would like to return in triumph some day.” R.D. is leaving a place, and only last year, after the Caroline affair and after my absence in England, did many of these thoughts crystallize. Perhaps I was just radicalized by Erwin, SCAS, the football stadium, and similar matters. Out of a distaste for public speaking, I have, admittedly, left the speeches in faculty and university debates, as Arrowsmith has, to abler orators such as Silber, Shattuck, Caroline, Grubbs, Edwards, and others. I doubt however if there have been many doubts as to where I bombing of North Vietnam, 4 Frank Erwin, the SDS controversies, and so on. Can Arrowsmith say the same? I still don’t know where he stands on Vietnam, the Caroline case, Erwin’s takeover, or the extension of the stadium. Indeed when half the classics department signed a letter I drafted protesting President Hackerman’s decision to break the contract with the national SDS and forbid them campus facilities, what was Arrowsmith’s public stand? He refused to sign the document, but said he would write a private letter to Hackerman. \(We were not apprised of the professed to be a hero, lacking that virility, guts, and tigerishness: frankly, a lot of aspects of Texas scared me stiff, not least the easy availability of handguns. It is therefore no surprise to be told that I am afraid of making enemies, but the tone of Arrowsmith’s predictable response might make it clear to the reader that I have not been afraid of making at least one. Where did I leave room for misapprehension, which perhaps prompted the attack on the courage I have never laid claim to and the charges of “wounded vanity,” was in my remarks on Arrowsmith’s many absences from UT. 5 Arrowsmith took this as meaning: “Arrowsmith kept silent by running about, Sullivan Replies