ustxtxb_obs_1971_10_08_50_00012-00000_000.pdf

A review I I present, also. The regents fired him; but UT was blacklisted by the AAUP as it had to be, and a period of the gradual recovery of integrity began about 1950. This period continued until 1963, when the new group of conspiring politicians moved in. Although there are many differences between then and now, the analogy between the Rainey period and the present one at UT is close. Rainey’s book, appearing 27 years after his firing, contains only a little that was not known at the time, but this little includes a fascinating episode. Rainey writes that during the first meeting of the regents after O’Daniel’s new appointments to the board, one of “Poppy’s” new men, D. F. Strickland, \(a lobbyist for theater from him. Rainey continues: “He took from his pocket a small card and passed it across the table to me. It contained the names of four full professors “Ilik. —,_ ‘ 1111.:,,..’ -Hatt ikt:re3/42A, … \(tat tea. DALLAS Now use any one of these fine credit cards joiantOnS IfiSium FREE RESERVATIONS hos1 -* 800-323-2330 motor lodge NORTH CENTRAL EXPRESSWAY JoTani 112 rooms, lobby, swimming pool, patio all styled with the spirit of the old Southwest of a don’s hacienda … truly distinctive! Yet, all the finest appointments and services for you, your family, your group, your convention. Fine meeting rooms, dining, entertainment lounge … on U.S. 75 North, Exit 18. OR U.S. 75, NORTH The Rainey affair revisited OR JUST VISIT OR CALL YOUR NEAREST./ HOWARD JOHNSON’S MOTOR LODGE. Washington, D.C. Homer P. Rainey, who was president of the University of Texas from 1939 until he was fired by fascist-minded regents in 1944, has written a book about this. Older Texans who lived and fought through those events will want to get it, but so will many people who are now slogging through the Erwin-Peace period at that same institution. Rainey’s The Tower and the Dome \(Pruett Publishing Co., Boulder, sincerely. The salient facts and issues are laid out. Dr. Rainey, now retired after a long and useful career as an educator, was brought to UT in 1939 by regents whose chairman was then J. R. Parten, the enlightened Houston oilman. A group of Texas Republicans and Neanderthals entered into a conspiracy with Gov. W. Lee O’Daniel to wipe out liberalism at UT. O’Daniel deliberately appointed malicious right-wing regents, and th6y systematically persecuted liberals on the faculty and Rainey. Finally Rainey took deep counsel with his conscience and read 16 charges against the regents to the faculty, with the press 12 The Texas Observer of economics, no one of whom had been on the University of Texas faculty less than 15 years. He said, ‘We want you to fire these men.’ I replied that I was amazed, and asked him why he wanted these men fired. His reply was that ‘we don’t like what they are teaching.’ ” Rainey was able to convince the regents that if they proceeded in that way, UT would be blacklisted. They then turned to their other tactics, which Rainey fully recounts. Rainey also tells, in his characteristically heavy prose, about his decision of conscience to, in effect, indict the regents publicly for what they had been doing behind the closed doors of the university. One sees shining through his account of this bold decision the integrity of a high-minded educator. “I believe[d] ,” he writes, “that the regents were so grossly violating the principles and ideals of a great university that they should be faced with their deficiencies and should be held responsible for their mismanagement of the people’s greatest public institution. It would have been easy to wash my hands of it, to walk off and leave the chaos to those who created it. However, I felt that such action would betray all men who had gone before me, men who had worked and fought to establish the principles and ideals of the university. I felt that it was my responsibility to fight to preserve these ideals. I believe[d] also that I owed some responsibility to those who would come after me to help create a situation in which university education could function at its best. I concluded that I owed an obligation to the whole educational profession, and to society itself, to help maintain one of the fundamental freedoms so necessary to a free society. “I assure my readers that this was no easy decision. In fact, I wrestled with it for an extended time. I reasoned with myself that in the long run it didn’t matter whether I was president of the university, but that the important thing was the manner in which the university was operated. In this way, I was able to set aside all personal considerations. . .” Homer P. Rainey was exactly the kind of man you can neither buy nor scare, in exactly the right place when he was badly needed there. He did his duty, and because he did the University of Texas spent a period in purgatory and came through clean. His book tells his story adequately and truthfully. It could be a much better book; it is tiresome in method and murky at some points. But Dr. Rainey did not work all his life to become a writer, he worked all his life to help educate people. He was true to that work, and his book could not have come out at a better time. R.D.