ustxtxb_obs_1977_06_03_50_00011-00000_000.pdf

ce , UT-Austin president Lorene Rogers and Gov. Dolph Briscoe After Gov. Dolph Briscoe went bonkers over Jimmy Carter’s energy proposals, the University of Texas sprang forward with a quickie report that lends academic credence to the governor’s ill-humored criticism. Titled “Preliminary assessment of the president’s national energy plan,” the 412-page document is a collection of twenty papers written by UT professors and researchers. It went to press soon after Briscoe told the world he was going to assemble himself a by-God brain trust from the state universities to poke into the Carter scheme. The governor’s dander had hardly settled when UT-Austin president Lorene Rogers was in his office with word that her energy experts stood ready to take the case. She told Briscoe, Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby, Speaker Bill Clayton, and railroad commissioner Mack Wallace that UT would launch a crash effort and have something at the printer’s in just three weeks. True enough: the report was birthed last month, on Friday the 13th. It is a carefully packaged piece of work, with an up-front disclaimer that the report should not be construed as a UT position paper, but merely the work of its individual contributors. Nonetheless, the UT seal is on the cover, UT’s vice president for research wrote the preface, and president Rogers’ office picked up the printing bill. Like Briscoe, the report’s authors find little to praise in Carter’s energy plan. The collective view is nearly identical to Briscoe’s and that of the oil companies, i.e., the Carter plan doesn’t offer enough profit for oil and gas producers, refiners and marketers. A front-page, banner-headlined article in the May 15 Austin AmericanStatesman celebrated the report as the work of “UT experts on energy.” The experts have extra-university ties that went unmentioned both in the report and in the American-Statesman. Dr. George Kozmetsky, dean of UT’s graduate school of business and coauthor of three of the twenty articles, is on the board of directors of Gulf Oil Co. Dr. Herbert Woodson, director of UT’s Center for Energy Studies and one of the coordinators of the report, has been a consultant to electric utility companies. \(CES is the recipient of a number of grants from the likes of Exxon, Central Power & Light, Southern Union Gas, and General Electricsee Obs., Jan. the board of directors of Texaco. One of the pieces in the report was an assessment of the divestiture debate: should major oil companies be required to sell their holdings in other energy fields which concluded that there was no evidence of uncompetitive behavior in the energy industry, was partially funded by the American Petroleum Institute, the trade association of the major oil firms. Brown make demagogic statements about you. Ken Herman, the 22-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter from the Lufkin News who is now with the Associated Press in Dallas, says that “in a small town you hear horror stories every day, but there was something about this one that struck us as authentic.” The “authentic” story was the one Herman and his editor, Joe Murray, were told one day last year about a Lufkin youth who died at a Marine Corps boot camp in California. Their subsequent investigation of Lynn McClure’s brutal treatment and death led to presidential and congressional inquiries. Later the Pulitzer board asked Murray and Herman to submit their McClure series for competition. “We were happy just to have submitted an entry,” said Herman. “I was convinced that was the highlight of my career.” The real highlight, though, came this spring when the Lufkin News won the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for public service. The best Herman and Murray could do in Texas was place second in. the AP Managing Editors Contest for community service reporting. First place went to the Marshall News-Messenger for its coverage of a local school bond issue. Joe Murray didn’t think much of driving to the Dallas ceremony only to finish second. “He ripped up the award in a fit of jealous rage,” said Herman. “Then he rolled it into a ball and tossed it at his hotel room wall at great velocity.” Even more surprising, said Herman, was that the feature-writing award should have gone to Hugh Aynesworth of The Dallas Times Herald for a story on the Lufkin marine’s death. “It was an excellent one-shot piece,” said Herman. “But he [Aynesworth] sat at my desk and used my notes to put it together.” Co-op bank Legislation that’ would set up a consumer cooperative bank modeled on the generally successful Farmers Cooperative Bank established by the New Deal has been reported out of the banking committee of the U.S. House. The bill would help consumers form their own food marketing outlets and other cooperative business ventures by making available government-insured longterm, low-interest loans. The legislation, with backing from the Consumer Federation of America, the National Farmers Union, and the AFLCIO, seemed a sure bet for passage until the Treasury Department suddenly decided to oppose major provisions of the