ustxtxb_obs_1977_08_12_50_00004-00000_000.pdf

George Kozmetsky and Kozmetsky remains on the board of directors. He is also on the boards of Gulf Oil and Datapoint, and until this spring he was a board member of El He worked hard, leading Business Week to exclaim in 1964, “With [Kozmetsky], growth is a religion and [his] desire to boss a very large company is almost fanatical.” In 1966, he came to Austin to boss the graduate school of business. Dr. Timothy Ruefli joined Kozmetsky’s faculty in 1968 as an assistant professor; now he’s the associate director of the ICC. Like Kozmetskywho’s served as a consultant to NASA, the U.S. Air Force scientific advisory board, and the presidential advisory committee on the National Data CenterRuefli has done his bit for what used to be called the military-industrial complex. He has been a consultant for the RAND Corp., NASA, and McDonnell-Douglas Co. Ruefli has held a top-secret security clearance since 1967 and helps evaluate the classified research at UT-Austin’s Applied Research Laboratory. \(According to Ruefli, UT-Austin has a number of Navy contracts, in acoustics and secrethe wouldn’t let slip a hint of who ICC’s new advisory board members would be, and when asked how Kozmetsky could be reached, he said, “You can’t reach him at all. There’s no way.” Where was the director? “He’s unavailable.” \(Kozmetsky’s secretary told the Observer that he was attending a month charming and good-humored: he offered to “say something really reactionary” to give the Observer a good opening lead, and joshed, “I hope you won’t say anything too good about us. That would kill us at the box office.” Giving at the office Ruefli’s box office, apparently, consists entirely of big business poobahs of a variety of stripes. A number of contributors to the fledgling ICC are corporations or individuals in the oil business. C. C. Pete Sublett, an independent oilman, gave the institute $25,000. H. B. “Hank” Harkins, president of Harkins and Co., an independent oil-drilling contractor and producer in Alice, kicked in $45,000 Harkins Professorship in Constructive Capitalism. \(Ruefli, as associate director of the ICC, is the newly endowed Hardonated a measly $3,000, while William Kennedy, executive vice president of C and K Petroleum, gave $10,000. All kinds of well-heeled-types and corporate foundations have so far made tax-exempt contributions totaling $1.7 million. For example, the Brown Foun$100,000; the Abell-Hanger Foundation, $50,000; the Sid Richardson Foundation, $500,000. “Miscellaneous” endowments come to $328,000; Zapata Corp. gave $20,000; Harte-Hanks Newspapers, $10,000; Tenneco, $10,000. A few of the biggest Texas corporations nickeled and dimed it: Southland Paper Foundation, the state’s 77th-largest corporation, gave only $1,000; Great Southern Life Insurancf Co., the 6th largest in Texas, came up with a mere $4,000. But the institute has not yet begun to fundraise. All the money collected so far, says Ruefli, has been unsolicited largesse from “the private sector.” A number of the early individual donors are members of the College of Business Administration Foundation advisory council \(the CBA Foundation is not part of. the ICC; it has been around for years and is yet another conduit for business rolled Ruefli’s endowed prOfessorship, is a new foundation board member. William Kennedy and Pete Sublett are already on the board. Others of long standing are Jere Thompson, president of Southland Corp.; Ben Love of Texas Commerce Bancshares; Karl Butz of Mercantile National Bank; Rex Sebastian of Dresser Industries; Bill Kaplan of Foley’s; Jimmy Farah of Farah Mfg. Co.; Fred Moore, former executive vice president of international Mobil and former president of American Mobil; and Jim Bayless of Rauscher Pierce Securi ties. Bayless has volunteered to head up ICC’s real fundraising effort, which will take off this fall. Ruefli explained that the institute won’t bother with small change. “All we need,” he said, “is about forty grants of $500,000 each. So we’re going after the big money. It’s more efficient. We’ll probably write letters to the presidents of Fortune’s 500 and ask them for a million each.” He has no doubt the money will roll in; embattled capitalists are generous. Ruefli insists that even though the biggest of big businesses will fund the ICC, they will affect not at all the policies and products of the institute., “Kozmetsky won’t prostitute himself,” Ruefli says of his unreachable boss. “He doesn’t have to.” Ruefli is quick to point out that the contributions the institute seeks must be completely unrestricted endowments. ICC’s vision will be determined by an executive committee of five faculty members from the UT-Austin business school, besides Ruefli and Kozmetsky. But the moneymen won’t be left out in the cold. A board composed of “five distinguished businessmen representatives from the private sector,” at least two of whom must be from the CBA Foundation advisory council, will provide Kozmetsky with “advice and counsel.” Ruefli has made nominations for the advisory board, but Kozmetsky has not yet forwarded the names to UT-Austin president Lorene Rogers. It’s a good bet that the ICC defines a “distinguished” businessman as a captain of industry, and not merely some ablebodied deckhand on the ship of free enterprise. ‘No free lunches’ It’s difficult to figure out exactly what the ICC intends to do. The institute has four programsdynamic small business and entrepreneurship; cultural, ethical and institutional studies; policy issues and analysis; and private enterprise education. Some of the thumbnail descriptions of proposed programs sound reasonablethe dynamic small business division plans to “provide advisory and information services to small establishments and entrepreneurs”but most are hopelessly vague. The cultural, ethical division says that, under its auspices, “An ethical basis of capitalism will be outlined and the leadership role of capitalist institutions will be investigated.” The policy issues and analysis division will “formulate managerial initiatives for policy determination and implementation.” Those mired in this mumbo-jumbo may turn for an explanation to some of the distinguished businessmen from the private sector who are involved in getting the ICC launched. When the Observer asked Jim Bayless for his idea of what the ICC would do, he responded tersely, “My views are 4 THE TEXAS OBSERVER NOW,/