ustxtxb_obs_1984_03_23_50_00004-00000_000.pdf

Duncan took it up with the administration. He argued that, at the very least, the school could not prejudge the student and could not remove him without a conviction. The school relented; the student stayed on and graduated. In the late 1960s, Duncan defended the right of students to publish an underground newspaper. The local ACLU chapter, of which Duncan was by then a member, succeeded in having the Tech ban on the newspaper thrown out. When in 1968 Duncan tried to get his Lubbock Democratic precinct caucus to adopt resolutions on U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and legalized abortion and was thwarted, he introduced a third resolution, reading: “Be it resolved that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Then-state Representative .Delwyn Jones tried to table the resolution, but, upon being informed that it was the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, he allowed it to be presented in the county convention as long as not a single word varied from the original. All this did not earn John Duncan tenure at Texas Tech or great popularity. But it did lead to his work with TCLU for a tenure whose length strains the imagination, given the unpopularity of the civil libertarian cause, when confronting former governor Bill Clements or the War on Drugs or the death penalty. According to Charles Sullivan of Citizens United for the done more than any other person in this state to prevent a wanton rash of killing made possible by. the reinstitution of capital punishment. With the make-up of the current Supreme Court, Sullivan said, the judicial avenues to prevent capital punishment are probably at this time exhausted. “Opposition has to come through the legislature and has to be organized at a grassroots level,” he said. “John probably felt there was nothing more the TCLU could do at this point.” The legacy of John Duncan’s tenure at the TCLU is best characterized by what we were spared. It is a legacy of bad laws not passed, of nicks and slashes at our civil liberties not being attempted, of a reluctance by officials to carry out certain death penalties, of more room to breathe, to think, to speak our minds than there might otherwise have been. Two Illustrations That America Is What We Make It THREE DEATHS near the end of last year provide a poignant reminder of what this country can be and what it has become. With major revisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act scheduled for Congressional consideration this year, the failure by all parties to discuss the “ideological exclusion” clause of the act bodes ill for the future of our culture. Juan Roura-Parella was a teacher to all who knew him. Roura was a native of Catalonia in Spain and studied psychology with the Frankfurt School in the late 1920s and early ’30s. He was a professor and thinker of high standing in Barcelona when Franco’s Falangists revolted against the Spanish Republic. An ardent Catalan and a more ardent Republican, Roura remained in Barcelona until it became clear that Franco’s victory was inevitable. Then, in the last days of the civil war, he crossed the Pyrenees into France, following routes he had known as a child growing up in the town of Tortella north of Barcelona. Crossing with RoUra and several others was the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, who died in the French border town of Collioure a few days after the crossing. From France, Roura went to Mexico, following his future wife Teresa, the daughter of a Catalan leader. In 1946, the Rouras moved to the United States, and Sr. Roura eventually took up residence as a professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. If humanism can be absolute, Sr. Roura was an absolute humanist, imparting his love for thought and humanity to two generations of students. In the introduction to a novel, he wrote, “All knowledge which does not lead to some kind of action is useless. The main concern of an educator is not knowledge but to make out of a man something which he was not before. . . . Pascal is right: the kingdom of values is not an order of the reason but an ordre de coeur [of the heart].” The greatest praise Sr. Roura could bestow on any person was that he or she was a liberal man or woman liberal in the largest sense of the word: open to ideas and to humanity, liberated and humane. In the 1970s, the Rouras began making trips back to their native Catalonia. Sr. Roura delivered a paper at the opening in Barcelona of the museum dedicated to his friend Joan Miro. They stayed for several months each year in his ancestral home in Tortella. He escorted visitors I was fortunate to be one of them down the three main streets of the town, two paved and one unpaved because the former Republican mayor had resided there. There was a lesson in everything. But the Rouras always returned to Connecticut, where Sr. Roura died on December 26, one day after his friend Miro. One month earlier, the crash of a jumbo jet in Madrid had claimed the lives of Angel Rama and Marta Traba. Rama had edited the Uruguayan journal Marcha, which was a cornerstone for the Latin American literary and intellectual boom. As the editor he had written extensively about the cultural and political intervention of the United States in the affairs of Latin America. In 1968, with a Uruguayan crackdown on a number of artists, intellectuals, and labor leaders, Rama went into exile. In Venezuela he became the literary director of the Biblioteca Ayacucho series of Latin American literary classics. Traba was an Argentine exile, who founded the first Museum of Modern Art in Colombia and wrote art criticism and fiction. Rama and Traba moved to the United States in 1980, when Rama was named a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. They both taught at Princeton later that year. In 1981, Rama becama a full-time tenured professor at the University of Maryland and Traba was employed by the art museum of the Organization of American States. In 1982, Angel Rama’s application for permanent residence was denied by the U.S. immigration service under the the Immigration and Nationality Act. This clause permits the exclusion of the foreign-born who have advocated, taught, written, or published information considered to be communist, anarchist, or terrorist in nature or who have belonged to political parties of this nature. The catch here is that the I.N.S. 4 MARCH 23, 1984