The Case of Professor Pancho

J. Frank Dobie is a maverick and a Texan. He can quote Wordsworth or Shelley at length--but he is also a he-man who once ran a 250,000-acre ranch. At the University of Texas, where he has taught for 28 years, Dobie likes to be called Professor Pancho. His lecture preambles--"Now, I'll tell you a little story of Liver-Eating Johnson . . ."--have delighted thousands of students. He refused to move into the new skyscraperish university tower. "It looks like a toothpick in a pie," he said, and opened an office in the oldest building on the campus.

There, surrounded by steer horns and bottles that once held "Judge" Roy Bean's beer, he wrote books of folklore that made him the Southwest's most raucously successful cultural historian ("The lies I tell are authentic"). On his door hung a sign: "Office Hours: Irregular."

Professor Pancho had other irregularities that Texas University's Board of Regents liked less. As friend and supporter of ex-President Homer Price Rainey, another maverick, he long ago earned the regents' enmity. Rainey refused to be bossed by the regents, would not remove John Dos Passos' U.S.A. from the library shelves, would not dismiss teachers whom the regents considered leftist. When Rainey was fired, three years ago, Frank Dobie told a Kiwanis meeting that "no self-respecting, able member of the present faculty would serve as president. But the regents will have no trouble finding a bootlicker or a quisling...." A few days later, the regents named Theophilus Shickel Painter, a mild-mannered zoology professor, as president. Governor Coke Stevenson told the regents that, if he were one of them, he would fire Dobie "without batting an eye."

Tranquil with an If. President Painter didn't fire Dobie, but he did bat an eye. After his first year in office, he reported that everything was now tranquil on the campus, and that he would not tolerate "any further attempts on the part of individuals within our staff ... to besmirch the good reputation of the university." Dobie decided that that meant him. In the weekly Texas Spectator, he called Painter "a flunky of the Laval pattern."

Painter and the regents decided that Dobie must go. The problem was how to get rid of him, for he was the biggest name on the Texas campus. Finally, a way was found. For years, Dobie had taken leave without pay during the fall term to write, and to avoid the hay-fever season. This year, when he applied for leave as usual, Painter refused it, said he must stay on the job. No, said Dobie: hay fever "devastated" him. President Painter thereupon issued a statement: "By this action, Dobie's connection with the university has terminated. . . ."

Maverick in a Trap. Last week, 250 students organized a torchlight parade, marched to Professor Pancho's house to say goodbye. The university's respected Historian Walter Prescott Webb called upon Painter to rehire Dobie. "The truth of the matter," said he, "is that Mr. Dobie has walked with stubborn unconcern into a trap."

J. Frank Dobie kept unusually quiet, for him. He did say one thing: that he was writing a book about coyotes, and might have to include a discussion of the human branch of the species.

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