Out Like a Janitor

In New Mexico, John Philip Wernette had two strikes .against him from the start : he was an Easterner and a Harvard professor. As soon as he took over the presidency of the University of New Mexico, it was obvious that he would not fit in. An aloof man with a Dewey mustache, a high recommendation from Harvard's President Conant, and a belief that all he was asked to do was to run a good university, he declined invitations to speak at Rotary clubs, could not bring himself to gladhand state politicos. He angered the faculty by polling the students to find out which professors they respected and which they considered dullards. Even when he joined a faculty barbershop quartet and tried to sing in harmony, New Mexicans decided that he just wasn't one of the boys.

In three years as president, Philip Wernette increased enrollments from 924 to 4,491 students, brought more top scholars to the pueblo-style campus than any president before him. He streamlined the administration ("Without a system, you're playing by ear"), opened a new law school and a new school of pharmacy, but to the university's politics-ridden Board of Regents he had also committed a multitude of political sins. He had once suspended three students in connection with a fraternity house fire. One of the students was the son of the state highway commissioner; the regents reinstated the students and accepted the resignation of the dean of men, who had denounced their action as "political expediency."

Then President Wernette began checking up on his faculty and their qualifications. He advertised for new faculty members, got hundreds of letters, signed on 13 Harvard Ph.Ds. When the Board of Regents tried to hand-pick a dean for the new law school, Wernette began investigating him, too. Nominee Victor E. Kleven was the son-in-law of wealthy Sheep Rancher Jose Ortiz y Pino, who controls a lot of Spanish votes. But Wernette found that Kleven had never received several of the university degrees he claimed, had resigned from the California bar in the face of disciplinary action, and had never been admitted to the New Mexico bar. Kleven resigned from the faculty, but Wernette got no thanks. Instead, the Board of Regents met secretly last June and decided that he must go. When Wernette heard about it, he told them: "You can't fire a college president as you might a janitor." They decided to hold off a while.

Last week, without notice, they fired Wernette. Protested editors of the student paper Lobo: "Wernette is an educator and a scholar and evidently could not play politics. . . . The university is , on the bottom of the national credit list now. ... If something isn't done about our so-called 'Board of Regents,' our diplomas will be scholastically worth about as much as Confederate money."

In Wernette's place, the regents appointed amiable University Comptroller Tom L. Pope joy. Most New Mexicans, they figured, would find Tom Popejoy more to their liking: he was a member of Rotary and one of the directors of the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce. Old grads also remembered the day when, as a star halfback on the university football team, he kicked the winning goal against the University of Arizona in 1924.

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