First-Class Ticket

The authors of the Texas constitution wrote a Texas-tall order: they bade the state legislature to set up nothing less than "a university of the first class." The University of Texas (24,993 students) has yet to fill the order, but under Chancellor Logan Wilson it has come closer than at any time in its 77 years. Now Wilson, 53, is turning over the rest of the job to one of the liveliest experimenters in U.S. education, new Chancellor-elect Harry Huntt Ransom.

Texans have often seemed to agree with the lawmaker who cried in 1856 that "universities are the ovens to heat up and hatch all manner of vice, immorality and crime." As though to cool the oven, Texans planted the main campus only a few blocks from the state capitol in Austin. Politicians have seldom left the faculty alone. As recently as 1959, legislators introduced a bill requiring all state teachers to swear belief in a "Supreme Being." It was their notion that the university swarmed with "atheists," who must be Communists.

Up to Excellence. The bill failed, but it echoed the inglorious 1940s, when the university regents fired able President Homer Rainey, who had accused them of imperiously firing facultymen with a total disregard for academic freedom. The regents replaced Rebel Rainey with a tamer president, Zoologist Theophilus S. Painter, who devoted himself to fruit-fly research. They also dumped famed Author J. Frank Dobie, Texas' top folklorist, who refused to stop protesting the Rainey firing. By the time Texas-born Logan Wilson became president in 1953, the eyes of U.S. scholars were on Texas as a good place to avoid.

Wilson changed their minds--one reason for his forthcoming appointment as president of the prestigious American Council on Education. A professional administrator, he did a remarkable job of remodeling his big main campus (19,500 students) and its five smaller branches around the state. Wilson raised salaries to attract better teachers, made Texas the first state university in the country to require entrance tests for all students. He launched a $35 million building program, aimed at scientific prestige with a new computer center and an atom smasher. He even persuaded the regents to stop spending the income from the university's $360 million endowment (second only to Harvard's) on buildings alone. Two-thirds of it is now going into new schemes for academic "excellence."

Up to Chancellor. To achieve all this, Wilson coldly discouraged "controversy" among his teachers, got to be known as "The Great Stone Face." Under him the student paper was regularly censored because it came out against a natural gas bill that favored Texas gas producers by exempting them from FPC regulation. Nor did Wilson win points in the 1957 case of Coed Barbara Louise Smith, a soprano who was removed from the leading role in a music department production of Dido and Aeneas because some legislators objected to the fact that she is a Negro. (The university is desegregated, has about 250 Negroes.)

Yet Wilson also carefully groomed a daringly different successor, Vice President Harry Ransom, who became president last fall when Wilson moved up to chancellor. Says one admiring facultyman of Ransom, who now becomes chancellor: "He doesn't just walk out on a limb for you. He climbs out on a twig, and jumps up and down on the leaf."

A genuine Texas intellectual with "a benign poker face," Galveston-born Chancellor Ransom, 52, was educated at Tennessee's University of the South and at Yale, began teaching English at Texas in 1935, turned to administration in 1951. Among other achievements, Bibliophile Ransom has made the university one of the country's richest repositories of rare manuscripts. Since 1957 Texas has picked up more than 100 private libraries and collections, including original manuscripts by famed modern authors, from James Joyce to Ernest Hemingway, from e. e. cummings to A. A. Milne.

"Damned Good Students." Ransom nursed the university press, started a lecture series that lures such literary lights as W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot. He also started the Texas Quarterly, which appears next month with an all-English issue featuring such authors as Henry Green and Angus Wilson, a cover by Punch Cartoonist Rowland Emmett. (An all-Texas issue is in the works.)

To stimulate all students, Ransom thought up the university's now-abuilding $4,000,000 "academic center," containing an open-shelf library of 250,000 books. To spur gifted students, he organized the Junior Fellows, made up of each year's 25 top arts and sciences freshmen, who get freedom to sweep through the university at their own pace. Such Ransom-bred vitality has already attracted a rising generation of bright young teachers who like what they find at Texas. "The good students here are damned good students," says French Professor Roger Shattuck, a former Harvard Junior Fellow.

"Dancing on Dreams." Ransom pumps hard for travel grants and time off for research. One of his first presidential acts was getting raises for about half the faculty; full professors now earn as much as $20,000 a year. And in marked contrast to the Wilson regime, facultymen now feel free to speak out on such Texas-ticklish subjects as integration. When students recently began stand-ins at Austin's segregated movie houses, 192 faculty members openly endorsed the movement with signed statements in the student newspaper.

Where is Texas going? Some old hands grumble that Ransom's fondness for "dancing on dreams" may plunge the university right back in hot water with the legislature. After all, Texans may yearn for a "university of the first class," but some outspoken professors make them nervous. Ransom is not worried. He says: "We need only one thing--wide confirmation of the growing opinion that we must be first class."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.