Can the Faculty Save Ole Miss?

Had James Meredith lived in North Carolina, he might have entered an excellent state university by simply presenting his academic credentials. But Meredith wanted to be the first Negro to enter the University of Mississippi, in his home state, even if the schooling is not the best. The resulting riot and weeks of disquiet showed Ole Miss to be embarrassingly short of leadership. The chancellor proved to be a don't-rock-the-boat executive who did nothing to head off the riot, and then merely wrist-slapped offenders. The faculty has for years been equally meek. Now, in a dramatic reversal caused by Student Meredith's battle, the once apathetic faculty has snapped to and set about saving Ole Miss.

It has taken a lot of indignity to make the faculty turn. To hunt down possible integrationists, professors must sign yearly disclaimer affidavits, listing organizations to which they belong. Guest speakers are "screened," leading to such fatuous flaps as the barring of one scholar because he once entertained Negroes in his home. In 1959, a state legislator denounced 14 professors for teaching "apostasy and advocacy of integration." In one two-year period. 25% of the faculty quit.

Milk of the Crop. This pressure created a faculty that traditionally stayed out of trouble, heeding Chancellor John D. Williams' admonition to limit public discourse to "the area of your competence." Such restrictions were accepted because Ole Miss teachers are widely afflicted with what one of them calls the "associate professor syndrome"--they want only an undemanding job in which a man can almost retire. The syndrome attracts men willing to take low pay; salaries at Ole Miss average $6,863 a year, as compared with $7,934 at the not particularly munificent University of Alabama.

"Unless a man has a social conscience," says one professor who does, "there is nothing here to bother him." Hunting and fishing are splendid; three-bedroom faculty houses rent for $60 a month. Ole Miss has a few highly able students, as proved by the 19 Rhodes scholars that it has produced in 57 years. As for the others, says History Professor James W. Silver: "In a sophomore class of 30, before the end of the first month I'm talking to only five. If the rest don't bother me, I don't bother them." More social than academic, Ole Miss is in essence an avenue to status in the state. The students are less the cream of the crop in Mississippi than the milk: good students go elsewhere, scholarly James Meredith being an exception.

Just a B.A., Please. Chancellor Williams, who arrived 16 years ago from a little-known public campus in West Virginia, well knows that white Mississippi wants a school that returns its children after four years with no highfalutin unorthodox ideas--just a B.A., please. As a result. Williams has long "served" rather than led, is generally regarded by the faculty as "public-relations-conscious on a statewide basis."

Teachers began to move into this leadership vacuum on Oct. 1, the day after the Meredith riot, when some 40 of them volunteered statements to the FBI. They created a committee of nine, chaired by-Classicist William Willis, to prod the administration to action against rioters. From the 60-odd members of the Ole Miss chapter of the American Association of University Professors came a resolution denouncing Mississippi newspapers for distorted riot reports.

As students armed with firecrackers and cherry bombs continued to harass Meredith and the U.S. marshals who guard him. the teachers got bolder. Incensed at the constant uproar, sick at heart of students yelling "nigger bastard," faculty wives started a telephone chain, got 68 husbands to patrol the campus at night to cool hotheads. The chemistry department threatened to quit in a body. Teachers were tempted to give rugged daily tests to pacify rebels, and to flunk prime offenders, but both ideas were rejected on the ground that moral, not academic, pressure is the right approach. Now the faculty committee of nine meets daily to read student fever, assigns night patrols accordingly, and encourages classroom lectures on law and order.

In moving at last to action, the faculty has a powerful weapon: statewide fear that Ole Miss may yet lose accreditation when the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools meets at the end of this month. "If one teacher is fired for his views now," says History Professor Silver, "it will be curtains for the university." The faculty is thus free at last to make Ole Miss hew to law and learning. By all evidence, most professors are now solidly behind one colleague's summation: "The powers of darkness abound. It's up to us to work for the powers of light."

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