Rocky Road

The sky is big and the mountains soaring -- but a sad smallness of vision afflicts universities in the Rockies. To the west, in California, and to the east, in Minnesota, Illinois and Michigan, great state universities flourish; but in Montana, Idaho and Colorado, regents rave, professors quit, presidents vanish, and in consequence academic excellence seems forever elusive.

The University of Colorado's President Quigg Newton is resigning after six years of bitter fights with his regents. A new law in Idaho requiring loyalty oaths for all state employees, including professors, is spurring resentment and resignations. But the rocky problems of the Rockies have lately come to sharpest focus in Montana, where last week President Harry K. Newburn summoned his faculty at Montana State University and told them why he is quitting.

"Graveyard of Presidents." Montana's higher-education handicaps exemplify those of its neighbor states: low population and resources, absence of any deep tradition of the university as a trafficker in ideas rather than simply producer of engineers or lawyers. But the particular rub is the failure to recognize that the essence of organizing human ventures, whether colleges or corporations, is to get a good man to run the show, set general guidelines, give him authority and time, and then let him stand or fall. Newburn is the university's seventh leader in 20 years, and professors everywhere call Montana "the graveyard of presidents."

Montana is the nation's fourth biggest state in size, but it has so few people (five per square mile) that its population could slip into Dallas with room to spare. Yet it supports six campuses: Montana State University at Missoula, Montana State College at Bozeman, a school of mines at Butte, teachers' colleges at Dillon, Havre and Billings. Montana's whole budget for higher education is less than the budget at Princeton--which is not surprising in a state where per capita income ($1,963) has risen less than 11% in a decade.

Montana's board of regents, appointed and chaired by the Governor, runs all six campuses, but not through a single strong leader like California's Clark Kerr. Instead, each campus' president reports to the board, which, far from offering full confidence, unloads upon him political pressures from legislators, individual regents, local boosters, and what Montana calls "the company"--the Montana Power Co., which wants taxes kept down. The board's control can be detailed and trifling. In winning a $700-a-year raise for noted Critic and Author Leslie Fiedler, an English professor, Newburn had to battle Regent Gordon Doering, a dentist who does not like what Fiedler writes. Chambers of Commerce pressure the regents so hard for expansion of local colleges that no real concentration and quality can be had at any of them.

Newburn's main reason for quitting is his conviction that the regents are about to "dilute the state's resources" by expanding the colleges in Bozeman and Billings. A former president of the University of Oregon who later headed what is now the National Educational Television and Radio Center, Newburn believes that "Montana really ought to have just one comprehensive institution.

But the best we can do now is to avoid having any more. I knew this was a difficult place, but I thought I could work here without getting too frustrated. I found I couldn't."

Comparable frustrations led the president of the college at Havre to quit last December, and his successor feels shaky. And Montana State College's President R. R. Renne seems to be in even deeper trouble. In January, the regents gave him a year's leave of absence to serve as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. In April, Democrat Renne got a "return or resign" ultimatum from Governor Tim Babcock, a conservative Republican. Renne refused, but the regents are expected to fire him when he returns next year.

March Blowup. The resulting instability of the university and colleges creates constant turmoil. In March came a typical blowup when Morton Borden, associate professor of history, made a militant speech in Minnesota before the Farmers Union Central Exchange. Borden charged Governor Babcock with hostility to consumer cooperatives, adding: "Montana will remain a backwater of Birchism while the rest of the country progresses." Ordered to investigate, Newburn told the regents that Borden failed to "exercise appropriate restraint," but had a right to speak. The Governor advised Borden to leave Montana because "he scoffs at free enterprise and belittles the state that pays him. I might remind him that it is not the right-wingers who are being placed behind bars for subversive activities."

Borden got a year's leave of absence, and Newburn is off to become a professor at Arizona State University. But Montana is used to losing good people. Billings alone recently had nine boys at Harvard, and eight of them were on the dean's list. Once away, such exiles rarely return. One professor calls this "the single most damaging economic and psychological aspect of Montana."

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