Alabama Quality

Despite their kinship as neighboring Deep South schools, the University of Alabama and the University of Mississippi are a study in contrasts, all favoring Alabama.

The Governor-appointed Ole Miss board of trustees was powerless to prevent the usurpation of its authority and functions by Ross Barnett, but in Alabama the constitution, as the result of a turn-of-the-century scandal over political meddling in the university, makes the trustees independent by providing that vacancies on the board are to be filled by vote of the board itself. Ole Miss is a way of making Mississippi kids into Mississippi adults; Alabama is more rigorously concerned with the pursuit of knowledge.

Stiffening entrance requirements have resulted in some 3,000 applicants' being turned down in the past four years. The number of doctoral fields has grown from 12 to 17. More than a tenth of the 10,000 students in the regular session at Alabama's main Tuscaloosa campus are in the graduate schools. Not that bookish sobriety rules the campus. Some 3,500 coeds provide the usual distracting feminine graces, and "squeal night," the traditional end of sorority rush week, is just that: "You can hear those girls shrieking all the way to the other side of Tuscaloosa." Faculty morale is high, and teacher turnover low, out of a sense of assured academic freedom.

Spineless leadership left Ole Miss students unprepared for an orderly transition to integration. As early as last November, the Alabama board of trustees went firmly on record: "This board will not condone, and will take such measures as it may deem necessary to prevent, violence, riot and disorder." Similar no-nonsense statements swiftly followed from the alumni organization, the university faculty and the student council.

"He's Lit a Shuck." Behind all this manifest preparation stands a determined and dynamic president, Frank Anthony Rose, 42, who recently reaffirmed his vow that "the university will maintain its dignity, its scholastic integrity, and our students and faculty will walk as honorable men and women."

In his 5 1/2year tenure as president, Rose has profoundly improved the intellectual climate of the University of Alabama, and he has infused Alabamans with his own passion for a school that aspires. Rose was born in Meridian, Miss., with little else but aspirations. As a boy he picked cotton in the fields at 500 a day. His father died when he was ten. He drove soft-drink trucks and plowed fields to earn the money to go to Kentucky's Transylvania College, where he majored in philosophy and went on to get a bachelor of divinity degree in 1946. For the next three years he taught philosophy and religion there, and preached at the same time as an ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ. Nine years after graduating he was president of Transylvania, at 30 the youngest U.S. college president.

When Rose came to Tuscaloosa in January 1958, the university was still reeling and demoralized from the Au-therine Lucy riots of 1956, Alabama's own sorry curtain raiser to the Ole Miss disgrace. The faculty was gutted, with 60 vacancies. Rose promptly recruited 126 promising young Ph.D.s. The engineering school had slipped badly. Rose hauled its standards back up. He has persistently pushed for higher professional salaries. A full professor now gets $9,548 as against $7,500 when Rose took over, pushing Alabama from 19th to fourth in the pay-scale rankings of 22 Southern state colleges and universities. A ten-year, $42 million capital-improvements plan is already two-thirds completed. At Huntsville, a research institute is being constructed to be tied in with the Marshall Space Flight Center at nearby Redstone Arsenal, and IBM and Lockheed have already signed up for space in a neighboring industrial park. As some Alabamans put it when they speak of Rose, "He's lit a shuck"-he has set a fire under the university as one might set fire to a shock of corn or wheat.

The Wise Foresee. More significantly, he's lit a shuck under the pride of ordinary Alabamans in their biggest state school. Rose has crisscrossed the state carrying the missionary message of his idea of a university, as a source of reason, enlightenment and civilized behavior. Borrowing a phrase from Alfred North Whitehead, he calls it "an habitual vision of greatness." Rose preaches the New South of industrial plants and untapped resources, in which poverty and the Southern inferiority complex stemming from that poverty will be banished. He visualizes the uni versity as the instrumentality of that brighter future, just as education has always been the classic U.S. instrumentality of progress.

Racial turmoil will scar and irreparably delay this timetable for progress. In his numerous contacts with busi ness and professional leaders, Frank Rose has quietly pressed his view that the university is not the place to defy the law of the land. He sometimes quotes a passage from John Stuart Mill that he read in his boyhood and has embraced in his own philosophy: "Great economic and social forces flow like a tide over half-conscious people. The wise are those who foresee the coming event and seek to shape their institutions and mold the thinking of the people in accordance with the most constructive change. The unwise are those who add nothing constructive to the process, either because of ignorance on the one hand or ignorant opposition on the other."

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