A New Dean at Ole Miss

In 1963, Dean Robert Farley was eased out of the University of Mississippi law school for insisting that James Meredith had a legal right to attend Ole Miss. As Farley's successor, the trustees appointed a safer man: Joshua M. Morse III, an Ole Miss alumnus and law professor who has opposed Farley's subversive ideas. But Dean Morse, now 46, soon showed signs of heresy himself. He strayed North for a year of graduate study at Yale law school, returned with a sense of social mission that dramatically changed Ole Miss--and has now doomed him to Farley's fate.

Morse, whose father was once Senator Theodore Bilbo's law partner, began by recruiting several bright young Yale-trained lawyers for his faculty. To combat Ole Miss's "provincial outlook," he got the Ford Foundation to put up $500,000 for hiring more Yale teachers, plus 30 visiting lecturers from Harvard, Columbia and N.Y.U. The Morse mood attracted speakers like Charles Evers and Robert F. Kennedy, whose jibes at Governor Ross Barnett were cheered by 4,500 rebel students, among them sons of Mississippi's leading segregationists. At one point, the Ole Miss law school enrolled 15 black students--more than any other non-Negro law school in the U.S. Not only that: some faculty members became active in a legal-services program, sponsored by the Office of Economic Opportunity, which took on a school-desegregation suit in one Mississippi county and challenged the residency requirements of the state's welfare laws.

The reaction was swift. Angry legislators complained about "socialistic, if not Communistic doctrines at the law school." The state board of higher education pressured Ole Miss Chancellor Porter L. Fortune, who then ordered all law teachers to choose between the school or the OEO. Last year two professors quit--and now Morse too has given in. Last week he moved to Tallahassee to become dean of Florida State University's law school. When asked about his decision to depart, Morse was brief and bitter: "I got a better offer."

Toward the end of Morse's tenure, virtually any offer might have looked attractive. While most other law faculty members recently received salary increases, he was pointedly denied one. When the state bar association held its annual gathering in 1968, he was not invited to speak--though the Ole Miss law school dean is traditionally a major figure on the program. The trustees began screening his faculty appoint ments, vetoing some of the men he felt would be most valuable. Morse did little for his cause with his abrasive, arrogant approach toward the old guard. He called one influential legislator a "rednecked lawyer."

Morse's successor is Joel W. Bunkley Jr., 52, a law faculty member for 23 years, who says, "I am proudest of all of one thing: that I am a Mississippian." Bunkley was appointed by Chancellor Fortune, who had repeatedly assured the 18 faculty members that he would not appoint a dean unacceptable to them. When the faculty was formally polled on eight candidates before the choice was made, the vote was more than 2 to 1 against Bunkley.

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