Texas History Offers Warnings amid Rash of Faculty Firings Lessons to learn from the politically motivated firing of a UT president in the 1940s
...And yet, if you want to look back to the Texas past in order to understand the increasingly authoritarian grip that the Republican establishment has on this state, and the increasingly destructive ends to which it is using its power, no figure from our past is better suited than Rainey.
Ordained as a Baptist minister at age 19 and a standout athlete at Austin College, Homer Price Rainey achieved national fame and enduring historical importance by being fired as president of the University of Texas in 1944. University regents had fired four economics professors from UT for speaking in favor of federal labor laws at public hearings in Dallas, and then moved on to ban John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. novels from the curriculum and dismissed the English professor who had assigned them.
Rainey furiously denounced these measures to the UT faculty and was himself promptly dismissed. Students went on strike, and 8,000 of them marched in a mock funeral procession carrying a coffin with a banner that read “academic freedom” from campus to the Capitol and the governor’s mansion. Governor Coke Stevenson appointed new regents though they refused to hire Rainey back. Meanwhile, conservative critics of the university continued to circulate their charges that it harbored communists, was a “nest of homosexuals,” and had plans to admit Black students. It took UT more than a decade to regain its standing and the ability to hire faculty at the top of their field.
I have been unable to get Rainey out of my head since learning this month of the firing of Tom Alter from Texas State University. Alter is a fellow Texas historian who I know slightly as a person and very well as a scholar. I served as one of the outside reviewers for his tenure file because of our shared expertise in Texas history. Tenure is a system by which faculty whose teaching, research, and service to the university and academic communities are positively assessed after a rigorous process are granted ongoing employment contracts to continue their work. They can be fired only for cause, under the theory—adopted by universities across the world in the 20th Century—that this ensures the continuation of quality teaching and research even if they reach conclusions that anger powerful interests. (Think the theory of evolution, modern art, climate change.) Tenure is a protection afforded to some academics after years of study and work but in the interests of the public good and of academic freedom.
Alter was fired—apparently outside of Texas State University’s procedures....
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