Word: austine
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...Austin, Texas...
...University of Texas regents were going through the motions of a public meeting last month, just one day after Chancellor Charles ("Mickey") LeMaistre had fired Stephen Spurr as president of the Austin campus. Student Body Vice President Bill Parrish rose to ask a question: Why was Spurr dismissed? For long seconds the regents stared down at their papers in total silence. "Isn't anybody going to respond?" asked the student...
Spurr's firing touched off a ruckus on Texas' Austin campus. Several days later, some 3,000 students attended a rally to protest the regents' action. The university faculty voted overwhelmingly for LeMaistre's resignation. Said History Professor Standish Meacham: "It was done in the best Texas bushwacker tradition. He was fired in the wrong way on a trumped-up charge." Lady Bird Johnson, the only regent who abstained from the 8-to-O vote upholding the ouster, said in a choked voice, "No great educational institution can sustain its greatness with the frequent and sudden...
...Regent Frank C. Erwin Jr., an ex-Democratic national committeeman and crony of Lyndon B. Johnson and former Governor John Connally. Erwin has really run the 16-campus university for more than a decade. Four years ago, for example, he personally fired Liberal Philosopher John Silber as dean of Austin's College of Arts and Sciences, telling him, "You scare the hell out of the incompetents above you." Silber went on to become president of Boston University, and more than a dozen other top scholars left Texas soon after he departed...
Ironically, Spurr, whom the regents hired away from his job as graduate dean at the University of Michigan in 1970, was not very popular at Austin. The faculty and students thought that he did not stand up to the regents enough, though he did win some respect with his largely unsuccessful efforts to raise faculty salaries-while the regents were spending $27 million for a new basketball arena, $11 million to enlarge the football stadium's seating capacity and $6.6 million for a swimming pool...