Word: spurr
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Professor Rogers, a widow, had been interim president ever since the regents last fall abruptly fired Stephen Spurr, a former graduate dean at the University of Michigan (TIME, Oct. 28). But few on the 42,000-student Austin campus thought she would take over the job permanently. In fact, when the regents started searching for a new president, they agreed to work with a twelve-member student-faculty search committee. The committee screened 300 candidates and finally came up with five finalists; it specifically rejected Professor Rogers on four separate votes. Nevertheless, soon after the start of classes this fall...
Last week LeMaistre was under pressure from Governor Dolph Brisco to justify Spurr's firing-the latest in a series of power plays at a highly political university. LeMaistre had, in fact, already told Spurr why he was dismissed. But the information was delivered during a private meeting and never put in writing. With good reason. The real charges according to Spurr: he had cut back on the lavish cocktail parties the university threw for wealthy contributors before football games; he had not cracked down on the student paper, The Daily Texan, which treats the regents with a notable...
...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...
...Perilous Job. True enough-but the Spurr affair was an eloquent reminder of recurring campus politics at Texas, the second richest (after Harvard) and fifth largest university (73,000 students) in the nation. The firing typified the style of the man who forced Chancellor Le-Maistre to do it: 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...
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...