Education: First-Class Ticket

The authors of the Texas constitution wrote a Texas-tall order: they bade the state legislature to set up nothing less than "a university of the first class." The University of Texas (24,993 students) has yet to fill the order, but under Chancellor Logan Wilson it has come closer than at any time in its 77 years. Now Wilson, 53, is turning over the rest of the job to one of the liveliest experimenters in U.S. education, new Chancellor-elect Harry Huntt Ransom.

Texans have often seemed to agree with the lawmaker who cried in 1856 that "universities are the ovens to heat up and hatch all manner of vice, immorality and crime." As though to cool the oven, Texans planted the main campus only a few blocks from the state capitol in Austin. Politicians have seldom left the faculty alone. As recently as 1959, legislators introduced a bill requiring all state teachers to swear belief in a "Supreme Being." It was their notion that the university swarmed with "atheists," who must be Communists.

Up to Excellence. The bill failed, but it echoed the inglorious 1940s, when the university regents fired able President Homer Rainey, who had accused them of imperiously firing facultymen with a total disregard for academic freedom. The regents replaced Rebel Rainey with a tamer president, Zoologist Theophilus S. Painter, who devoted himself to fruit-fly research. They also dumped famed Author J. Frank Dobie, Texas' top folklorist, who refused to stop protesting the Rainey firing. By the time Texas-born Logan Wilson became president in 1953, the eyes of U.S. scholars were on Texas as a good place to avoid.

Wilson changed their minds—one reason for his forthcoming appointment as president of the prestigious American Council on Education. A professional administrator, he did a remarkable job of remodeling his big main campus (19,500 students) and its five smaller branches around the state. Wilson raised salaries to attract better teachers, made Texas the first state university in the country to require entrance tests for all students. He launched a $35 million building program, aimed at scientific prestige with a new computer center and an atom smasher. He even persuaded the regents to stop spending the income from the university's $360 million endowment (second only to Harvard's) on buildings alone. Two-thirds of it is now going into new schemes for academic "excellence."

Up to Chancellor. To achieve all this, Wilson coldly discouraged "controversy" among his teachers, got to be known as "The Great Stone Face." Under him the student paper was regularly censored because it came out against a natural gas bill that favored Texas gas producers by exempting them from FPC regulation. Nor did Wilson win points in the 1957 case of Coed Barbara Louise Smith, a soprano who was removed from the leading role in a music department production of Dido and Aeneas because some legislators objected to the fact that she is a Negro. (The university is desegregated, has about 250 Negroes.)

Yet Wilson also carefully groomed a daringly different successor, Vice President Harry Ransom, who became president last fall when Wilson moved up to chancellor. Says one admiring facultyman of Ransom, who now becomes chancellor: "He doesn't just walk out on a limb for you. He climbs out on a twig, and jumps up and down on the leaf."