Universities: Alabama Quality

Despite their kinship as neighboring Deep South schools, the University of Alabama and the University of Mississippi are a study in contrasts, all favoring Alabama.

The Governor-appointed Ole Miss board of trustees was powerless to prevent the usurpation of its authority and functions by Ross Barnett, but in Alabama the constitution, as the result of a turn-of-the-century scandal over political meddling in the university, makes the trustees independent by providing that vacancies on the board are to be filled by vote of the board itself. Ole Miss is a way of making Mississippi kids into Mississippi adults; Alabama is more rigorously concerned with the pursuit of knowledge.

Stiffening entrance requirements have resulted in some 3,000 applicants' being turned down in the past four years. The number of doctoral fields has grown from 12 to 17. More than a tenth of the 10,000 students in the regular session at Alabama's main Tuscaloosa campus are in the graduate schools. Not that bookish sobriety rules the campus. Some 3,500 coeds provide the usual distracting feminine graces, and "squeal night," the traditional end of sorority rush week, is just that: "You can hear those girls shrieking all the way to the other side of Tuscaloosa." Faculty morale is high, and teacher turnover low, out of a sense of assured academic freedom.

Spineless leadership left Ole Miss students unprepared for an orderly transition to integration. As early as last November, the Alabama board of trustees went firmly on record: "This board will not condone, and will take such measures as it may deem necessary to prevent, violence, riot and disorder." Similar no-nonsense statements swiftly followed from the alumni organization, the university faculty and the student council.

"He's Lit a Shuck." Behind all this manifest preparation stands a determined and dynamic president, Frank Anthony Rose, 42, who recently reaffirmed his vow that "the university will maintain its dignity, its scholastic integrity, and our students and faculty will walk as honorable men and women."

In his 5½year tenure as president, Rose has profoundly improved the intellectual climate of the University of Alabama, and he has infused Alabamans with his own passion for a school that aspires. Rose was born in Meridian, Miss., with little else but aspirations. As a boy he picked cotton in the fields at 500 a day. His father died when he was ten. He drove soft-drink trucks and plowed fields to earn the money to go to Kentucky's Transylvania College, where he majored in philosophy and went on to get a bachelor of divinity degree in 1946. For the next three years he taught philosophy and religion there, and preached at the same time as an ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ. Nine years after graduating he was president of Transylvania, at 30 the youngest U.S. college president.