Every day that classes are held at the University of Texas at Austin, a procession of students enter Homer Rainey Hall, which houses the Department of French and Italian. How many of them know who Rainey was? He is certainly not a saint in the pantheon of Texas history—a diverse bunch that includes, depending on who you ask, Stephen F. Austin, Sam Houston, Juan Seguín, Audie Murphy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Barbara Jordan, Larry McMurtry, and George W. Bush.
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 for hearing charges against tenured faculty—after statements he made at an online socialist conference condemning what he sees as the violence and oppressiveness of the U.S. government. I have seen no indication that he called for or incited violence—unlike, say, the president of the United States or the late Charlie Kirk. A right-wing blogger, who has previously published a YouTube video entitled “Why I’m embracing FASCISM”, surreptitiously recorded Alter’s comments and published them. The video was picked up by a right-wing Texas website, which not only circulated her account of Alter’s comments but also listed his scholarship, including articles on the Mexican Revolution and recent teachers’ strikes. A few days later, Alter was unemployed and his family without health insurance.
Alter is not alone. In the days since the assassination of the conservative activist Kirk, dozens of university faculty and staff around the country have been dismissed, most for criticizing Kirk (without endorsing his murder or violence of any sort) or simply quoting him. And a few days before Alter’s dismissal, Texas A&M fired a lecturer for bringing up the idea of gender as a social construct in her children’s literature class and dismissed her department chair and dean from their administrative posts. A&M President Mark Welsh, who came under fire for having initially hesitated in firing the professor, announced his own resignation last week. Measured by firings, this panic is already larger than the repression of the McCarthy era. And it has only begun.
Rainey’s time as president of UT came to an end in 1944. After a failed gubernatorial bid, he served as president of Stephens College in Missouri and then as a professor of education at the University of Colorado. (Let us hope that Alter, if he does not win reinstatement by way of the lawsuit he has filed, is so fortunate.) In a sense, Rainey lost the battle at UT, but he won the war. The regents who dismissed him were replaced, and the university returned to the mainstream of higher education by honoring the tenure system it had so egregiously violated. Rainey lived to age 98, dying in 1985, knowing that he was a hero to countless people in Texas and beyond. Soon after his death, UT renamed a building after him, and Austin College established an award for outstanding achievement in his honor.
The sprawling and heterogenous university system for which Rainey fought has served the state well. Every year it exposes tens of thousands of students to knowledge and slices of the human experience previously unknown to them, keeps them from moving out of state and attracts newcomers from across the country and the world, fosters music and art of all sorts, and provides thinking and expressive skills necessary for a productive workforce. It is difficult to imagine Houston’s energy sector, Larry McMurtry’s novels, Compaq Computer, Texas Instruments, Whole Foods, or Austin’s music scene, and so much more without our colleges and universities.
The reign of terror brought down on Alter and countless other professors and teachers, the demonization of education, and the Trump administration’s gutting of basic research funding and repulsion of international students and scholars could reduce Texas higher education to a shadow of its former self. You might think that university leaders like Texas State President Kelly Damphousse would follow in the footsteps of Rainey by taking a stand against this anti-intellectual thuggery. Yet they have not.
If the leaders of these universities, charged with defending academic freedom, and the leaders of our state, charged with defending the Constitution and its free speech guarantees, cannot find a fraction of Rainey’s courage, then all of us must do so. The moment now is dark, but like Homer Rainey, we can play the long game and stand firm on our principles.
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