Regent Meddling Is Nothing New

More than 40 years after UT System administrator Ken Ashworth locked horns with Frank Erwin and the Board of Regents, Ashworth has put out a tell-all memoir. Unfortunately, he says, the controversy is more resonant than ever.

Ken Ashworth interviewed by Lynn Freehill

[caption id="attachment_2758" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Ken Ashworth. Courtesy of the Briscoe Center for American History."]

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What was your role at the UT System, and how did you encounter Frank Erwin?

I started out as the assistant to the vice chancellor for academic affairs. After a year, to my amazement, I was appointed vice chancellor. I had held my doctorate for only a year. Frank Erwin was the chairman of the board. He didn’t really have an office at the University, but anywhere he wanted to drop in and start asking questions, that was his office.

You tell countless anecdotes about Erwin’s meddling in UT-Austin affairs. What do you think was the most egregious example?

I think probably the division of the College of Arts and Sciences. The college was bigger than probably 95 percent of the universities in the world at that time. He put on a lot of pressure to divide that. And then to fire John Silber, the dean. But I think his most egregious meddling was when he attacked departing faculty members. He was using our press office, issuing press releases. It became for him, I think, a matter of entertainment and personal revenge. It misused the resources of the University.

What damaged the University most?

Erwin was constantly in the news; he brought the University criticism that it didn’t need. It was on the move to becoming an internationally recognized university. Rankings are based on reputation—how do a university’s counterparts see it? When they looked at The University of Texas, they were seeing a university that was not being run by the academicians but by a regent who had been on the board for approaching 12 years.

Do other states bring as much political pressure to bear on their public universities as Texas?

No. Texas, over a long period of time, has been seen as a state where politics have been injected into higher education much more than in other states. In Texas it goes all the way back to Pa Ferguson’s interference in the early part of the century in firing [President Homer] Rainey, in an effort to fire professors who were unpopular with the regents because of their views on economics and their support of Roosevelt’s New Deal. I can’t speculate as to why Texas is more political. I would hate to think that it comes from any inherent anti-intellectualism in the state.

[caption id="attachment_2759" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Regents Chairman Frank Erwin. Courtesy of the Briscoe Center"]

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UT Austin has gone from college on the prairie to internationally respected institution. How does that happen?

Reputations of universities are often not appreciated by the people close at hand. Citizens can be proud of the football team, proud of the athletics, proud of the campus and the way it looks—but the great thing that makes a university is what the citizens are almost unaware of, and that is the contributions that are being made to culture, to society, to politics, to economics, to the literary advancement of mankind, to research about scientific discoveries. Humanity could not possibly be supported without scientific advancement, and most of the advancement being made in science is in the United States. That is because most of the research here is done at universities rather than in laboratories, which focus on specific problems. Universities have a broad mandate: study, research, extend the frontier of knowledge. You never know the application of certain studies, but they can make absolutely priceless contributions to the advancement of mankind.

One example I’ve always appreciated is the German chemist who was interested in the color of butterfly wings. He undertook about 15 years of study to figure out why butterfly wings were so colorful. He thought it was pigment. What he discovered was that it was a metabolic process that colored the butterfly wings. Well, that seemed like a useless piece of information that laid around for years. But then Roger Williams, when he was studying vitamins here on the UT-Austin campus, found some of the chemist’s work useful.

You lay out the differences between a university and a business or government organization. What’s wrong with running a university more like a business?

If a university’s going to be great, it has to be elite. It takes a certain forbearance to understand and accept that. The other thing it requires is patience, because universities change slowly. Universities don’t chase fads; they don’t respond to temporary changes in society. The other thing is tolerance, because very often, a major role of a university is to be a critic of society. When faculty and universities are critical, they’re often attacking the society that provides their resources. That takes a good bit of tolerance.

Businesses are interested in profit, and business is defined in a very short term. And in fact that’s a major problem with American capitalism right now. The contributions that a university makes are long-lasting and, very often, slow in coming. You don’t know the value that is given to an individual student until that student grows up and applies it. Business is interested in a quick return, tight control, top-down decision making, and you don’t get that in a university. It’s a large organism with many interests, many disciplines, so the contributions are much broader and not as focused.

Your book is so timely and relevant right now. You couldn’t have planned this better, right?

It’s unfortunate that a book like this about politics at The University of Texas should be timely.