Oral History Transcript - Daniel Farlow - March 11, 1986
Interview with Daniel E. Farlow
Interviewer: Tylon Snodgrass
Transcriber: Tylon Snodgrass
Date of Interview: March 11, 1986
Location: Mr. Farlow’s office, Medina Hall, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX
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Begin Tape 1, Side 1
Tylon Snodgrass: A tape recorded interview conducted by myself, Ty Snodgrass, with Mr. Dan Farlow, a professor of political science at Southwest Texas State University. The interview took place on Tuesday, March 11, 1986, at 2:30 p.m. in Mr. Farlow’s office at Medina Hall. The nature of this interview is the McCrocklin Case of the late 1960s, in which a past president of Southwest Texas State University was asked to resign.
Mr. Farlow, I came here today hoping that you could tell us some of the things that were going on on campus in the late 1960s with the McCrocklin Case. Maybe you could start out by describing how it all got started, some of the background information, and how these events started the spawning effect of the McCrocklin Case.
Daniel E. Farlow: Okay, actually, the events known as the McCrocklin Case occurred before he arrived on campus. There were rumors spread by book salesmen, and they are about as notorious about gossip as the worst of gossipers, but anyway, they brought tales that there was a question about the writing of McCrocklin’s dissertation; that he had plagiarized, and that was about all that we heard about the charge, and most people were prone to simply put it down as rumor or gossip and let it go at that.
In no time at all, McCrocklin—of course, he was a very strong-willed kind of individual and a very strong kind of president, and we had a lot of political sensitivity back in those days, particularly in the inter-factional rivalry of the Democratic Party. And it worked out that we had a precinct convention just upon the day of the primary elections, sometime probably in ’66, I would guess. In any event, one of the precincts was over on San Antonio Street, mostly consisting of Mexican-Americans, and a couple of the professors on the campus organized to get a lot of the blacks and Hispanics out in what was legitimately in their convention. Anyway, they were there in the majority, and of course, that meant they got to organize the convention—and it was much to the shock of a lot of the Anglo citizenry—down somewhere around San Antonio Street. The short of it was that the crowd kept getting larger, but the Anglo people would leave the convention to go out to get their neighbors to try to increase the number there and maybe outnumber the people actually Hispanic.
So they had to move out of doors, and it was very hard to control that situation—it then appeared that the professors who were kind of leading the blacks and Hispanics, they felt compelled to hurry things up, so it got to be a kind of a railroaded kind of thing because you had these masses of people coming in, and they wanted to go ahead and get the convention over while they had the majority. It worked out that they managed to do that, but complaints were addressed to President McCrocklin, and whether he was angry about that or not is not within my scope of knowledge, but eventually these two professors were fired, and they believed honestly that they were fired because they had the audacity to do this.
Snodgrass: Mr. Farlow, how did these two faculty members get involved with the precinct convention? What were their intentions?
Farlow: They were, of course, not alone in being active in the intra-party rivalry of the Democratic Party. That kind of things went on not only in San Marcos and Hays County as a whole but all over the state of Texas to a very large extent. These two guys were very anxious to get what would be the votes of that precinct to represent at the county convention and all that would build toward the majority, or a possible majority, for a moderate to liberal faction rather than the moderate to conservative. Moderate is usually divided somewhere in between the middle, and they were sometimes more on one side and sometimes on the other side; although more often, of course, they were on the conservative side in a state like Texas. But anyway, that was their intent; they would just simply get out and work the precinct. They were offended by the fact that here were people who voted and who had attitudes, and they were not really represented in that precinct process because nobody ever encouraged them to come out, and so you had the interesting aspect of having oh, maybe 10% of the precinct running that precinct and represented eighty degrees opposite of where those people really stood in terms of public policy.
So, I think it was innocent enough, I would say that, oh, probably a good 50–60% of the faculty was involved one way or the other somewhere in town. And what was revolutionary about this was, of course, that they just simply moved to get blacks and Mexican-Americans to come out and participate, and of course that meant that a precinct that was usually going to send a delegate to the county convention that would be more of a conservative would be more of a liberal because they had intervened. It was pretty tight in this county, and it was tight only because the university professors were around and they had decided that. And of course, President McCrocklin was a very politically-wise and active person. I remember he was at the precinct that I attended and there was probably a hundred people there, and we divided down fifty-fifty; that’s how close it was, and because President McCrocklin was there, some of the faculty people felt intimidated and switched their votes so that his side won, so anyway, it was just very sensitive. But that really didn’t have so much to do with the incident as it came to exist, but it under-laid what seemed to be the reason for the firing.
I would have to say that there were reasons that the administration cited: not enough work done on a dissertation and not enough publications, things of that kind had been cited in the firing of both of these people. In time, they both went on to bigger and better things probably, but they were of course shocked by—well, after the firing, then one of the professors involved was a sociology professor by the name of Charles Chandler. His wife was the editor of a local newspaper, I think they called it The Cedar Chopper Almanac, but it may have already become The Hays County Citizen by that time. One became the other, and it’s hard to remember just off-hand—I would have to look it up. But anyway, she [Charles Chandler’s wife] was editor of that and was a very fine writer and a very keen investigative reporter—very talented—and as the weeks passed, evidently she decided it would pay to investigate what had been merely rumor before McCrocklin had arrived, although it didn’t cease very much after he arrived. The book salesmen would still say, Oh yeah, it really happened down at A&I [University] where McCrocklin was. And of course, it simply meant that if you’re hurt, then you sort of look around to see if there is a way to strike back. There is not much to lose if you have already been fired. So that was her endeavor. The other guy was John Quincy Adams, a name unbelievable, but truly John Quincy Adams, and John was a lawyer as well as a PhD candidate; a very bright guy. In fact, both of them [Chandler and Adams] were very bright guys. I never did understand that John did very much—it may simply have been that either he was just recently married or still unmarried. I can’t remember. But he did not, in any case, have a wife who was a reporter, while Mrs. Chandler was in a position to take a look at the thing and then to write about it—get some public exposure about the allegations. So in short, after some research on her part, there was an article published that alleged that there was plagiarism on the part of Mrs. McCrocklin and Dr. McCrocklin’s dissertation.
Of course, this caused all kinds of excitement and division on campus, many people thought that that was a false charge and that there was no substance to it and that sort of thing. The controversy picked up momentum, and very shortly both the dissertation and the thesis of Mrs. McCrocklin were made available and people could take a look for themselves. I don’t think that for most people there was any doubt that there were was evidence of considerable plagiarism, and it still continued to be one of those situations where those who had raised the charge were alleged to be liars and people who were trying to do McCrocklin in and were ugly and wrong; therefore, they [persons alleging the plagiarism] felt they had to defend their position, and people had seen this and had affirmed that they thought there was plagiarism. They decided that perhaps what they ought to do is ask Dr. McCrocklin either to deal with the matter in a forthright way or let the faculty community take a look at the documentation. Since nothing really happened except the charge and counter-charge, eventually it was decided by a very small group of professors on campus that they should have an open meeting at which they would show—with the advantage of overhead projectors and similar materials or similar equipment—to show the thesis and the dissertation so the people could judge for themselves, and it was at this meeting that a large number of the faculty came—some, of course, feeling somehow obliged that they ought to defend President McCrocklin against all odds, others believing that the evidence would speak for itself. Also, to complicate the matter, were administrative officials there—sort of scattered among the crowed, and also there were representatives of the University Police Department.
Snodgrass: How were the faculty divided as far as their support?
Farlow: Most of the faculty was quite frightened about the situation. Pretty much the people identified as, in this case, trouble-makers—that’s what they were called—they were well-known, and a lot of people sympathized with them. In fact, an overwhelming number of the faculty did sympathize with them, but it’s not easy to have courage in this situation where somebody has control over your salary, control over your tenure, control over your job, and that sort of thing. So many of them just simply were there, they were interested, they wanted to find out, they wanted to know if the charges were without foundations or whether they were; but there were some there that evidently, because of friendship or because of some kind of pragmatic consideration satisfactory to their own mind, they decided they were simply going to deny even what was in front of them. Some would simply say, I don’t see any evidence of plagiarism, even though plagiarism was overwhelming, as the later investigation by the University of Texas was able to support. In any event, it was a traumatic affair, there were people who cried, there were people who cried because they thought that it was a gallant thing for President McCrocklin to do this kind of thing for his wife; that it really wasn’t cheating in the usual kind of way. The academic purists thought, Well, cheating is cheating, and you don’t cheat in any academic fashion, even for one’s wife. And so a lot of different conflicting values were destined to get involved. But, anyway, that “show and tell” exercise was the first really big magnification because it did get publicity. It was picked up in the newspapers around the local area, and eventually, of course, it was picked up in newspapers in other parts of the country.
Snodgrass: Do you remember when all of this started to take this large of a scope? Do you remember when the faculty meeting was or when these people got fired? Maybe you could mention that.
Farlow: The firings occurred sometime after what had been the precinct convention of probably May or June. I would have to look it up we had some change in—
About 196—I would say probably 1966. All of this had to happen along the time before it reaches its climax in 1968 and so on and so forth. It took a while for all of this to reach any kind of culmination, and then it was quite a bit after that before you had the actual meeting. That probably occurred, oh, in perhaps November or so of 1968, it was after McCrocklin had left the campus and was part of the Johnson Administration as Under-Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. So he was not on campus, and that was another reason that some of McCrocklin’s defenders said that he isn’t there to defend himself and that was known; it was a matter of contending that plagiarism doesn’t have to have some kind of defense: it’s a matter of the objective evidence. You have what represents one kind of writing and the subsequent writing, if it’s exactly alike verbatim, then you have a prima facia case, a first view case that plagiarism occurred. Now once that is established, then someone might want to come forward with a defense, but that was for the appropriate moment.
Snodgrass: So there was two years between the time when these two faculty members got fired for their involvement—
Farlow: Yeah, they weren’t fired probably; oh, they weren’t fired immediately, but subsequently they were fired, it wasn’t too long after—
Snodgrass: By McCrocklin?
Farlow: Yeah, that’s right. Anyway, it was their conviction that their firing was attributable to their activities in organizing the precinct on behalf of what were actually Hispanics and blacks. It worked out there were other reasons cited; the administration, of course, didn’t cite the precinct convention matter; they cited other reasons, which probably for a lot of people would have been satisfactory, but I really believe that what caused it was a perhaps less than noble kind of effort to strike back after they thought they had been unfairly dismissed, and that sort of thing might never have happened had that not occurred. It might have been the kind of thing where a “sleeping dog lies,” even though the rumors had persisted all that time, but to imagine that the faculty members themselves had conjured up the rumor and somehow manufactured the evidence, of course, simply isn’t supported by the fact the rumor preceded President McCrocklin’s arrival, and nobody seriously paid any attention to that. It wasn’t until somebody felt they had been hurt and thought this is the one place this president might be vulnerable; and so they investigated and, almost surprises of surprises, they find there was considerable evidence.
Snodgrass: This was already after he had left campus then, had he—
Farlow: Yeah, well, at least he was on leave to take that job with the government. It was getting toward the end of the Johnson Administration; of course, he wasn’t there in any sense a long time in the Johnson Administration. Well, after this turn of events, then it was really a matter of reaction, and there were a lot of exchanges in the newspapers, particularly, of course, the University—probably then called College Star—where some faculty people would write criticism of the ten or the twelve. There were ten who had signed a petition that President McCrocklin ought to clear up the matter; if the charges were false, then he be exonerated and that didn’t seem to be such a terrible thing, but President McCrocklin and the administration did not like that view. They didn’t believe, evidently, that they ought to have to answer to it; they just simply contended it was wrong, false, and they weren’t going to respond to such ridiculous charges, but that didn’t make them [the charges] go away.
Snodgrass: This is “The Dirty Dozen” you’re referring to?
Farlow: Yeah, they had been referred to as “The Dirty Dozen” because it wound up, and of course, it was probably about the time that movie came around, and so The Dirty Dozen seemed to be [an apt designation]—now, there were only ten signatures on the petition, there had to be at least sixty or seventy that had indicated they were willing to sign, but at the last moment, when the petition was being circulated then, they refused to sign; although the instigators of the petition had been assurances—Oh yes, they would be willing to sign—but in the end, they were not. I was really kind of on leave, and they came to my house, although I had gone to see the exhibiting of the documents, and I thought that there ought to be a clearing up of it because I thought that the campus and the university—we were still a college then—would suffer until we cleared that matter up. So, anyway, after skirmishes of that kind, the reactions were very bitter, and I really felt very distressed.
It seemed that it would not be a matter objectively resolved and perhaps explained by President McCrocklin. So, I was really kind of concerned, and so I wrote a letter to my former debate coach, who was at the time the president of the Ex-Students Association or was perhaps maybe the incoming president of the Ex-Students Association. Anyway, I was distressed, and I wrote a very long letter in which I tried my best not to indict President McCrocklin. I know all too well that evidence is not good evidence or damning evidence until it has been tested against a defense, and I realized that. By this time, my old debate coach is also a lawyer, not only is he president of the Ex-Students Association, but he is a lawyer. So I knew he would understand a lot of these matters a lot better than a lot of other people. He also is a very conscientious and decent kind of human being; he’s not one who would in some reckless way go out to get the scalp of a president or the scalp of a faculty member. So I felt a lot of confidence in taking my own distress to him or at least present it to him. And he was indeed distressed and replied not by letter, but immediately after receipt of the letter by telephone call. He subsequently came to campus, he examined the evidence for himself and had a pretty good idea then of kind of what was at issue, and of course he did not agree to take any kind of action—it was sort of a “wait and see.”
[As Roy Willbern viewed the matter,] It could be that President McCrocklin would decide that the better part of valor would be to simply say, “I made a mistake, I regret that mistake, I don’t approve of that kind of thing,” and he thought, Well, that would be sufficient after so many years, and most people thought that he said, [in essence, that plagiarism is wrong]. However, if it is a matter that he denies any part in this and that it never happened, then it was almost like trying to call white “black” or black “white;” you just simply would have a very difficult time trying to renounce and denounce what was the overwhelming evidence.
Anyway, after a time, you would see all kinds of subtle and not so subtle pressures. I got telephone calls from people in the community asking what I wanted for my house, that they understand that my house was up for sale, and it wasn’t up for sale or anything of that kind. In some way or another, a lot of people got some of the same kind of treatment. And then there were people in the community that were told that this was a communist plot, or it was a drug user’s plot; there were at least three different kinds of plots identified as being responsible for the whole thing. But it just didn’t go away; it was a very distressful time for the faculty as a whole.
Eventually, the situation expanded outside of San Marcos, and several newspapers, the Philadelphia Inquirer, for one, and the Detroit News—although I may be leaving out part of that title—and a number of other eastern, northeastern, and perhaps even one Midwestern newspaper picked up on the story to some extent, and that tended to increase the questions. But all of us, particularly those of us in political science at conventions—Well, what about this president of yours that plagiarized? And so it was the kind of thing that was usually going to be at least a very damaging thing if not a ruination of Southwest Texas, but it would [at least] be a very damaging kind of thing; certainly an embarrassment to those of us who came from Southwest Texas. I had only a few instances [of such], but a lot of other people recorded having quite a number of those things happen. But none of this would stand still, and there were editorials and comments written by both journalists and people in the community, oftentimes never having examined the evidence but simply picking up on whether they knew or admired or liked President McCrocklin or did not.
But all of this then came to a new plateau when Colonel Robert Heinl, simply on his own, came from Washington, D.C. He was the number two man at one time in the Marine Corps; he was considered to be, at one time, the apostle commandant of the Marine Corps. He was not a man without reputation or considerable reputation for integrity. He came to the campus, and there was a reception, and many of the people who were involved, in fact all of them, and many of those who had always been kind of sympathetic, but they wanted to hear—[Telephone rang]
Pause in recording
Snodgrass: Right before the phone call, you were talking about Colonel Heinl’s involvement and how he got involved in the McCrocklin Case.
Farlow: Yeah, there was kind of a reception, as I recall it was out at the Holiday Inn in one of their rooms there, and it may well be that we had dinner there, and then they made the facility available to anyone who wanted to come. But there was a very large crowd, and there were some townspeople as well as faculty and way more than anything like “The Dirty Dozen,” you know there was like fifty, sixty, seventy faculty people and a lot of townspeople.
Anyway, Colonel Heinl then just simply told the story of how he knew about this or why he was interested in it. He had heard it on a television station, he had heard news of the incident known as the “McCrocklin Incident” or “Situation,” and he was in the bathroom shaving when his wife called and said, as he put it, “Eureka, Bob, the justice is about to unfold,” or something like that, but anyway, I remembered that he used the expression “eureka” because it’s a little unusual in this day and time. But anyway, he ran to the television to find out, and on the Washington station they were telling about this person in the Johnson Administration as Under-Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare about whom this big controversy had arisen over his—over the authenticity of the writing of this dissertation.
He was very interested in it because years before—it may have been as many as twelve years before—he was at the Naval Institute, which is the publishing arm of the Naval Academy, himself publishing a book. And McCrocklin’s dissertation at the time was undergoing a publication, and while this was going on, one of the readers at the Naval Institute or their publishing house came to Heinl and others working in the same room as Heinl and asked, “Does this seem suspicious to you? This particular manuscript sounds like a Marine Corps document, a Marine Corps report.”
Heinl said, “I examined it, I didn’t recognize it.” He said, “Well, it’s true the style and that sort of thing’s very like that, but that may not mean anything.”
But someone working in that same room had just been reviewing what was known as the “Hart Report,” and he took one look and read some and said, “This is the ‘Hart Report’.” Well, the Naval Institute examined the—according to Heinl, the Naval Institute examined that particular possibility and found out that that was the case. So in the introduction of that particular published piece—they had already invested a lot of money in bringing this out—they asked McCrocklin to give credit and figured it was up to the University of Texas to worry about whether that made it an authentic dissertation or not, but it made him recognize that the material had been drawn from the “Hart Report.”
Anyway, he knew that much, but what it did was to open up a third dimension to the plagiarism; it was not a matter of a wife plagiarizing from her husband, but the husband had plagiarized from the Marine Corps reports—you had plagiarism upon plagiarism—and, of course, that complicated the situation. Now, way back when they had what some people refer to as the “show and tell,” where they had the overhead projectors and that sort of thing to show the actual pages, and they would compare—anyone could call out the pages by the way, so it wasn’t a matter of stacking the deck, you could compare anything that you wanted to, and a lot of that went on. But unknown to the administration was the fact that the faculty—they had put together the opportunity for the faculty to take a look for themselves—they had already cleared it with the Board of Regents. Normally, that would not happen, but because of the sensitivity of this thing they thought, We can’t go through the channels and still have this, so they simply asked the president of the board what he thought about this. He thought that the faculty ought to go on and do it, he understood why they bypassed him, but that didn’t stop the administration that was in McCrockin’s place from [cracking] down hard on the faculty. Of course, the letters went out, and a memorandum went out saying that you’re not to under any reason at all make direct contact with the Board of Regents about anything—it was almost like on pain of death—but, of course, the contact had already been made, and the blessing of at least part of the regents had been given formally through the president of the Board of Regents. It may well have been that the local committee was headed by J.C. Kellam, who was on the Board of Regents and headed our own what we call the “local committee”—all the institutions would have a committee on board that headed that particular institution. It could be they had a different point of view. In any event, the Board of Regents had, in a fashion, given their permission to hold this. The Heinl situation, of course, made it a much more serious kind of thing, it wasn’t a matter of man and wife, it was a matter of the academic integrity of President McCrocklin by that point.
By this time, a report from my former debate coach, this is Roy Willbern, [shared] that the Board of Regents needed to have assurance that it wasn’t just a few troublemakers on the faculty that were concerned, he suggested a strategy whereby we would simply get as many people who would sign a petition saying we need to clear this up, we need—it’s not a matter of opinion against opinion, it’s a matter of fact, and we think we simply ought to have the regents look into the factual basis of the charges and act accordingly. That petition then did garner somewhere seven—oh, I would say seventy signatures or something like that, which was a fairly good percentage of the faculty back in those days. It doesn’t seem like a very large number now, but it would have been a fairly good number given all the circumstances and the fear that people felt about it, but still it was a big enough thing with members of the faculty and so close to academic integrity that they were willing to sign because nobody could say that they thought we were out of step to say we ought to clear it up because they were as much interested, of course, that McCrocklin be exonerated if exoneration is what should happen—that he do the right thing, whatever that may be. If the charges are true, he would at a minimum at least have to state that he isn’t for that kind of academic cheating, that he had made a mistake, he looks back on it now, and it was a terrible error—it might have just been dropped—that’s what everybody expected, but he simply would not bend at all, he was unwilling to admit there had been anything of the kind that had happened.
So it then moved to a kind of a larger scale, and people that were involved on campus were told that as long it amounted to being no more than just simply a campus issue between the establishment of power in the form of the president and the regents, then probably nothing would happen, but it would probably have to be a matter of the conflict area being enlarged; it would have to be demonstrated that others beyond just the faculty and the university community were involved or had some concern about this.
So it was a matter of talking to friends, and the more powerful the better, and simply indicate what was going on and letting them take a look at evidence if they wanted to, and that sort of thing. And it really had an impact in the sense that many of those people then volunteered letters to the regents, and it became very clear that it wasn’t just a matter that could be contained on campus and people in a sense bulldozed into submission—it was a matter of expanding the conflict that was no longer under just the regental control any longer.
That then, of course, brought pressure on the University of Texas, the University of Texas had been notified, and they weren’t seemingly too interested, but very early on a committee had been appointed and just ended up that one of the persons on that committee appointed by the University of Texas to look into the authenticity of the charges and the evidence and that sort of thing was a member of the economics department, and one of my very good friends, Daniel Morgan, was a member of that economics department, while I did not know very well Forest Hill, who was on that committee among a number of others.
I attended a Christmas party or something about like that—I don’t know exactly, I would have to look back; it would have to be either in ’68 or ’69, I just cannot remember—but he was a member of that committee, and without my realizing, he stopped me during the party and conversed at length and asked all kinds of questions, never divulging to me that he was a member of that committee, and I related as best as I could because I did not want evil to befall the institution. I thought we needed to clear up the situation if it could have been, and if McCrocklin were innocent that ought to established and he be absolved of all the charges. But anyway, he asked a lot of what we had done and what I had seen, and it gave him a kind of an indication. I don’t think by that time he had known anything about Robert Heinl, and that made him extremely interested. Well, the short of it was that the University of Texas expanded their own research into what had happened in terms of the “Hart Report,” and they actually spent over $10,000 in the investigation. They sent a person to get the “Hart Report,” so they had the “Hart Report,” and they compared it with the dissertation, and they found what everybody else found. In their final announcement, they found that over 98% of the dissertation had been plagiarized verbatim. Not just plagiarized in the sense of the thing, but verbatim, which is just a flagrant case of, a grievous, I guess we could say, case of plagiarism. They also found things that nobody else had ever found out. They found out copywrited material had been plagiarized. So, it was really a matter of—their decision was that you have to go to court to strip somebody of a degree, to revoke a degree, but if you just cancel a degree then you can just keep it—they can use it any way they want to—but if they submit applications and credentials are to be sent from the University of Texas, from which the degree was received, they would show that the degree was canceled and the reasons for that. But he could keep the document on his wall and keep his title as long as he wanted to, but the university itself would never recognize it; they would not send out credentials. That was my best understanding of the difference between the cancellation and a revocation of a degree. Then, I guess the only other aspect—you know, these are hitting pretty much the high points, but I think we covered a lot of the aspects, but maybe you want to maybe ask another question, but I know you are interested in some of the repercussions and—
Snodgrass: How did, how was it ever resolved after his degree was canceled? Was that pretty much the end of it, as far as—
Farlow: Well, not quite, but almost simultaneously, once the University of Texas had a report that could be formally made then that report was made available to the Board of Regents or the Board of Regents inquired about it. I was never really privy of how that linkage did occur, but I know they were able to see the official report. Then once they saw that official report, then that was the end. The president of the Board of Regents made a trip to campus from Midland, and he went to President McCrocklin’s office and told him that he wanted his resignation within a specified amount of time, and then that was it. He was then dismissed on that basis; although, he probably, well, in fact, I know that he announced that he was submitting his resignation, he was doing so in order to devote full time to defend himself against all these charges and that he would be able to clear it up and that he hated having to do this, but they were monstrous charges, but that he would have to devote full time. Almost as far as anybody knows, there was never any real effort; that he didn’t go to court, for example, he did not do anything that had been threatened all along he would do if something had happened. Know you can draw whatever conclusions you want to on the basis of that.
Snodgrass: At this same time, did he also serve in the Johnson Administration in the latter part of his presidency here?
Farlow: Actually, by the time that the Board of Regents at the University of Texas had completed the—then the Johnson Administration had pretty well ended, and he was back on campus. So the actual dismissal was delivered on campus here, but pretty shortly after he returned.
Snodgrass: Was he still president?
Farlow: Yes, he was still president.
Snodgrass: He was still president of the university while he was serving on the Johnson Administration.
Farlow: That’s right, and he was just on leave, and there was an acting president, it was Leland Derrick that [was] acting president for the time, and as soon as Dr. McCrocklin got back, he was able to resume his post. Then, after the University of Texas decided on the cancelation strategy, then shortly after that the Board of Regents acted. But it was almost a matter that once the evidence really could be accumulated then it was very difficult to defend what had been charged. Probably, a better strategy would—if he—if that much evidence existed, for him to have simply said, “It was a terrible error, I was young, I would not do a thing like that, I don’t approve of this kind of thing.” I think people would have been forgiving. It had just simply gotten beyond that, and so there it was. The repercussions beyond this were, of course, that many people were of the opinion that anyone who was involved in any sense, that was at all vulnerable, would be somehow dismissed. And sure enough, out of the twelve, just about all of them except two of them on the list of signatories and then the other two that had not signed but had written separate letters with their own articulation of their concern, and they never really were quite put in the same category as those of us who signed the petition. I thought the petition was a kind of a noble thing in the sense that they did not want to say that President McCrocklin was guilty, but they thought it ought to be cleared up, and I suppose that we were more sensitive to the charges because we were in the same discipline and therefore we knew it kept coming, it kept coming, and we thought it was doing a great deal of injury to Southwest Texas. But anyway, many of those people did not get tenure or there was a lot of pressure of one kind or another, and so many of them did leave the campus.
In virtually every case, their professional situation improved, although many people found that there were some obstructions, and there was early applications—would be frustrated by the fact that somehow they had been connected with this, and it would almost be a matter of what might be in quotation marks a “conspiracy among administrators,” Well, we will “do in” these people, you don’t “blow whistles,” and you don’t play noble person against the power structure. But there was sufficient breaking of the ranks, if there was anything to that, and there may never have been anything more than just a few close friends maybe of President McCrocklin, but I don’t even know to the extent there was any of it. Most of the people were told that despite the fact they were told that they were involved in that, that it made no different to them, and they really thought of it as something rather—a mark of good character. That it showed that they would stand up for the principle of integrity, of academic honesty, and so forth. So, they really saw it as a plus and not as a minus, but the short of it was they did very well professionally—most of them.
Snodgrass: What were the impacts on the students going to Southwest at the time? Did they get involved in it at all?
Farlow: Students did to some extent, there were some demonstrations, but it really didn’t have quite the credibility that it might have had because normally in those days—I’m talking about the credibility of the students. There was a fairly large group of students, and they held at least one demonstration, perhaps even more than that. As I say, the credibility of the students was somewhat questioned because they were more of the radical types of the sixties and there had not been much to demonstrate about. It was almost as if to say, well, the cause could be a right one or a wrong one, or true or false, and they would demonstrate because they were going to demonstrate. That wouldn’t be true for everybody, of course, in the group, but that would be kind of the way it was. So, a lot of the students were interested but didn’t really get very much involved, if at all, with a great deal of interest.
Some people who were students were very concerned: Well, all of this is going to ruin my degree. Then others said, Well, it’s going to ruin your degree if we don’t clear it up. That was the more important aspect of it; not that it happened. Because nobody—it was nobody’s fault who “blew a whistle.” It shouldn’t have happened—if the charges were true, but they needed to clear it up. So, anyway, it was that kind of thing that was the immediate kind of reaction. It was very difficult, I think, for people to keep their mind of their business, and I think people were able to conduct their classes without disruption, but I think that people were terribly preoccupied. And the stress was so awful, the trauma on campus, the worst that I’ve ever seen and I ever hope to see. It was a very, very difficult year, there’s no doubt about it. I think the productivity of the faculty suffered as a result of this, and it would have been better if we could have somehow gotten rid of the whole thing, but once the charges are made and you fight against it, and the fight become really, a great big fight, and evidence mounts, then it’s like, I suppose, a terribly bitter divorce instead of one that’s kind of an amicable divorce. If it would have been an amicable divorce of the president and the faculty, then the university probably wouldn’t have been so bad, but it was long and it got increasingly bitter as time went by.
Snodgrass: In your opinion, what were the effects on our academic reputation here at Southwest, both in the state and nationwide?
Farlow: I think that for a time we were a kind of laughing stock, but I never did get the impression that people were, in any long-term sense, were going to hold us accountable for what had happened by the lack of credentials. I look back now, and I think probably we would have been much more victimized by the whole thing had somehow or other, despite—evidence, despite the investigation of the University of Texas, the regents just simply decided, Let’s just keep him, we’ll in a sense choke him down the throats of academia and the throats of the students, the faculty, the community and the whole academic profession. Had that been the thing, I think we might well have suffered because what was not our fault might have been somehow something that would have been construed to have been our principles, as well as maybe the principles that manifested in the fact of plagiarism in the first place. But even with that kind of thing, a lot of people believed that the regents looked for a successor to President McCrocklin. This was Bill Mac Jones, who would come in and, in a sense, wheeled the axe or the hatchet against faculty and any others that may have been involved; be hard-nosed about salary increases and promotions, and that sort of thing. Now, I never had any direct reason to believe that I was somehow selected out, and certainly I would have been one that probably would. It wasn’t a perfect situation for myself, and I thought, Well, I’m not always going to be getting pay raises, but there were some academic problems, and I had had some difficulties with my dissertation director dying, and several things that had slowed things down in terms of my academic process. And I chose simply to say, “Well, it’s that, I couldn’t help it, but the rules are the rules are the rules,” and so I didn’t think too much about it.
But I was Secretary of the Faculty Senate during the time that President Jones was here, and I arrived at a meeting early to polish up some of the minutes, and he was to address the Faculty Senate that very day, and he arrived early, and the two of us were alone in the meeting room for the Faculty Senate, and sort of out of the clear blue he said, “Farlow, it’s too bad we can’t be friends.” My own response was, “Well, I don’t see why we can’t.” It was just sort of left as an unexplained kind of remark. I really never did understand it, although I must say that the thought passed through my mind that I had been identified with the twelve, and I had tried to keep it on as high a level as possible because I believe that’s the only way you can deal with things that are very difficult like that. But I never did know, I didn’t confront him about it, I just simply said I didn’t see why we couldn’t, and I didn’t find his explanation brought that in, but it wasn’t a convincing kind of reply either. You know, he may have been just kidding, or I just never did know. I must say, the thought crossed my mind, and many people thought that he went on to make sure that anybody who was identified with that [McCrocklin affair] somehow got cashiered here, and if that is the case, then again they went on to higher and better things, it never did really hurt them for a long time academically. And I think, overall, except for perhaps some postponed promotions and maybe pay raises and a few things like that, that most of the repercussions from one administrator after another sort of faded away into history, and it became part of the faded memories of that particular time.
Snodgrass: So you feel Southwest has completely recovered by this point?
Farlow: Oh, I think so. If there is a remnant, then it is such a tiny thing, with such a tiny impact that I can’t imagine that it would have much significance; although, I don’t think that the people that were directly involved will ever see it as insignificant, it was a whole year or longer of, really, very excessive trauma for people, and the whole campus was terribly divided. There were those who were strongly pro-McCrocklin, and those who were, let’s say, pro-integrity; I guess—at least that’s what they thought. They thought integrity has to override any other situation. There were those that were embarrassed by that, did not want to take sides, and they wished it would just go away. And all three sides had difficulty talking to each other. There could be social gatherings; we had, all during this time, various faculty meetings, sometimes there would be planned standing ovations for McCrocklin, and other times there would be faint applause that would be praise that is damning because it is faint praise. All that sort of thing happened during this time, so it really divided the faculty, and if that were to have persisted for any time, it would have been the ruination of the school.
Snodgrass: How many people would you say know about the problem now/ how many of the faculty and the administration are still aware of what happened?
Farlow: I could probably give you a real good count if I were to check my list of people who were here, I mean, who are here now; you know, just run over the faculty list. But I would imagine that there is probably no more than that—that are right on the faculty, there are people in the community that have retired, but they are not really active on the faculty—there’s probably no more than about thirty or forty at the very most.
Snodgrass: Out of how many faculty would you say?
Farlow: Oh, we had probably at least 250 back then, with about seventy that did sign the letter, and many of them contemplated it, some said, I would like to do it, but I’m scared to do it. I think that was an honest assessment, but many of them were up for tenure; they were very vulnerable to the whole system at the time. And there were those who were vulnerable, but they still let their own sense of academic integrity take hold. But I must say that in that day and time, getting jobs, although not exactly a snap of the finger, was much more easy; far easier than it is today for people who were in academics. So they didn’t feel that they would forever be banned from teaching or something like that, they got involved; although, some wanted to stay, they sort of did away—I think on the whole, most people on both sides could understand that.
I thought one of the marvels of the thing was that Alan Butcher, who was probably one of the more vocal of the persons, he’s now a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, but he’s also a very fine criminal lawyer. He argues cases all the time before the Court of Criminal Appeals and the United States Supreme Court and was ranked by the Bar Association as one of the ten top criminal lawyers in Texas. So, this is the guy that was supposed to not know anything, but he’s a very sensitive person to civil rights and civil liberties, he’s always been a keen student of that. I think it was simply when it seemed that people were going to—heads would fall, let’s say. When it was not they that had committed the wrong, and I think that’s what made him rise up in that kind of way; it’s characteristic of his personality. But he eventually was sort of driven from the campus, but as I say, he was driven to an endowed chair. Most people—he would never have been offered the endowed chair if this hadn’t happened; it gave him a little notoriety, but he didn’t do it for the notoriety. I have no idea; he would have liked to stay, probably. It was very interesting from that point of view, but many people were either forced out, retired, or maybe quite on their own. I would doubt if there’s more than thirty or forty right now who are on campus now.
Snodgrass: Would you say that the matter—after people left campus that were really involved in it, or were fired, or whatever happened to them—the matter was pretty much swept under the rug and forgotten about?
Farlow: Yeah, pretty much so, there was not much made—I think most of us simply wanted to forget it. I think it ought to be a matter of historical record, else I probably wouldn’t go on with this particular project. But, not to bring stones against anybody, because I would assume that there would be a time lapse before any of this would be available; I don’t want to hurt people—
Snodgrass: I really appreciate your insights and information on the McCrocklin Case, hopefully this information will be of benefit to people in the future that wish to study the impacts and effects of this on Southwest. Thank you, Mr. Farlow.
End of interview