Oral History Transcript - Daniel Farlow - April 24, 1986
Interview with Daniel E. Farlow
Interviewer: Tylon Snodgrass
Transcriber: Tylon Snodgrass
Date of Interview: April 24, 1986
Location: Mr. Farlow’s office, Medina Hall, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX
_____________________
Begin Tape 2, Side 1
Tylon Snodgrass: The following is a second interview with Mr. Dan Farlow of the Southwest Texas State Political Science Department conducted on April 24, 1986. This interview provides a description of Mr. Farlow’s teaching career at SWT and the evolution from a teacher’s college to a state college and finally to a state university. There will also be discussion about the different administrators under which Mr. Farlow served and the progression of Southwest Texas State’s academic reputation.
Mr. Farlow, maybe you could tell us some about your additional backgrounds and experiences, and how you came to Southwest in 1959.
Daniel E. Farlow: I was attending The University of Texas at Austin as a graduate student and had reached the point where I was doing my dissertation, and I had finished my oral examinations. I found out that Southwest Texas State University was looking—well, it wasn’t State University then, Southwest Texas State Teachers College was looking for someone. And since I still had a lot of work to do on the dissertation and my subject was the Office of Lieutenant Governor, I thought it would be a good place to go because it would be near Austin; I could continue my research almost without interruption.
I scheduled an interview then with the then-chair of the social science division, Dr. Jimmy Taylor. He decided that I didn’t need to come down to San Marcos, that in fact he would arrange to meet me in [the] Headliner’s Club. I don’t know why it was that he was a member of the Headliner’s Club, but I met him there. So, he interviewed me there, and evidently I didn’t ruin things for myself because he asked me then to come down and meet the other members of the faculty and meet the dean. In those days, we had one dean of the college, not the Vice President of Academic Affairs, and all that sort of thing. Anyway, I met the faculty and the dean and the president. Then it was a matter of formally applying with all my credentials and that sort of thing. But my real avenue of getting here was I was interested in the location because of my research interest.
Snodgrass: You also had some experience teaching at two other universities; is that correct?
Farlow: Yes, I had done some teaching as a teaching assistant at Sam Houston State University and at the University of Texas where I got to teach Plan II students, which was really a kind of honor because not any of the teaching assistants got to do that. It was an accident in a way; it would never have happened had it not been the fact that I already had some teaching experience. Both a little bit at the University of Maryland, but much more at the university at Sam Houston; it was then a state teachers college, also. It was a part of the same system, and still is, as Southwest Texas is.
Anyway, I had had that experience, and Dr. Livingston at The University of Texas at Austin, as a kind of unplanned thing, had been given a grant to teach in England, and he normally taught the Plan II courses. When they looked over the various people they had that could take that particular class, they just decided that I could do it. I was flattered that they thought I could, and I don’t really think I was really qualified to do so in those days, but I was glad they thought I was. It was a lot of fun; a very fun kind of a teaching experience, no doubt because those students are selected and are very bright, and it was very interesting to deal with that class. But that was how it ended up that I got to teach in the Plan II.
It was basically the teaching background at Sam Houston and at the University of Texas, and then I had had some public school experience, but it was just limited to a year. It was after I had got out of the service, and it was too late to get started at a college, but they were short of teachers, and so I had some superintendent friends that made me feel guilty for not making myself available to teach in the public schools for a year. So that’s how I ended up teaching that one year in public schools.
Snodgrass: Mr. Farlow, when you first came here, we were a state teachers college, and then we progressed to a state college and then finally a state university, as we are today. Could you tell some of the reasons for those changes and how these changes occurred?
Farlow: Yes, the university—well, what became the university—as a state teachers college, we found out that our function was changing, regardless of the title of the institution. And while Dr. Flowers, who was president up until 1964 and had been since 1940—so he had been here quite a long time, as you can see, about twenty-four years. He was reluctant to see it be anything, the institution can be anything but a state teachers college. That’s what his interest was; he had come from such a place. He greatly admired what teachers colleges did, and he was really reluctant to make the change, and yet he was broad-minded. And when statistically it could be shown that we had arrived at the point where at least half of our students were no longer seeking teacher’s certification, then he went along with a formal change to Southwest Texas State College. So the “teachers” part was dropped out. We still had strong teacher training programs, and for that matter, as you know, we still do, but that was that change.
Then we found that there was a kind of a trend in the sixties where state colleges were suddenly becoming state universities, and while their function didn’t really change very much, there was a decided advantage in being a state university. There were grant programs available from the national government, and of course that period of the sixties was a time when the Higher Education Act was passed, and there was a great deal of emphasis on research and all kinds of relationships and studies between universities of all kinds and the national government. And you had a better chance if you had the name “university.” It was just observable fact. So that was the real motivation to add the word “university” instead of the word “college,” and so it was simply Southwest Texas State University instead of State College. Most of us at SWT just kind of kidded about it, being that we did not really see ourselves as truly a university. But sometimes you acquire the title and then you begin wanting to make that title more meaningful, and so we did diversify programs, and as we got larger with the influx of students in the sixties and it continued on, it seemed to make a great deal of sense to divide the college—I mean, to divide the university—into the different schools and/or colleges. We pretty much stayed with the term “school” rather than “college” because we were still relatively small. But soon we had the organizational structure of the university and increasingly the attitudes and the modus operandi of universities; although, I think happily Southwest Texas never has, even with the twenty thousand students, lost that capacity to be the “friendly campus on the hill.” Maybe not quite to the extent that it was when I first came here, but compared to many other schools, certainly of this size and even of some smaller, that tradition had continued to live on, and I think students kind of enjoy it. That’s one of the reasons people come here and like it here and want to stay here because they’re part of that tradition; it probably helps to extend it.
Snodgrass: What do you feel the differences are, other than the grants and things available? What’s the distinguishing difference between a college and a university designation?
Farlow: Well, I think that it allows us to attract quality professionals; that is, people who are seeking to be professional teachers. Professors of all ranks and college/university teachers are more attracted to institutions with the university designation because it usually subsumes a greater amount of specialization. That means they can maintain a more specialized research interest and have some chance of pursuing that. If it is not a university, then it usually means that imposed on the professor will be a broader teaching responsibility, and that means probably less time for specialization.
Many people who desire to elevate themselves as far as professional standing goes greatly aspire an opportunity to invest time on that research interest. Many people are, of course, able to do both, but it is a lot harder, and everybody would recognize it is harder. If you have got to teach all kinds of preparations and across the whole curriculum of not only maybe one department, but as in our case in the early days, if you were in the social science division, you’re just as likely to be teaching history as well as political science. And I taught economics, politic science, and even public finance–advanced economics at one time. Well, that’s covering quite a big waterfront, and that doesn’t leave one a lot of time to be a specialist in research; the time just isn’t there. I think with some recognition of the problem you could do that research, and educational institutions were growing and everybody was competing for what, at least for a while, was a shortage of people. You wanted the very best people you could get, and anything that would help attract them seemed to make sense, and so I think that [the name “university”], as much as anything else, helped to make for the change.
Snodgrass: What changes did you see in the subjects taught as we evolved from the teachers college to a state university?
Farlow: Well, of course, probably all of the subjects taught continued to be taught. There were just many more offerings, and it allowed a lot more specialization. For example, we had a course that was in state and local government, and at least for a while we divided that up, we have kind of come back to it. I have to say kind of come back to it, but we do offer state and local to get that more general approach, but then we offer specialized subjects in metropolitan or urban politics, and we take specialized aspects of what might happen at the urban level or local level. There was always the tie to the state government because of the unitary relationship between state government and the local subdivisions that they have. But certainly a diversification of course offering—more political science majors. We had, then, faculty that were more nearly specialists in the area. I would teach, for example, economics in the very earliest days, and if I have had a lot of economics in my background, I certainly was no match for the people who came with PhDs in economics. But that was the main difference: diversification and specialization that we were able to incorporate into the course offerings.
Snodgrass: In the early days when it was just a teachers college, could you major in political science or business?
Farlow: That’s a good question. We did have certain majors, but you could not at that time major in political science. I thought the reason given was wrong. Of course, I was already a political scientist, and when Dr. Taylor responded, “Nobody teaches just civics in high school,” I thought, “Well, that’s not so.” I had come from Tyler High School where that’s what I taught. Now I admit, I did teach on one occasion one history course and I also taught one algebra course, but the year after I left it was the new policy that everybody teaching the civics courses would teach nothing but civics. They would not be teaching history. But Taylor’s notion was that primarily you would be teaching history, and whatever else you knew by way of teaching civics, that would just sort of be something extra. It would be the unusual rather than the usual, and so he contended that we did not need anything but a major in history and then a composite major in the social sciences, and that would do it just fine. Now, they offered a number of courses in politic science to deal with knowledge of American government and politics, but it was not a full major or even a minor, but that changed very quickly beginning in the middle-sixties.
Snodgrass: Was the only degree offered that in education or a teaching certificate?
Farlow: Well, you would major in a substantive subject; for example you could major in history, and then you would automatically take the teaching—the education courses that would give you teacher certification. It was almost like a double major in many ways, but it wouldn’t have quite the same hours. I guess you could even think of it as a second minor that was automatically in education, but it was a pretty full minor, it wasn’t a little short minor. But it was most like an automatic minor that you had if you wanted teacher’s certification. Then, if you did not want history, then the other option in the social sciences would just simply be the social science composite. So, while we still have that—it’s about to be phased out as I understand it—but the number of such majors is much smaller. At one time, it was a great big option, and a lot of people chose that particular option—you know, to go into social science. And they had some history, but they had a lot more government, a lot more economics, a lot more geography; the things that constituted the social science composite.
Snodgrass: You have been here through several administrations, and I was wondering what influence the different administrators might have had on some of the changes going from a teachers college to the university.
Farlow: Well, I’m not real sure in every case all of the influence brought to bear, but as an observer on the scene, you could certainly get some strong impressions. I know that Dr. Flowers was a person who revered teaching, and he revered teaching—or I should say “teacher training”—institutions. I think he was reluctant to see the role of Southwest Texas change, and yet he was realist enough to know that regardless of his preference it was changing. In many ways, I would say it would be—his administration would be like a person who tried to make Southwest Texas the very best teacher-training institution he knew how, and [he] prided himself on that.
As growth occurred, it was almost like having one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the brake. He knew we were having to move forward, but he didn’t want to go too fast, so he was always ready to put on the brake a little bit. He was the only president that I remember who actually talked in terms of a limit on the enrollment—maybe around four thousand—which really is amazing when we think of an institution now that knocks on the door of twenty thousand students in the fall semesters. But he really believed that a lot of what this institution stood for had something to do with its size, and he thought that quality would be governed to some extent by size. He thought that we would be so overwhelmed, if we let growth get out of hand, that we would lose in quality, lose in terms of the tradition of a friendly institution with a lot of individual attention that students receive from the professors, and he thought that was a unique relationship as many thought way back from the very founding of Southwest Texas. But, of course, retirement age reached its point of fruition, and he retired around 1964.
Jim McCrocklin came at that time, and he seemed to be prepared to move Southwest Texas more fully as a state college, and he certainly was quite prepared to take advantage of what seemed to be a growing situation in colleges and universities throughout the state, and he saw no reason why Southwest Texas might not be one of the more rapidly growing institutions of higher learning. And we were, as a matter of fact! So, very shortly we reached the four thousand, and we kept reaching the new plateaus in enrollment just about every time we had a new fall semester.
As you may know, spring enrollment almost always drops off a little, and that pattern has been a constant one, but it would be almost invariable, I am sure, if we checked the record. I do not remember an exception, maybe one in the late seventies and early eighties, where we might have dropped off just a little bit. But basically it’s been one of some increase virtually every fall semester from the sixties on. Then, of course, McCrocklin stayed roughly four or five years, and we had a search [for his successor]—the growth continued on. Not a lot of changes are made in administrations that are really interim administrations.
We did get some decisions made in the early seventies, and then when Lee Smith came—well, there was Billy Mac Jones before. Billy Mac Jones came, and he seemed to be anxious to continue the growth and the sophistication of Southwest Texas as a university. He was more interested perhaps than any one at the time in expanding the number of degree programs that SWT offered at the graduate level. It was under the administration of Billy Mac Jones that we had our first effort at formal application for a doctoral degree. One of the petitions was for a doctorate that would be simply a doctorate of administration, and there was another doctoral degree that we gave some emphasis to: it was a doctor of arts degree that would not differ a great deal from a PhD. But because there were other institutions that offered PhDs, Dr. Jones thought we had a better chance at going for the Doctor of Arts. It would be—it’s a little bit more of a professional degree rather than the broad philosophical degree, and while it was being offered, there were people who resisted that kind of degree because they interpreted—perhaps rightly—that it was a way of just simply creating another degree program that wasn’t always absolutely needed. But we thought we had some capacity to offer that, and maybe would have been better advised to have gone for a straight PhD back in those days because we really had the resources in many ways that equaled that of East Texas and some of the others that went for a PhD and were able to get them. In many ways, our faculty and our resources were strong, and maybe [applying for the DA program] was a bad strategy, but at the time everybody thought that was the strategy to follow, but it didn’t prove out to be the most successful thing.
Then, after Billy Mac Jones went on to Memphis State, we had the position of president filled on an interim basis. The next full-time president was Lee Smith. Lee Smith, of course, continued promoting Southwest Texas State University as far as growth was concerned, diversity of program, enrichment of faculty—and I think probably under every president we made some headway. His most notable contribution that most people are aware of, I suppose, was his effort to try to systemize policy. We had grown very large, and so he wanted to bring on the OLS, which is the “operating letters,” and the “management by objectives,” into the SWT system of administration. While probably most people agreed that there was a lot to be said for that—up to a point!—many of the faculty soon believed that it was being overdone. It was almost like the old debate of the people in the medieval period who would have debates over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. You know, there were rumors that there were OLs on how to answer a telephone, or how to open an office, and while I know that at least one of those was in existence because I’ve seen it, some of those I never did; but it was very easy for the rumor mill to pick up on.
Snodgrass: I understand that Dr. Smith, President Smith rather, sort of built up a fortress around him of friends that he employed or whatever, and he also terminated some of those he felt like might come in conflict with his power. I understand there were some power struggles going on during that administration.
Farlow: Yes, there were power struggles, and I suppose there is a certain amount of that that goes on with every change of administration. In some changes, it’s so slight that it’s imperceptible; may not even exist. Although you always imagine there is a little of that because almost invariably somebody is brought in, you know, where they’re—they bring in a lot of people, and it’s mainly secretarial, or whether they actually bring in people they have in mind for deans and vice presidencies. It depends on the individual, but, yes, there were people that were brought in, and many of the old timers were sort of—not exactly displaced, but they were sort of shoved over to the side. It was almost a matter of greatly increasing the administrative structure done by creating new positions without necessarily getting rid of old ones; although, in a few cases they were gotten rid of. It was—had the impact of increasing the number of administrators, but many of those people who stayed on did not have real power. It was almost a face-saving kind of thing, and most members of the faculty thought that it was a mistake to do it that way. I am sure they would have preferred—most would express it this way also—that they would have preferred that there not be a lot of new people brought in, that they do it in-house. They are more comfortable usually with that.
Snodgrass: I also hear that he tried to keep the faculty under his thumb with rules and all of the paperwork and everything. Did he abolish the faculty senate or something? It seems like I heard something like that.
Farlow: He never did abolish the faculty senate. I think many people believed that the faculty senate lost prestige and became less important as a link in the overall advisory system for the administration. There were times when there were open hostilities between President Smith and the faculty in general. But there were many, many things that, probably in retrospect, people look back with less jaundiced eyes and they would say, Well, maybe that wasn’t so bad, but I think it was really the excesses of the administrative mechanism. Then the resistance—anytime you have fairly basic changes in the way you operate, there is always some resistance, and sometimes the resistance is just the natural conservatism, or the natural opposition of, just, change. A lot of people like to resist change. I think it was a matter of President Smith getting tired of that and would take harsher measures to insist that his changes be implemented, and sometimes there was an equal effort to show, “By golly, there’s not going to be change after all.” So there was that tug-of-war that went on, and it probably led to some unhappy relationships.
Certainly the faculty, though, would—I think you can say that they themselves were personally better off because—despite what many of the faculty described as—shortcomings were offset by the fact that President Smith was not very politically-oriented in the sense that he had in mind political goals, except outside of just simply the general wellbeing of the institution. Even though he might have been wrong about the method of achieving that. But what I am driving at is the fact that it didn’t make much difference to him if you were a Democrat, Republication, or liberal, or conservative; he was much more interested in whether or not you were a productive person. He wasn’t much impressed by what might be credentials if somehow those credentials didn’t spell effectivess and productivity. He evidently was very oriented to that kind of management style and that kind of management philosophy. I think some people actually flourished under that, where they might not have done as well for [other SWT presidents]—in terms of merit pay and things like that, they really came off very well, even though they didn’t particularly like the OL system and some of that. I knew some people that professionally advanced, for example, that would explain to the students when asked, What’s wrong with faculty moral? and I know one occasion the faculty member said, “Well, I think I can show you easier than I can tell you,” and the method employed was to get a letter that had been addressed to faculty, and it was not addressed to colleagues or “Dear faculty members,” it was “Dear OL holders,” and people were reduced not to faculty status, which they were, or simply being a colleague at an institution of higher learning, but to an OL holder. What gave them significance was that they held OLs, and it was almost true to say that the method then became the whole essence of the institution. We weren’t faculty anymore; we were OL holders—hard to say that. That gives you kind of an idea.
Then, of course, the next big change was when President Hardesty came, and his administration, I think, probably has been marked with very excellent interpersonal communication skills. He has a remarkably sophisticated sense of political sensitivity. That probably has been very helpful to SWT in terms of appropriations. He generally has been credited with being willing to delegate the academic decisions to those who are the vice presidents and deans and chairs of departments—persons in the administration who are most involved in academics, and yet he does have overall academic concerns. While obviously everybody’s going [i.e., every president, every administrator] to have expressed dissatisfactions on this point or that point—nobody escapes that fate. I don’t think that he would imagine that he has. But on the whole, he has had a remarkably smooth administration; no big revolts, not even partially loudly articulated complaints. There are some criticisms, of course. I think for the time that he has been here, he’s been remarkably fortunate to be free of that kind of thing.
Snodgrass: I heard some criticisms that he is too political. That is his sensitivity is too much; too political—
Farlow: Yeah, that could be at times. I know in terms of the economizing, in terms of the shortfall of revenue some people have said, Well, the University of Texas didn’t worry about really cutting it down 13%, but he did that. I think that it may be stated—on the other hand, it may, in the long run, pay off. The short-term cooperative effort might be something we think of maybe being—Hardesty being responsive to the wishes of Governor White, but in the long run, it’s the record also that is spelled out to the legislature. Governors tend to come and go, and it may be that he will establish a reputation of a person who will do his upmost to—without seriously impairing the institution—to cooperate along those lines. When the tills are a little fuller, it may be that it will pay off, and we may actually advance as a result of a president who has a reputation for cooperating as much as he possibly can with an eye of trying not sacrifice things. I have no way of knowing whether it will work out that way or not, but I think because I am a political scientist I can look also—you have the sort view and then you can have the long view, and the long view may—it could still pay off in the long run for Southwest Texas.
Snodgrass: As you know, some students are concerned about his political sensitivity because they’re afraid that they’re going to lose their scholarships or grants or that type of thing, because the legislature tends to be moving in that direction with state institutions. A lot of the students don’t feel that President Hardesty is going to back the students, as far as the grants and things are concerned.
Farlow: I have never addressed this matter with President Hardesty personally, but I would think that he exhibited some concern about this matter during the time of the twentieth anniversary celebration on this campus of the signing of the Higher Education Act. Of course, there were a lot of public relations in that, but we would have to recognize that the thrust of that ceremony was to augment, not just for students of Southwest Texas, but students all over the United States, [efforts to see to it] that those grants be at least available. So, I know there is an interest there, and I think that his inclination is that there will be an effort to cut where you can cut. I’ve not seen an inclination on his part not to support the kind of tuition assistance and grants that we even have available at the state level. I can’t remember that—there is a grant system known—
Snodgrass: Pell Grant?
Farlow: Yeah, well that’s a national one, there is one that was—the senator was from Amarillo, and I can’t think of his name. It’s a—I want to call it Haywood [Haglewood Grants is the correct title], and I’ve almost got it, but that’s not it. Anyway, there is a system of state grants. It may not seem as valuable, but it is there. I would believe that President Hardesty would be pretty much interested in keeping those and economize maybe somewhere else. I think sometimes it means a postponement of a new building and maybe when the contracts are let [construction will be delayed]—(unintelligible) although that doesn’t even seem possible or probable, but if you have to not buy as many computers this year or you don’t buy new furniture, that’s where he usually is for the economizing it seems. There have been some positions that we don’t fill, but that means people have to simply take on a little bit more. We, I guess, in a sense work a little harder, but I think he thinks that’s worth the sacrifice to try to do what we’re asked to do. I just don’t see that he would decide, “Well, let’s cut our enrollment,” for example. “We’ll limit the enrollment.” I don’t think that he would want to do that, he would want to maintain faculty, and certainly his communication to the faculty and staff has been, “We’re going to keep that [faculty and support staff] to the extent we can.” Now, we do get some natural attrition, and we could manage to redouble our efforts; at least temporarily, we’ll try to do that. But if it’s going to—if it’s crucial to teaching, we’re going to fill the positions. So my own feeling is that students need not fear that he’s going to be against tuition assistance or that sort of thing.
Snodgrass: I would like to change the topic a little bit and talk about our academic reputation to find out your feelings or your opinions on how our reputation has changed over the years. We were once viewed as a real party school, and now we are starting to break away from that some. Maybe you could discuss that a little bit.
Farlow: Okay, my span of years covers a lot of different reputations. In many ways, I suppose, when I first came to San Marcos in 1959, we were thought of as just a little school down in San Marcos. As you may realize, I was living in Austin, certainly in the shadow of the tower [University of Texas], and I think that the image then was that mostly kids of lower, middleclass socioeconomic status were more likely to come to Southwest Texas. And they were usually rural, not urban; and others thought of the school as having almost a bunch of country hick-types. That was not a correct image any more than the completely party school image was, but I would say that the general socioeconomic level was less than what it is today.
That was certainly manifest on campus with a campus interest in politics, and candidates, and that sort of thing way back in those days. But I know that there were beliefs circulating that students might make it here would not be good students elsewhere. That has always been incorrect. While we’ve had students that were poor students from the very time I came here, I had poor students at the University of Texas, and I found almost immediately, since I had taught in both places, that I had students every bit as good here as I had had at The University of Texas at Austin. But I had probably somewhat a higher proportion of good students at UT, and I had more maybe in the middle, but they [my SWT students] were still fairly good students.
It wasn’t really until at least in the latter-sixties that the party school image began to build, and that was when we were growing in terms of enrollment very, very rapidly, but we were also attracting more students from the urban centers of Texas. We were attracting more from San Antonio, for that matter we were attracting increasingly larger numbers from Austin. But we could look at the statistics and find that Houston was one of our biggest sources of students; that’s hardly a country area. It really reached the point that for the City of Houston and Harris County, we were probably the fourth or fifth most important school to Harris County, and that was something that we had never realized before. But with that increased urban student body, or urban-oriented and urban-originated student body, we had students that had more affluence; with a greater affluence came the capacity to party. Then, I think always that the very small size of San Marcos compared to the enrollment of the university has made it easier for the partying to be observable; you can’t hide it. Having lived in Austin, both as a graduate student and then I commuted from Austin to San Marcos in the very earliest years of my tenure here, I recognize that there was a lot of partying that went on at the University of Texas, but it really wasn’t very much observed because it could get sort of absorbed out there in that larger society. Anyway, we did get that reputation, and I think—if it is changing—and I believe that it is beginning to change—it is changing partly because of the college in its own public relations efforts and in the kind of emphasis that President Hardesty has put upon a stronger academic image, and yes, strong academic programs have begun to turn that [“party school” reputation away]. But many people in the public at large comment on this, and I believe the students themselves may begin to perceive this to some extent.
Snodgrass: How much longer do you think we’ll be recognized as an “underdog” school? Compared to UT, A&M, Tech, all of the larger Texas schools, we’re still thought of as the “underdog,” easy to get grades, and that kind of thing.
Farlow: I guess I would not be able to even fathom how long it might take. I find, however, in general, that reputations tend to linger long after the facts for such a reputation have ceased to exist. So, I suspect that we are moving to where we have a greater academic integrity and respectability, but we are not going to be given public recognition immediately for that in general, but I think it will come. I think maybe that in a decade, if the programs that we have embarked upon recently reach fruition and they have the degree of project success that most of the faculty hopes for, I think that we probably will dispel a good bit of that bad image. It may be impossible to be thought of as absolutely equal because it would be very difficult for a university that’s part of a state system of universities to have the same kind of support for research; it’s the difference between the big research university and a good “teaching” university. And the same thing exists in California, where San Diego State University does not have the same kind of prestige quite as Southern Cal, well, which is not really a state university, it’s a private school, but say University of California at Los Angeles or the University of California at Sacramento; but it’s still a first-rate institution, and nobody has to hang their head. They know—anyone knows that very good scholars and good programs and good degrees are issued from there, and they go on to make their names in the public.
I think that’s what I would want to see us emphasize to our students and our parents as much as to maybe the public because a part of our own image is a kind of a lack of confidence in our own institution; almost an inferiority complex. I think, for example, if we ask ourselves, What college or university in all of Texas has produced a president? Well, there’s only one, and it’s not the University of Texas, and it’s not Rice. There may be people who think that Lyndon Johnson was a country hick, but I can show you quotations in some of the best magazines in the country that said that anytime anybody thought Lyndon Johnson was stupid had better watch out, that he very frequently outsmarted the whole lot of them. He was able to accomplish a lot that people from Harvard and Yale had not been able to accomplish, and so forth.
But I go even beyond that. I think if we look at some interesting events in history—I know just from my own personal experience that we’ve had students that had more than any other persons in the whole United States in bringing on that amendment to the Constitution that gave eighteen, nineteen, and twenty-year-olds the right to vote. That was not a UT student, it was a Southwest Texas student. The lawyer that dealt with one of the most crucial integration suits in the 1970s was a Southwest Texas graduate, and he was elected an outstanding member of the Bar in 1981, as I recall off the top of my head. We do have people that are reaching the top of their profession, and they are having solid contributions. I think sometimes it would pay us to emphasize the fact that we don’t have to take a back seat to anyone in terms of—we are producing people that are effective as professionals and as citizens, and I think once that image is emphasized a little bit more along with these other things that maybe it will help because we will have a little bit more self-confidence.
I ought to add one more thing; I was aware for a long time that Southwest Texas State University students would oftentimes provide the highest GRE—that’s “Graduate Record Examination”—scores of any of the students all over Texas, I don’t care where they’re going, but we also had some of the lowest. And sometimes, the very lowest. Well, that shows that complex mix that we’ve had, but I think there’s not much we can do about it. Having to take a broader sweep of students, we don’t always get the best, but we also do get some very fine students, and they go on—sometimes they might simply prefer going to a campus where they don’t feel that they’re lost in the big numbers, or they flourish when there’s a warm, friendly relationship between the professor and the student. You can go to some of the great universities, and the professors don’t have time. They have posted on their door, ten-minute time—office time—and they mean it; they escape. They’re much more interested in publication; and you can just either “see it” for yourself or falter and fail, and they could care less. Well, that is not an attitude here. And I think even bright people sometimes can flourish if they get some support rather than simply alienation from the professor.
Snodgrass: I guess in conclusion, you could talk about any future trends that might see happening in the near future at Southwest Texas State.
Farlow: I wish I had a magic wand; then I could not only talk about it but make them come into existence. I think we’ve reached the point, and it would be not only desirable—from our point of view, it’s been desirable for a long time—but I think it would be really beneficial to the people of Texas for us to provide some graduate programs at the doctorate level where we have a unique contribution. And I think a step has been made in that direction and apparently it will reach fruition, unless this shortfall of money will stop it dead in its tracks, to have a program where a doctorate in administration will be offered. And we have a lot of public school administration, and public administration, and business administration through which that might be. And we’ll start first where we have our largest program still, which is in the school administration. We’re still the largest teacher-training institution in the country as I understand it. And that will probably always be a strong point, and we might as well play upon that strong point. We’re at a point in time when there’s lots of problems that need to be resolved and lots of new issues coming up, and I think that we could play a leadership role there; and I think President Hardesty has already gotten in on that. Not always in the tradition of the professional educator, or the educationist as some people like to call him, but as an academic—as a person who himself is dedicated to scholarship, but looking for new ways to do a better job. And I think that we have certainly moved out with the college of general studies, the EXCET examination, the fact that he is on—heading up a state task force on that, or a commission, whatever the exact designation. We also have a member of our student body, in fact, the President of the Associated Student Government, Rob Patterson, who is serving in a national capacity on things. And I think that this augers what I think is likely to be a characteristic; I think that for a long time we’re been just on the edge of being an institution that’s going to be recognized as a leader in a lot of areas. I see that we’re beginning to break out in some separate disciplines and in more general things; and it’s not slowing down. It seems to me that we’re picking up momentum there.
So it may be that if I were to predict what might be, I think we may be heading toward a more golden day, and I think that it will not only enhance the academic reputation, but also the role that Southwest Texas has overall on education matters. I think that we will be—regardless of the fact that we’re not a research institution—we’re still an institution with a lot to offer and a great deal of leadership in areas of education.
Snodgrass: That’s good news for those of us that are pursuing degrees here now. Thanks very much for your time today, and I am sure this information will be of benefit to someone in the future. Thank you.
Farlow: Okay. You’re welcome, Ty.
End of interview