The Texas Student Publications Board has decided that the student newspaper editor of the Daily Texan should no longer be elected — instead, they’ve decided, it should be appointed by them. Mere students can’t be trusted to make important decisions about who gets to edit the student newspaper, although of course they do get to vote for who gets to be president of the United States. Lots of former Texan staffers, including me, are disappointed by this decision. My long article below explains why.

“The Daily Texan Does Not Belong to You (But It Used To): How a Student Newspaper Was Robbed of Its Independence”

By Mike Godwin

Copyright 1987, 2001, 2005

[Author’s note: This
article was published first published in the October 1987 issue of UTmost, then
a print feature magazine published by Texas Student Publications. A note to
that article in its first appearance stated that “Godwin, who ran
unsuccessfully for Daily Texan editor in 1983, has been involved with the Texan
and with Texas Student Publications since 1981.” In the months after this
article first appeared, the TSP Board formed a Handbook-revision committee on
which I served, and the committee adopted some but not all of the reforms
suggested in the final section of this article. Notably, the Handbook was
amended to restore the older Handbook language stating that final student
authority for what appears in the paper as a whole resides in the elected
editor. Shortly after those reforms were instituted, I decided to run for editor
again, and was elected to the position in spring of 1988.]

The atmosphere was tense
when the Texan Student Publications Board of Operations Trustees met last April
16. At issue was the appointment of a managing editor for The Daily Texan during the summer.

Why the tension? None of
the three applicants, it turned out, had taken any of the four journalism
courses listed in the Texas Student Publications Handbook of Operating
Proceduresas waivable requirements
for the job. The Department of Journalism faculty members who served on the
board were miffed.

Still, all three applicants
– Trish Berrong (an advertising senior), Diane Burch (a second year law
student), and Lorraine Cademartori (an American studies senior) – had assumed
that the TSP Board, while irritated by their lacking the courses, would
nevertheless look at their lengthy resumes and conclude that they were entitled
to course waivers.

But the Board didn’t talk
about their qualifications at all. Instead, it blasted the students for their
temerity. “They knew these things were coming down the road, and they should
have done them,” fumed Board Member Martin “Red” Gibson, a member of the
journalism faculty. Not only did Gibson feel the applicants had been
irresponsible, but he also surprised some listeners by claiming that waiving
those courses “would cut the ties” between TSP and the Department of
Journalism.

Gibson and fellow Board
Member Griff Singer, another journalism professor, then led the TSP Board to
reject the three applicants. Following the journalism professors’ lead, the
Board decided to delay selection of a managing editor for six days, in the hope
that an applicant who had taken the courses (presumably a journalism major)
would step forward.

The Board’s decision
triggered questions at The Daily Texan. Why all this talk about “ties to the journalism department”? What do
those ties have to do with choosing a competent managing editor? Why didn’t the
Board acknowledge that each of the candidates had held three or more positions
at the Texan, or that they’d met
all the nonwaivablerequirements
(including J360, a media-law course)? Why did the Board assume that the
candidates hadn’t even tried to take the courses? And to whom does The Daily
Texanbelong, anyway?

The roots of the Texan

Founded in 1900 by a small
group of students, the Texanwas
published for more than two years as a private enterprise before the Students
Association assumed ownership of the newspaper in 1903.

A Texan editorial of the time pleaded with students to
contribute to the paper: “ If you are a student in this University, you are
part owner of the weekly paper. It belongs to you.” The claim was sound. The
Texan, then a weekly newspaper, did belong to the Students Association, and,
then as now, every student on campus was considered to be a member of the
association. The newspaper’s roots in student government led to the single
longest-standing Daily Texan
tradition: election of the editor by popular vote.

Historically, electing the
editor seems to have ensured the paper’s independent voice. Instead of being
hired by some student-government committee, or by the Student Assembly, or by
the staff, or by the UT faculty, the editor (as well as the managing editor,
who was also elected) was elected by and felt directly accountable to the
students at large. And in spite of its being owned by the Students’
Association, the Texanrepeatedly
showed over the years a willingness to criticize student government, as well as
the other student publications and the UT administration

As a Students Association
enterprise, the Texanprospered.
By 1907, it was published twice a week, and then, in the fall of 1913, student
government passed a student referendum to turn the Texan into a daily. Renamed The Daily Texan, the newspaper billed itself as “ the first college
daily in the South.”

But UT administrators,
themselves a frequent target of critical editorials, grew nervous at the Texan’s growing power, prestige, and influence. They sensed
that here was something that needed to be controlled. So, in 1914 the
University founded a School of Journalism, its nominal purpose, according to
the April 1914 issue of Alcalde,
to better prepare editors and reporters for the Texan. But there is little doubt that the University also
hoped to train a generation of editors less likely to make trouble.

As it happens, this plan
backfired. The fledgling journalism school, led by 20-year-veteran editor of
the Brownwood BulletinWilliam H.
Mayes, turned out to be an independent voice.

The time-bomb charter

By 1916, it was apparent
that the Texanand the other
student publications, for all their competence at journalism, were beginning to
suffer from financial mismanagement. So, the Students’ Association decided to
unite the various student publications under a “Board of United Publications at
the University of Texas”, which would hire a general manager to handle the
publications’ business affairs.

Five years later, the
Students’ Association incorporated the publications board as an independent
entity that would eventually be called the “ Texas Student Publications, Inc.”
the new corporation was placed in charge of publishing the Texan, the Cactus,
the Longhorn (a literary
magazine), and later, the Texas Ranger, which reigned for decades as one of the nation’s leading college
humor magazines.

Students dominated the new
organization’s nine-member board of directors. In addition to the Students’
Association president and the editors of the publications (all of whom were
then voting members), three faculty members were appointed by the UT president,
and two students were selected by the Student Assembly.

This setup had two major
advantages. First, it guaranteed at least some general student input into TSP’s
financial operations. Second, it guaranteed that those most knowledgeable about
the day-to-day operations of the publications – the editors themselves – had a
significant role in the policy-making.

But the charter also
contained two fatal flaws. The first was a clause limiting the newly formed
corporation to a lifespan of 50 years. Strictly speaking, this was not a legal flaw, since, according to former Students’
Association President Bob Binder, the clause reflected a requirement of Texas
nonprofit corporation law in the in the 1920s. But it meant that future
generations would face the thorny problem of rechartering TSP. The second flaw
was a clause stating that, should the corporation not be rechartered at the end
of the 50-year period, the assets of TSP would be transferred to the UT System
Board of Regents.

It’s not clear why the
second clause was included. One former Board member has suggested that that it
was designed to prevent Board members from dissolving TSP in order to plunder
its assets. Another theory is that the clause was added, in spite of the fact
the corporation was initiated by the Students’ Association, because the SA always
has had to operate under the regents, who (in some people’s minds, at least)
were ultimately responsible for the corporation; under this theory it made some kind of sense
that the assets would eventually go to the UT System in case of TSP’s
dissolution. A third, more sinister theory is that the regents themselves
forced the inclusion of the clause, in order to lay the groundwork for their
eventual takeover of the publications and their assets.

In any case, while the
charter underwent several revisions during its 50-year existence, those two
clauses remained un-changed. Former general manager Loyd Edmonds described
them as “ a time bomb,” ticking away at the heart of TSP.

Controversies and censorship

The 1920s saw the Texan become a newspaper to reckon with. By 1925, the paper
had a circulation of more than 5,500, and its audience had grown to include
state and local politicians as well as students.

It wasn’t always a friendly
audience. The appropriation for the School of Journalism during the 1926-28
biennium was vetoed, in effect abolishing the school during that period. This
measure by Governor Miriam A. Ferguson may have reflected the ongoing grudge
her husband, former Governor James E. “Farmer Jim” Ferguson, held against his
political enemy Will Mayes, head of the journalism courses taught in the School
of Business Administration.

During this interregnum, Texan Editor Sam Johnson resigned in protest of the Faulty
Discipline Committee’s attempts to censor the newspaper. According to Margaret
Berry’s Student Life and Customs at the University of Texas, 1883-1933, the
editor “accused the Faculty Committee of having triode to force him to suppress
the student side of the issue as to whether B. Hall should be closed [and] to
publish names of students tried for violations of the Honor System.” Johnson
had also alleged the fact that the Faculty Committee had objected to the
content of the newspaper’s gossip column.

Dean of Student Life B.F.
Pittenger later responded, “There is no disposition, so far as I know, on the
part of any member of the faculty to seek a faculty censorship of any student
publication….” But Pittenger followed that reassurance with a warning: “[I]t
will be recognized that, in the final analysis, the faculty and the officers of
the University will be responsible for what occurs here, and that they must,
therefore, hold responsible the contributors and editors of these publications
when serious lapses occur.”

In many respects, this
conflict between the Texanand the
administration provided the choreography for the far more disruptive conflicts
to come in the subsequent decades. There are basically three movements to this
dance: First, the administration reacts to critical news coverage or editorials
by accusing the editor of “irresponsibility”. Second, the editors counter by
charging the administration with attempts at censorship. Finally, the
administration soberly reminds the students that it bears grave
responsibilities and proposes new and more stringent limits on the autonomy of
the student press.

In the 1927 incident, the
new limits were manifested in a fairly general censorship and discipline policy
that Dean Pittenger eventually printed in the Texan. But for all its warnings of disciplinary proceedings
following the publication of “injurious” material, the policy statement had
little actual effect on the newspaper. Perhaps the faculty members of the UT
Discipline Committee recognized the occasional Texan insubordination was easier to tolerate that the bad
publicity entailed by censorship attempts. In later years, however, the
University attempts to control the Texan would become less subtle and more coercive.

The regents crack down

The 1930s were a decade of
vigorous political debate as the federal government tried to rebuild the
national economy. And the Texan
took part in that debate, its editors increasingly using the editorial page to
discuss national as well as University issues. A common topic of the
newspaper’s editorials during the ‘30s was “Big Oil”: the Texas oil industry,
which was actively resisting the tax and regulation legislation coming out of
Congress.

By the middle of the
decade, some influential Texans had had enough of the newspaper’s meddling in
oil politics. TexanEditor Joe
Storm was criticized for his oil-policy editorials by the Fort Worth Star
Telegram, which gleefully referred to
the Texanas the “official
newspaper” of the University of Texas. Storm angrily replied in a Texan editorial that (1) the Texan belonged to the students, not the University, and (2)
it was perfectly appropriate for the Texan to comment on oil issues. “If [the editor’s] opinions are not in
accordance with those of the University of Texas,” Storm wrote, “ the officials
are not in a position to suppress them.”

But some legislators
disagreed with Storm’s assertions of editorial independence. They went to
Regent J.R. Parten, himself a successful oilman, with an order to muzzle the Texan. Parten and the Board of Regents passed the message on
to the TSP Board of Directors, and the directors duly imposed editorial
censorship on Storm. The new policy was intended to limit Texan editorials to subjects directly concerning the
University. In practice, the director’s censorship policy forbade Storm and his
successor, Ed Hodge, to print editorials or news stories that would antagonize
members of the Legislature or put the University in a bad light.

It was commonly
acknowledged that the TSP Board and the Texan had been forced to knuckle under the Regents. The
1937 Cactus yearbook, edited by Joe R. Greenhill (later a Chief Justice of the
Texas Supreme Court), described the situation this way: “Before it had time to
test its wings, the 1936-37 Daily Texan fluttered once and capitulated into a Regential-brewed [sic] stew of
censorship.” (Then, as now, Cactus
writers had a knack for the mixed metaphor.)

At the prodding of student
members of the student TSP Board, the censorship policy eventually was
rescinded. This did not sit well, however, with the Board of Regents, who felt
that TSP was too responsive to the wrong constituency. In 1937, Leo Haynes,
Secretary of the Board of Regents, notified TSP that the regents had decided to
rewrite the rulebook. Citing the powers granted them by their Rules and
Regulations, the regents unilaterally
changed the Students’ Association Constitution, the TSP Charter, and the TSP Handbook.

The changes revealed a lot
about the regents’ mindset. First, they amended the Students’ Association
Constitution by including a passage that explicitly extended the regents’ power
to change the TSP corporation charter and operating policies. Second, they
eliminated the TSP Board’s power to amend its own charter without regental
approval. Third, they sharply restricted the Students’ Association’s ability to
amend the charter – the new rules provided that all such changes had to be
approved by a two-thirds majority of an election in which at least 50 percent
of the eligible students voted.

A fourth change concerned
the qualifying requirements for Texan
editor candidates. Prior to this change, prospective candidates could qualify
either by taking journalism courses or by having worked in certain positions on
the Texan. The new rules, however,
required both. Presumably, making the classes mandatory would properly
indoctrinate future editors in the principles of professional journalism. Which
is to say, the regents hoped that candidates who’d taken the journalism classes
would not be so irresponsible as to criticize their elders on the Texan editorial page.

Compared to their changes
to the Students’ Association Constitution, the regents’ amendments to the TSP
charter seemed positively terse. They simply added a statement providing that
the TSP Board was now subject to the regents’ Rules and Regulations and that all subsequent action taken by the TSP Board
would have to be approved by the regents in order to take effect.

It was clear that the
regents wanted everyone to know who was boss. It was also clear that they
wanted to circumscribe the ability of any group to challenge their claim to
power. Thus, both the Students’ Association and the TSP Board itself were
effectively forbidden to change the TSP charter. Since the editor’s power base
derived largely from the Students’ Association and from the Board, the regents’
actions seemed designed to render Texan editors largely defenseless in the face of regental attacks.

There was one thing the
regents forgot to do, however. They didn’t eliminate the editor’s power to talk
directly to the students.

Crackdown, take 2

The ‘40s and early ‘50s saw
relatively little conflict between the Texan and the regents. World War II had turned everyone’s
attentions to Europe and the Pacific, and the sense of national unity made
students and administrators less likely to pick fights with each other. Even
the Texan’scriticism of the
regents after they fired UT President Homer Rainey in 1942 didn’t trigger any
significant attempt at regental censorship, although it did inspire some Texas
legislators to pass a resolution chastising the newspaper. And the Board’s
addition in 1948 of an “editorial director” to the TSP staff was accompanied by
promises that the man filling the new position would be an advisor, not a
censor.

One major change in the
TSP’s structure did take place in the early ‘50s however. At the instigation of
certain faculty members on the TSP Board, the Board petitioned the Student
Assembly to change the elected managing-editor position (then called “associate
editor”) into an appointed position. Their argument was straightforward. Since
the Texaneditor was the person
responsible for implementing student-oriented policy at the newspaper, and
since the managing editor was primarily an executive officer rather than a
policymaker, it followed that submitting the managing editor to an election
served no useful purpose. The managing editor was supposed to assist the editor
in his supervisory duties. It made no professional sense for the managing
editor to devise a “platform” and campaign for what was essentially a non-policy
position.

This reasoning seemed so
sound and so appealing that, for once, the editor, the Student Assembly, the
TSP Board, and the regents were all in agreement. Unfortunately, the Students’
Association Constitution- – even though the amendment won a majority of the
vote in a student election, the turnout was slightly short of the
regent-mandated 50 percent needed to pass an amendment. That didn’t prevent the
regents from obligingly changing the student constitution anyway – they were
cooperative fellows when they wanted to be.

Four years later, however,
the atmosphere of cooperation turned sour. Texan Editor Willie Morris antagonized both the Legislature
and the regents with his outspoken stands against segregation and Big Oil. In
editorials reminiscent of Joe Storm’s nearly two decades before, Morris
lambasted a Congressional bill that would have lightened the tax burden on the
state’s oil and gas industry. Texan
politicians were incensed. So was Regent Claude Voyles, himself a successful
oilman. Voyles knew full well that nearly two-thirds of the University’s funds
came from the UT endowment’s oil investments and oil-rich land holdings.
Reportedly, he instructed UT President Logan Wilson to censor Morris’s Texan.

Voyles later denied ever
having ordered censorship, but it’s indisputable that Wilson instructed the TSP
Board to censor future oil-policy editorials, as well as any other editorials
that Wilson felt were beyond the bounds of proper student concern.

But Morris was unbowed by
this exercise of regental fiat. As an elected editor, he felt he was
responsible primarily to the students rather than to the TSP Board. Morris took
what former editor Ronnie Dugger later termed “infuriated delight” in his
censorship, and printed some determinedly innocuous editorials with titles like
“Let’s Water the Pansies” in order to lampoon the regents’ insistence on
noncontroversiality.

Nor was this the only
tactic he used to make Wilson and the compliant TSP Board look bad – he also
printed blank space on the editorial page where a censored editorial would have
appeared. And in one memorable editorial, he characterized the content of the
other college newspapers that had been censored: “The censored exchange papers
pour into this office from all corners of the land, speaking their shameful,
tongueless idiom. They hide behind their blankets of shame by imploring
students to turn over a new leaf at the start of a new semester, give blood to
a blood drive, support a new cheerleader rule, use their leisure more wisely, support
student government, or collect wood for a bonfire.”

In one instance, Morris
submitted a New York Times
editorial on the oil regulation to the TSP censor. He also submitted some
direct quotations from Thomas Jefferson, minus the quotation marks. The censor
pulled the pieces, and Morris had the satisfaction of being able to say that
the TSP Board was afraid to reprint Times editorials or the writings of Thomas
Jefferson.

Eventually, the TSP Board
came around to supporting Morris – to some extent at least. Although he
frequently had to submit his editorials – including his columns on censorship
itself – to the Board for approval, the student-dominated Board accepted most
of them, though not without occasional modification of Morris’s fiery language.
At President Wilson’s request, the Board reaffirmed its right to set Texan policies, but it also reaffirmed the editor’s right
to some autonomy on the editorial page.

As editor, Morris himself
was a voting member of the Board, and he served as its secretary during his
term. As a result, a number of disputed editorials were included in the TSP
Board minutes. These passionate, articulate defenses of editorial freedom
remain a testament to Morris’s considerable abilities as a writer and to the
small-mindedness of the UT administration censors. “They [the regents] have
called this newspaper liberal,” he wrote. “Yet paradoxically, the stand we are
taking here is intrinsically conservative. We are merely seeking to preserve
that which was set down as ours by the founding fathers…. The moment our
philosophy bows before the fear of politics, or money, or both, on a university
campus, we are doomed as a nation and as a way of life.”

When Morris left the Texan in the spring of 1956 to prepare for his Rhodes
Scholarship, he knew he’d won a symbolic victory against the regents. But the
regents had the last laugh – the summer after Morris’s departure, they changed
the TSP charter yet again in a way that permanently undermined student control
over the TSP Board.

First, the regents
eliminated the Texaneditor, the Cactus editor, and the Ranger editor as voting members of the Board. (They became,
instead, ex-officio non-voting members.) Henceforth the Board would be composed
of the Students’ Association president, four students from the Student
Assembly, and four faculty members (two of them journalism faculty).

On its face, the new Board
had the same student-faculty ratio as the old one, but the regents’ second
major change made that student majority nearly powerless. The regents instituted
a faculty-dominated “executive committee” of the Board, which handled all the
duties of the Board’s old student-dominated “non-editorial committee.” That is,
it set the salaries of the managing editor and the TSP business manager. The
regents also strengthened the powers of the TSP “editorial manager (their term
for “censor”), whose duties and salary were to be specified by the executive
committee.

Former TSP General Manager
Loyd Edmonds, who retired in 1982, was hired by TSP in 1956 just as the regents
were imposing these changes. According to Edmonds, the ostensible purpose of
the editorial manager was “to prevent libel, misstatements, poor journalism.”
But it was common knowledge, says Edmonds, that the changes were “because of
Willie Morris,” and that the problem with Morris’s editorials was not that they
were unprofessional, but that “they were more or less political.”

Similarly the change in the
Board’s composition ostensibly was to make TSP’s structure conform to that of
other student publication boards around the country, but the real justification
was to diminish the voice of student editors in censorship and other policy
decisions.

Thanks to the regents’
actions during the summer of 1956, Morris’s symbolic victory for Texan editorial freedom had been followed by a practical
defeat.

The ‘60s and Frank Erwin

The regents never forgot
that a chief source of Morris’s intransigence was his loyalty to the student
body rather than to the TSP Board. As a result, when DeWitt Reddick, Director of the
School of Journalism and longtime TSP Board member, developed a list of
recommendations for changes in TSP, the regents isolates one of those
recommendations and imposed it unilaterally upon the TSP Board – they made the
editorship an appointed position rather than an elective one.

The 1963 press release in
which Chancellor Harry Ransom announced this change was a masterpiece of
rhetorical misdirection. Nowhere did it mention the word “election” or state
explicitly that election of editors had ended. Instead, it stressed,
gratuitously, that the TSP Board is “composed of students and members of the
faculty” and that “[the] Texas Student Publication Board membership and method
of operation were not changed.” The statement to the press was cleverly
designed to obscure the fact that a 60-year-old tradition was about to be
erased.

Reddick had already
developed his recommendations after a survey of journalists and journalism
educators showed they most favored appointment over election as a method of
choosing qualified editors. But the survey did not consider whether elective
editorship might be uniquely appropriate to the University of Texas, with its
tradition of regental meddling in the affairs of student organizations like
TSP. And it’s noteworthy that the regents did not bother to institute any of
Reddick’s other recommendations, which included higher salaries for Daily Texan workers.

The students of the
University of Texas did not sit idly by while this change occurred, however. In
the spring of 1964 the Student Assembly formally asked TSP to return to the
elective-editorship system, and the student body itself voted in an
Assembly-sponsored plebiscite by more than two to one to restore election of
the editor. In November of that year, the TSP Special Committee for Selection
of the TexanEditor voted nine to
one to recommend restoration of elections. Committee member DeWitt Reddick,
whose recommendation had been used to justify the regents’ action, voted with
the majority. TSP then submitted the request to the regents.

The student/faculty
consensus on the election issue made it impolitic for the regents to reject
that request. But even thought the restoration of elected editors was a victory
for students, it also planted the seeds of TSP’s downfall – the elected-editor
controversy brought Texas Student Publications to the attention of Frank Erwin
Jr., who had recently been appointed by Texas Governor John Connally to the
Board of Regents.

There is no brief way to
describe Frank Erwin, his effect on the University, and his relationship to its
students. It must be said in Erwin’s favor that his love for the University was
unmatched, and that he strove with all his energy to advance the University’s
power, prestige, and resources. But a concomitant of Erwin’s love was this: there
was no enterprise even remotely connected to The University of Texas that he
did not seek to control.

TSP and The Daily Texan were no exception. When Erwin, in the course of
reviewing the charter changes, discovered the extent of the corporation’s assets
and operations, he immediately set out to acquire formal control over TSP. In
the course of doing so, he also discovered that The Daily Texan was distributed for free to all the members of the
Texas Legislature.

Erwin was disturbed that
the Texan, with its liberal
editorial slant, was representing the University to the senators and
representatives. He was equally disturbed that the now-immense assets
(estimated by some to be as much as $600,000) that had accumulated during TSP’s
existence were not being used to advance the position and power of The
University of Texas. (According to Greg Lipscomb, then Students’ Association
president and chairman of the TSP Board, certain Austin banks had protested to
Erwin that TSP was storing and investing its capital out of state.)

In one fell swoop, Erwin
imposed a number of changes on the TSP charter. He passed a regental resolution
that eliminated free distribution of the Texan, made every aspect of TSP’s financial operations (no
matter how minute) subject to regental control, and rendered TSP powerless to
take any action whatsoever without approval by the regents. (Previously, they’d
had only discretionary veto power over TSP actions.)

And this was only the
beginning of Erwin’s preoccupation with The Daily Texan and TSP. When the next elected editor, Kaye
Northcott, began to editorialize about the war heating up in Vietnam, the
regent took offense at the Texan’s
criticisms of his friend, Lyndon Johnson. Now an Austin journalist, Northcott
recalls her editorship primarily in terms of Erwin’s ongoing battle with the Texan. As a result of those Vietnam editorials, says
Northcott, “all of a sudden Frank Erwin was interested in every nuance of TSP.”
Erwin convened a panel of professional journalists and journalism educators to
generate recommendations for new restrictions on the Texan. (The journalists, who knew a censor when they saw
one, failed to oblige.)

Erwin also tried to
persuade the Board of Regents to eliminate salaried student positions at the Texan – this would have forced Texan staff members to severely limit their involvement
with the paper. Once again his efforts were less than successful; looming over
the diminutive Northcott, he grilled her at regents’ meeting about her salary,
but ended up arousing only sympathy for the beleaguered Texan editor.

Neither of these failures
discouraged Erwin from trying to bring the Texan to heel. Over the next several years, he scrutinized
all TSP expenditures, sometimes delaying Texan paychecks for weeks. And he threatened the journalism
department by hinting that he might cut funding for the planned communications
building, which the department would share with TSP. The TSP censors kept
themselves busy screening out a number of articles and editorials that, it was
feared, might overly provoke Erwin. They claimed to be pulling “unjournalistic”
and “unprofessional” pieces, but, says Northcott, “they weren’t protecting
against libel – they were protecting against left-wing opinion.”

Not that everything was
screened out. Between 1965 and 1971, Texan editors managed to voice wide-ranging criticisms of both Erwin and the
regents, as well as of Lyndon Johnson’s war. Erwin’s boldfaced political
manipulations, his outrageous statements, his petulant quarrels with students
and with other administrators – all were documented by Texan reporters during those years. Occasionally the
stories were censored, but more often they got into print, embarrassing and
infuriating Erwin. But this only strengthened his resolve to neutralize The
Daily Texan.

TSP falls into Erwin’s clutches

Throughout its existence,
the Texanhad always paid its own
way. Instead of relying upon University funds, it had supported itself and
grown through its own advertising revenue, and through the subscription monies
that the Students’ Association provided it through the Blanket Tax. The Tax –
an optional fee that supported student government, student publications,
student athletics, and the Cultural Entertainment Committee – was in some ways
analogous to today’s Student Services Fee. The difference was that this fee was
voluntary, and that students made the final decisions about how it was spent.
And it was student government that appropriated student money in order to pay
for student subscriptions to The Daily Texan. Until 1971, the UT administration, much less the
Board of Regents had nothing to do with it.

Even the Texan’s operation
on campus was paid for out of TSP, not University, funds. TSP had contributed
$125,000 to help pay for the construction of the first Journalism Building (now
the Geography Building), and it later dedicated $205,000 to the building funds
for the Jesse H. Jones Communications Center, where the Texan and TSP now reside. In return for its aid in the
construction of these facilities, and for its educational services to the
Department of Journalism, TSP received guaranteed floor space in the buildings.

Yet in spite of TSP’s
financial autonomy, Erwin liked to paint the Texan as using (and misusing) University funds. Although
the Blanket Tax was collected and disbursed entirely by students, it was
deposited temporarily in University bank accounts. Erwin sought and obtained a
statement by the State Auditor that any money ever paid out of a University
bank account was legally University money. Even though the Tax had been
initiated and administered for more than half a century by students, Erwin used
the State Auditor’s “ruling” (it was actually a non-binding opinion) to justify
increased control over both Students’ Association and TSP revenue.

Ever since he’d reviewed
the TSP charter in 1965, Erwin knew that the charter was scheduled to expire in
1971. He also knew that when it did, and when the assets reverted to the Board
of Regents, he’d have a chance to remake TSP in a form he could control
completely.

But this opportunity also
posed a substantial risk to Erwin’s plans. During the ‘60s, the Texas
Legislature passed the Texas Non-Profit Corporation Act, which provided that
non-profit corporations like TSP could amend their charters simply by majority
vote of the board of directors. If TSP managed to get rechartered under the
Act, it would eliminate any claim Erwin had to control over the student
publications. (There were those who argued that the regents had had no formal
power over TSP ever since the Act was passed, but before 1971 there was no
formal challenge to regental authority.)

It’s probable that neither
student government nor the student members of the TSP Board really ever grasped
the depth of Erwin’s intentions until the end. Early in 1971, the TSP Board
proposed charter amendments to the regents that would have extended the
lifespan of the corporation to 250 years. It also would have established a more
effective student majority over the TSP Board: seven students and four faculty
members.

But Erwin and the regents
weren’t having any. At Erwin’s instructions, UT Chancellor Charles LeMaistre
(Erwin’s friend and personal physician) named a committee of 13 Texas
newspapers to advise the Chancellor in drafting a regent-approved TSP charter
revision. Despite this pretense of seeking professional advice, it was clear
that LaMaistre or Erwin had come up with the basic proposal, and that they had
meant for the editors to rubber-stamp it.

LeMaistre’s plan included
two changes designed to divorce the Texan from direct student input. First, it proposed to shift control of TSP
from students representing the whole student body to students selected from the
journalism school. Second, the plan would make the Texan editorship appointive rather than elective.

Ostensibly, the plan was
motivated the regents legitimate concern about “professionalism” at the Texan and about its ongoing relationship with the
journalism school. But Erwin, a hopeless extrovert, was incapable of keeping
his real intentions secret. One evening in April of 1971, over drinks at the
Forty Acres Club, Erwin revealed to TSP Board Member Tim Donahue that he was
going to “fuck the Texan.”

By 1971, Erwin had built up
quite a grudge against the newspaper. Many of the Texan stories detailing his combativeness and abuses of
power had found their way into the state and national press. In particular, he
was incensed by Texancoverage of
two stories. First was the firing of Arts and Sciences Dean John Silber, whose
political power at the University threatened to rival his own. The second was
the Bauer House scandal – it turned out that Erwin and the regents were
building a $907,000 residence for LaMaistre, and were most likely paying for it
out of University money. The Texan
story led to an embarrassing, though inconclusive, state senate investigation
of the mansion’s financing.

As a result of Erwin’s
antagonism, the TSP Board found the regents dragging their feet on their
requests for an approval of TSP’s own charter revisions. It didn’t take a legal
scholar to see why the regents were taking so long – if the charter weren’t
renewed by July 1971, the regents would suddenly gain complete control over the
assets of a million-dollar corporation. And Erwin would be able to reduce the Texan from an independent student newspaper to a laboratory
publication for the journalism school. TSP was in a fix. All during the spring,
the TSP Board engaged in intensive meetings and negotiations in order to keep
the corporation alive and the Texan
independent. TexanEditor Andy
Yemma addressed the Board of Regents and requested an indefinite extension to
the current charter.

No resolution was reached,
however. On May 31, the TSP Board met with LeMaistre and Regent Jenkins Garrett
to hammer out a final compromise concerning the proposed revised charter, but
TSP refused to accept a regent-drafted provision that the new corporation would
dissolve if any part of the charter were ruled invalid in court.

Why did the regents insist
on such a provision? Perhaps in the hope that if TSP pursued its independence
under the Non-Profit Corporation Act it would do so at the price of its own
continued existence. But this time it was the TSP Board that wasn’t buying.

In the absence of a
compromise charter, the TSP Board voted to amend its charter by adding a
seven-month extension. But the extension didn’t do much good. According to the
original charter, TSP ceased to exist on July 6, 1971, and on July 9 the
regents voted to instruct the state attorney general to sue the TSP Board
members for recovery of the corporation’s assets. (Since the University of
Texas is officially a state agency, its lawyer is the attorney general.) On
July 20, the attorney general filed suit against the TSP Board, and six days
later TSP responded with a countersuit.

To this day, Bob Binder,
then Students’ Association President and TSP Board chairman and now a local
attorney in Austin, believes that TSP could have won the lawsuits. After all,
he says, TSP’s extension of its own charter was perfectly legal within the
provisions of the Non-Profit Corporation Act. What’s more, it was clear to
anyone who’d researched the history of the Texan that the regents couldn’t claim to be recovering
money they’d originally outlaid – all of TSP’s assets had been generated by
advertising and by student-controlled Blanket Tax money.

The problem, Binder says,
was that even if TSP had won, it would have lost. Erwin had sworn that if TSP
managed to survive the regents’ legal assault, he’d see that it was forced to
move off campus. “We believed we could successfully get the printing presses,”
Binder says. But Binder and the TSP Board had read studies of student
newspapers at other universities that had moved off-campus. Very few had
survived.

Erwin clearly had TSP by
the short hairs. But TSP and the Texan had some leverage of their own. Richard Adams, a professor of
anthropology, managed to sign a statement praising The Daily Texan for its “quality, courage, and freedom” and warning
the regents that limiting the Texan’s freedom would “disgrace the university.”
State Senator A.R. “Babe” Schwartz also passed a resolution endorsing “the
tradition of a free university press as symbolized by The Daily Texan, student
newspaper at the University of Texas at Austin for 71 years.” The resolution
urged the Board of Regents to “guarantee the continued integrity” of Texas
Student Publications.

Nor was the Texan without pull in the media. Newspapers from all over
the state, and indeed all over the country, reported the spectacle of a
grudge-minded political appointee’s attempts to destroy an idealistic student
newspaper. On May 21, 1971, The New York Times ran a detailed account of Erwin’s efforts to strike
back at the Texan– even the Times attributed his motives to the Bauer House
controversy. It became clear to political observers that if Erwin succeeded in
destroying the Texan, he’d do so
at the price of an angry backlash among the UT alumni he relied upon for his
political support.

Even while the two lawsuits
progressed in that courts that summer, TSP representatives engaged in secret
negotiations with LeMaistre and UT President Stephen Spurr to develop a
compromise that would allow Erwin to back off without losing face. At the same
time, the plan was designed to preserve, as much as possible, TSP’s scheme of operations.
Most importantly, the new plan would allow Texan editors to continue to be elected.

Called the “Declaration of
Trust,” the agreement was adopted late that summer. In spite of the word
“trust” in its name, says UT System Attorney W. O. Schultz, the agreement did
not actually set up a trust arrangement between the University and TSP. This is
a debatable claim, since on its face the agreement does classify the Board of
Regents as “trustees,” and it seems likely that a Texas court, faced with interpreting
the document, would interpret it as an actual trust. (In law, a trust is an
arrangement whereby the legal ownership of property belongs to one party who
must use it for the “benefit” of another party or parties, who are considered
the trust “beneficiaries.”)

But Schultz holds that the
Declaration of Trust merely provided that legal ownership of all the assets of
TSP would be transferred to the Board of Regents, who would use them “solely
for the maintenance and support” of the student publications. (That the Board
of Regents is constrained to use the assets in this way is a primary reason for
thinking the Declaration of Trust establishes a true trust under Texas law.)
The TSP Board of Operating Trustees, and its membership would be as follows:
four undergraduates from the journalism department, two students elected at
large, two journalism faculty members, one faculty member from the business
school, and two professional newspapermen. The agreement was amended in 1974 to
provide that advertising students as well as journalism students could serve in
the journalism positions on the Board.

The editorship of the Texan would remain elective, but in every other respect
Erwin had won. Although the Students’ Association President would remain as a
non-voting member, the new TSP Board would be divorced almost entirely from the
substantive control of the Students’ Association. And all the assets would now
be controlled by the regents.

When the Declaration of
Trust was revealed to the public that summer, however, both sides claimed
victory. Binder felt that he’d preserved the most important guarantee of a
responsive yet independent Texan–
the editor would continue to be elected.

But Erwin saw the new
agreement as an occasion for celebration. “I certainly congratulate Regents
Chairman John Peace and Regents Attorney Preston Shirley,” Erwin crowed, “on
successfully achieving all of the Regents’ goals without the necessity of a
trial of the pending litigation. The publishing board will now operate under
the Regents’ Rules and Regulations and the TSP assets will be owned and
controlled by the Board of Regents.” Erwin then took a last stab at TSP: “I
heartily congratulate TSP attorneys Joe Latting and Tom Gee on getting a legal
fee of $16,000 out of TSP funds for negotiating the dissolution of the
corporation and for negotiating the transfer of the remaining TSP assets of
$600,000 to the Regents.”

TSP versus the Texan

The resolution of the
rechartering crisis didn’t end Erwin’s struggle with the Texan, or course. Throughout the remainder of his term on
the Board of Regents, and during his subsequent years as a UT lobbyist, Erwin
continued to quarrel with the newspaper, while the Texan continued to criticize Erwin. At the regents’
instigation, the Texanwas removed
from mandatory Student Services Fee funding. In response to that move, Editor
Michael Eakin published an issue of the Texan whose front page was entirely blank, save for a small
box marked “We do not fund anything that we don’t control.” (The Texan was restored to mandatory funding after Erwin left
the Board of Regents).

But for all the apparent
drama of that confrontation, the real struggle between Erwin and the Texan ended in 1971. After that, the focus shifted – the
new enemy of the Texan
independence was less the administration than the TSP Board itself. This
antagonism between the Board and the Texan was the natural outcome of the changes Frank Erwin forced in the
composition of the TSP Board. Prior to 1971, the students on the Board had been
active, interested, and representative of the whole student body. But the
majority of the new Board’s student contingent was drawn from one small segment
of the University community. Together with the two journalism faculty members,
the four journalism /advertising students constituted a simple majority for the
College of Communication on the TSP Board.

On its face, this setup
shouldn’t have presented any problems. After all, who better to decide policy
for TSP than journalism and advertising students and faculty, who have a
professional interest in the publications? Yet over the years it typically has
been difficult to find journalism or advertising students who are genuinely
interested in and knowledgeable about TSP. (Recently, for example, the TSP
Board had to appoint replacements for two journalism student members who’d left
only a few months after their terms began. Most of the applicants admitted to
not having had any real knowledge about TSP before the Board advertised the
vacant positions.)

Another thing has become
increasingly apparent through the ‘70s and ‘80s – the Department of Journalism
has an entirely different agenda for TSP from the one the organization’s
founders intended.

One of the items on this
agenda has always been binding the Texan to the service of the journalism school. This has been reflected in
several actions by the Board over the years, but it’s particularly evident in
the Board’s emphasis on the course requirements for the editor and the managing
editor.

Increasingly, the
journalism faculty members, such as Mike Quinn, Martin Gibson, and Griff
Singer, have been the dominant voices on the TSP Board. This is easy to explain
– the journalism/advertising students naturally tend to defer to the wisdom of
the journalism professors, while the professional members who often live in
Dallas, Fort Worth, or Houston, tend to rely on the professors to inform them
about issues that are important to the University community.

But the dominance of the
journalism-faculty voice has led to the Board’s shying away from policy
decisions that might risk undermining the legitimacy of the journalism school.
In the late ‘70s, outgoing student Board members eliminated the course
requirements altogether – this action was almost immediately revoked by the
next TSP Board, at the instigation of a journalism-student member, Jeff Case.
And in 1982, Gardner Selby, a Plan II student who was widely regarded as a
superbly qualified editorial candidate but who lacked some of the journalism
courses, was certified as a candidate only to have his certification revoked at
the last minute. Later that year, the Board delayed the appointment of graduate
student Maureen Paskin as managing editor while they sough to lure a likely
journalism student to take the job instead.

Clearly, there was ample precedent
for the Board’s refusal last April to certify Berrong, Cademartori, and Burch
as candidates for managing editor.

The issue of the journalism
courses raises some important questions, the answers to which were muddied by
the Board’s handling of the managing-editor hiring this spring. If the
candidates know they have to take the courses in order to serve as editor, why
for crying out loud didn’t they take them?

The answer lies in the fact
that the Department of Journalism typically can’t offer enough spots in basic
journalism courses to handle the demand. This means that lower-division
students, as well as non-journalism majors stand less chance of being able to
register for J312 and J314, which are not only requirements but are
prerequisites for the other journalism courses.

Since the Texan was founded, as a service to the University community
at large – rather than as a career-training center for journalism students –
how does the journalism faculty justify its preoccupation with the course
requirements? Board Member Martin Gibson, who left the Board this spring after
leading the rejection of the managing-editor candidates, admits that it’s
possible for a good journalist to never have taken a journalism course. (He
cites James Reston as an example.) But given that insight, why did Gibson and
Singer not even consider the possibility that Berrong, Cademartori, and Burch
may have deserved to have their qualifications waived?

Perhaps it’s because the
journalism requirements, which were instituted back in 1937 after Joe Storm and
Ed Hodge proved their “lack of professionalism” by bucking the UT
administration’s authority, had taken on a life of their own. If the Board had
waived the journalism-course requirements or, failing that, revised them to
reflect a more trustworthy test of journalistic competence, it might have been
regarded by some as an admission that the journalism curriculum was
superfluous.

Journalism professors tend
to be sensitive about such criticisms of their curriculum, and with good reason.
From the beginning, journalism as an academic discipline has been under attack,
both from academics in the liberal arts and from professional journalists.
Professors in other disciplines have openly questioned whether the attributes
of a good journalist – writing skill, respect for the facts, and an inquiring
mind – cannot be learned equally well or better outside the journalism school.
And according to surveys in Journalism Educator, as well as a recent collection of articles in the Washington
Monthly, there are large numbers of
newspaper and magazine editors who think that college journalism education
ill-prepares students for careers in journalism, and who prefer to hire
students who’ve majored in something else.

This is not to say that
journalism courses aren’t useful. For many people, they provide the skills and
insights that it takes to make a professional journalist. But they’re not uniquely useful, and a substantial proportion of professional
journalists weren’t journalism majors. Over the years, some student Board
members have sought to change some of the requirements to reflect this – that’s
why some of the current course requirements are waivable. But this waivability
is meaningless when the most vocal and powerful minority on the Board refuses to
recognize any normal circumstance under which they’d consider waiving the
courses.

Complicating the journalism
faculty’s intransigence is its streak of paranoia when it comes to the Daily
Texan staff. A number of journalism
professors like to say that there’s a “junta” or a “clique” in control at the Texan and that this clique conspires to keep qualified
journalism majors from getting published or from applying for the top positions
at the paper.

One frequent version of
this story involves the Plan II Honors Liberal Arts Program. Over the years,
Plan II students have made up a substantial percentage of the Texan staff. Many journalism professors believe that these
Plan II students are dilettantes – after all, if they were seriously interested in journalism, they’d be journalism
majors. (Gardner Selby, the Plan II student whose course requirements the Board
refused to waive, later worked for the Washington Post) What’s the basis for the journalism faculty’s
paranoia? Probably the fact that occasionally there are journalism students who
do good work in their classes but who, for some reason or other, don’t become
successes at the Texan. Or perhaps
a competent story generated by a student in the journalism lab courses fails to
make it into print at the Texan.
At the same time, the professors see the non-journalism majors such as Plan II
students rapidly climbing the editorial hierarchy. Their conclusion? It must be
a “clique.” It would be dishonest to claim that the Texan staff is never subject to cliquish influences – put
any working group of men and women together and you have a political
organization, like it or not. But in general anyone who displays competence in
journalism can get a job on the Texan
staff. It has less to do with whom you know than with how well you do your job.

The deep suspicion of on
the part of the journalism faculty is expressed again and again in statements
that presume a certain attitude on the part of Texan staffers. “I don’t deny for a minute that you can
gain [journalism] experience outside the classroom,” Gibson said at the TSP
Board meeting last spring, “But I’m certainly happier with people who have gone
through there and indicated a willingness to take the courses.”

The thing is, most
candidates have been willing to take the courses. Berrong, Cademartori, and
Burch each tried to take the journalism courses early on, but since they
weren’t journalism students, they had trouble gaining entry. Says Berrong, “
They [the journalism advisors] basically said they weren’t accepting anyone who
isn’t a journalism major.”

Gibson’s charge that the
prospective candidates had irresponsibly avoided taking the courses assumes
that the candidates had decided to apply for managing editor one or two years
in advance. In fact, they hadn’t. Besides, they knew the Board could waive the
journalism-course requirements if the applicants could demonstrate they had
equivalent experience. Yet neither Gibson nor Singer even allowed discussion of
the applicants’ alternative qualifications.

What the journalism faculty
may not realize is that their insistence that there’s a Texan “clique” frequently becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy. After their abrupt dismissal of the managing-editor candidates last
spring, Gibson and Singer extended the deadline for managing-editor candidates
in order to flush another candidate from the woodwork. No qualified candidates
came forward; TexanAssignments
Editor Lauri Jones, who considered applying for the job, had taken the waivable
courses but did not meet the non-waivable requirements. Nevertheless, at the
second TSP Board meeting Gibson stated that he was against waiving the
requirements because “I am told – and it disturbs me a little bit – that the
people in charge of the Texan…
have strongly discouraged other applicants.”

For Gibson, it was one more
proof of the “clique” theory. What he failed to consider, however, is that
neither TexanEditor David Nather
nor Editor-elect Sean Price was conspiring against the TSP Board’s decision –
instead, they were merely being honest. Price says he told those students who
were considering applying “that they would receive a hostile welcome from the
staff, not me, but by the people who supported the original three candidates
and felt the Board was wrong to refuse them in the first place.”

Thus, at a stroke Gibson
and Singer had created another situation in which the TSP Board and the Texan were at odds. For the journalism professors, the
situation confirmed their fears that an invidious Texan “clique” existed; for the newspaper staff, it
confirmed their perception that the Board put its own goals ahead of the
efficient and harmonious running of The Daily Texan.

Eventually, the Board went
ahead and chose Burch to be managing editor that summer. Rather than waive the
requirements, which would have looked like backing down, the Board, “declared a
vacancy” so they could appoint anyone, regardless of the requirements.

Undercutting the editorship

Unfortunately, the Board
has not limited itself to quarrelling with editor and managing-editor candidates
over the course requirements. In 1983, the Board took action that permanently
eliminated the greater proportion of the power the editor had over the
newspaper. In doing so, the Board made the editorship of the Texan largely meaningless, except for its symbolic value.
Although the Board claimed to be advancing the professionalism of the paper,
the underlying rationale was an effort to limit the power of Roger Campbell,
who’d been elected that year as the first black editor of The Daily Texan

Campbell had won the
election with an overwhelming majority, in part because he campaigned for the
position with the support of most of the staff, as well as substantial support
from the journalism students and faculty on the TSP Board. Once Campbell took
office, however, much of his popular support leaked away. The Texan staff found that Campbell seemed to bee peremptory
and overemotional in his decision-making; Campbell, in turn, felt the staff was
stubbornly unprofessional in its resistance to his attempts to run the paper.

In the course of the summer
of 1983, this mutual hostility only got worse. Eventually, Campbell began to
feel that he had little control over the newspaper, and he began to wonder what
would happen to his campaign promises to make the Texan more professional.

Enter Nancy Green, the new
General manager of TSP, who’d succeeded outgoing general manager Lloyd Edmonds
in 1982. When Green, an ex-officio member of the TSP Board, first came to the
University of Texas, she was appalled at the Texan’s practice of electing its editor. Not only did this
practice seem unprofessional to Green, but also it diminished the power she
would have over the Texan. When Green saw Campbell’s dissatisfaction with the
way things were going, she approached him with a proposal to make editorship
appointive by the Board.

Campbell took the idea and
ran with it. At Green’s urging, he came to believe that many of the problems he
was having with the staff derived from the fact that he’d had to be “political”
in order to get elected as editor. (Other staff members who served with
Campbell, however, believe he would have been appointed by the Board, had the
position been an appointive one in 1983.) Campbell presented the TSP Board with
a proposal, drafted by Green, that would have ended elected editorships

In his enthusiasm for this
proposal, Campbell was somewhat naive. Appointing the editor doesn’t make the
process apolitical – it just means that prospective editors have to appeal to a
different (and much narrower) constituency: the TSP Board. And the TSP Board
itself noted back in 1965 that two-week election process is far more likely to
bring out the strengths and weaknesses of editor candidates that the relatively
short interviews conducted by the Board.

Initially, Campbell had
some success in arousing some enthusiasm for Green’s proposal. But Students
Association President Mitch Kreindler led a successful counterattack – he
presented the Board with a survey of former editors and former Students
Association presidents who condemned the concept of an appointed Texan editor. Nearly all the responses stresses that the
elected editorship had been one of the main factors that kept the Texan relatively free and independent.

Eventually, the Board
rejected the proposal, choosing instead to stiffen the course requirements for
editor candidates. But Campbell’s attempts to change editor selection had
opened the door to his own downfall. During the discussion of the appointive
editorship proposal, another proposal bubbled to the surface—this one allowing
the editor to be elected but limiting his formal power to four pages of the Texan: the editorial pages. The argument was that this
organizational change would depoliticize the newspaper as a whole, while at the
same time preserving the tradition of elected editorship.

Initially, this proposal
was also turned down, but summer Managing Editor Mark Stutz and fall Managing
Editor Suzanne Michel each saw an opportunity to free themselves from
Campbell’s control. In the fall of ‘83, Michel resubmitted that proposal,
arguing that it would make the newspaper more professional by mimicking the
organizational scheme of non-student urban dailies, such as the Dallas
Morning News, (Michel now freely
admits that she was motivated to promote the change by her dislike of
Campbell’s management style.) The Board passed it, and Campbell and all
subsequent Daily Texaneditors
have had their formal power limited to controlling the content of the editorial
page. The Board rationalized this decision by claiming that since the editor
was elected in order to represent student opinion, it follows that giving the
editor control over the editorial page while eliminating his direct power over
the rest of the paper is the right combination of responsiveness and
professionalism.

Yet the Board ignored a
critical consideration – editor candidates are typically not elected on the
basis of their proposed editorial stances. Instead, they’re elected on their
promises to increase coverage of various aspects of the University community,
or to make other changes to the rest of the newspaper. Moreover, the editor’s
ultimate responsibility for the entire paper is reflected in both the language
of the TSP Handbook of Operating Procedures and in the editor’s salary (he’s paid more than the managing
editor). The current language in the TSP Handbook states that the Texan editor is responsible for shaping the policy of the
newspaper, but does not provide him with any formal power to enforce it.

Ironically, over the last
four years this change in the Handbook has increased the politicization of the
newspaper, not decreased it. “In a way,” says current editor Sean Price, “I
have to be morepolitical, since I
have to persuade everyone that any given policy is correct.” Although his
relationships with his managing editors have been good so far, Price says,
“there’s always the undercurrent that the managing editor might try to pull
rank sometime. That’s not paranoia on my part – it’s just a recognition of the
power the ME has over the majority of the newspaper.”

As it stands now, Price
says, the Texaneditor has a lot
of responsibility but not a lot of power to back it up. “The editor is the one
who catches hell over what goes into the newspaper,” he says, but adds that
“what power the editor has comes from the cooperation of the ME.”

Not only has the Handbook
change diminished the editor’s power, but it’s sapped the readership power as
well. It’s worth comparing the Texan
to other urban daily newspapers. If the readers are unhappy with the news
coverage in a non-student newspaper, they can refuse to buy it, or buy another
paper. But student subscriptions to the Texan are mandatory – there’s no way the market can force
the Texanto be responsive if its
news coverage id inadequate. And this is another key reason for electing the Texan editor – in the absence of a free market, it’s the
only way of guaranteeing significant input into the paper from the students.

Nor is it obviously true
that it’s “unprofessional” to have the same person in charge of the editorial
and news departments of a newspaper. If that were so, quite a few newspapers –
including local papers like the Westlake Picayune and the Dripping Springs Dispatch – would deserve to shut down.

Back to the future

Over the course of its
87-year history, the Texanhas
been altered again and again by forces inimical to student interests. What was
once a student-owned, student-run, independent newspaper has become a
University-owned “auxiliary enterprise” whose board is unrepresentative of the
community it serves, and whose editor has been restricted to mere opinion
writing. An unelected position that was designed to assist the editor back in
1951 – the managing editorship – has become the most directly powerful position
at the newspaper.

The TSP Board has the power
to reverse some of the more egregious changes, however. And current UT
administration, possibly the least antagonistic in years toward student
initiatives, isn’t likely to resist Board sponsored amendments to the TSP Handbook and to the Declaration of Trust. The question
becomes: What can the TSP Board do to revive the Texan’s democratic traditions
and make the newspaper more responsive to the University community?

First, it can restore the
power to the editorship. Although the managing editor should remain in charge
of the day-to-day operation of the paper, the TSP Board should reinstate the
Handbook clause that made the managing editor subordinate to the editor in
matters of policy and in major decision-making. Currently, the editor is paid as
if he had that power, and editor candidates run on the promise of being able to
improve on the whole paper, not just the editorial page. Restoring the editor’s
power would mean that he would really be earning that salary, and that the
editor’s campaign could be something more than well-meaning promises. It would
also mean that, in spite of mandatory student subscriptions, the newspaper
could still be responsive to the needs of its community.

A second necessary reform
would be to improve the University community’s representation on the TSP Board.
As it now stands, not only is the Board unrepresentative, but it’s also
typically very difficult to find enough interested and knowledgeable
journalism/advertising students to fill those four seats on the TSP Board:

* Electing all the student representatives on the Board
at large rather than choosing four from the journalism or advertising schools.

* Restoring the editors’ rights as voting members.

The third and final reform
involves the course requirements for the editor and managing-editor positions.
Since the basic journalism courses are overenrolled and difficult both for
journalism majors and non-majors to get into, the Board should follow the lead
of the colleges of Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences and encourage the
Department of Journalism to institute a credit-by-examination program. Many,
and perhaps most, students with journalism experience find those introductory
courses not just superfluous, but painfully easy. Credit by examination would
allow those editor candidates who have the experience provided by those courses
to get the necessary credit without having to pass through the bottleneck of
journalism registration. And it would mean that journalism majors no longer
have to have an unfair advantage over non-majors when it comes to meeting those
requirements for the editor and managing-editor positions.

In addition to promoting
credit-by-examination programs, the Board can change the Handbook to allow for
the course requirements to be met by equivalent experience on the Texan or on other publications. A Texan news assistant or general reporter, for example,
should be able to claim credit for J312 (introductory journalism) and J322 (a
reporting course). And anyone who’s served as an associate managing editor
should be regarded as having demonstrated experience at least equal to that
provided by J314 (copy editing). Proof of equivalent experience should justify
waiving the course requirements, and all the course requirements should be made
waivable by a simple majority of the Board. Currently, the student majority of
the Board is meaningless, since it takes an affirmative vote of eight of the 11
Board members to waive the waivable course requirements.

None of these three
proposed changes is radical; in one form or another, all were once standard
operating procedure for the TSP Board and for the newspaper. It is only after
TSP’s authority was chipped away by the UT administration and Board of Regents
– and after Frank Erwin’s reconstruction of TSP polarized the Board and The
Daily Texan– that the limitations
and restrictions were imposed.

What will it take now is
courage on the part of the student and faculty members of the Board – courage
to recognize how much of the Texan’s independence has been stripped away, and
courage to do something about it.

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