Ouster Aftermath

Nebraska's Senator George William Norris found on his desk last week a letter from onetime President William Elmer Sealock of the Municipal University of Omaha. In it the complaint was made that Senator Norris' old enemy, the power interests, had cost Dr. Sealock his job. There was nothing Senator Norris could do, though, because William Elmer Sealock was dead.

The University of Omaha has had the ''Municipal" in its title for only four years. Before that it was as rock-ribbed a private Presbyterian institution as ever had a 9 o'clock curfew for students under 18. One year of Depression was enough to break it and in 1931 the city took it over. The school board appointed nine regents and the regents called Dean Sealock of the Uni-versity of Nebraska College of Education to put the university on its feet.

President Sealock arrived in Omaha tingling with conviction that the future of higher education lay with municipal institutions. His first contribution to that future was to shake out of the faculty a quantity of Presbyterian preachers. His second was to replace them with young Ph.D.'s. The new instructors, with their liberal leanings, proved Dr. Seacock's undoing. Few months ago word got out that he was at odds with fully half the regents, including their Chairman James Edward Davidson.

James Edward Davidson is a name to command respect among Nebraskans. In 1923 Mr. Davidson was King of Ak Sar Ben (Nebraska spelled backwards), Omaha's Mardi Gras. In 1929. by courtesy of the American Legion, he was First Citizen of Omaha. He is president of Nebraska Power Co., past president of the National Electric Light Association. Mr. Davidson was reported dissatisfied with ihe disrespectful treatment which Dr. Sealock's young instructors gave private ownership of public utilities.

Last spring Omaha students, assembling in mass meeting, charged that Dr. W. H. Thompson, Dean of Men, hired some of their number with FERA money to sit in on classes, report radical statements by professors. Regretfully Dr. Sealock said that there was such a spy system. The regents said there was not. Three weeks ago Dr. Sealock was voted out of office.

It shortly appeared that faculty, students, most of Omaha were on Dr. Sea-lock's side. Some of his friends arranged a conference with a doubtful regent who might be persuaded to switch his vote. Late one afternoon Dr. Sealock was waiting to hear the result of that conference when he sat down at his desk, started his letter to Senator Norris. The telephone rang. The doubtful regent had called off the conference. ''It looks like a long fight," said the voice on the telephone. Dr. Sealock finished the letter, sat down to supper. After supper he talked quietly with his wife and daughter in the sun room. Finally he got up, walked into the kitchen. There he mixed a glass of gopher poison, gulped it down.

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