The Right to Be a Buttinsky

On most campuses, no one would think there was anything very strange about the ideas of Frank Richardson. A mild-mannered man with a distracted, scholarly air, he is chairman of the biology department at the University of Nevada, has never done anything more unorthodox than ride to class on a motorcycle. But Richardson happens to believe in high academic standards and intellectual discipline. It was that belief that got him into hot water with Nevada's new President Minard W. Stout.

A former professor of education who was principal of the laboratory high school at the University of Minnesota, President Stout does not put too much store by conventional academic standards. He thinks that an emphasis on such "discipline" subjects as mathematics, languages and history is little more than "intellectual snobbery." Last fall, acting under this credo, Stout announced that Nevada would henceforth have no entrance standards at all, would take in any Nevada high-school graduate no matter what his ability or preparation. With that, the Stout v. Richardson battle was on.

"Mind Your Own Business." As head of the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors, Biologist Richardson felt he had a duty to protest. After one Stout speech, he made some pointed criticisms, during the question period, of the new policy. He was also critical when Stout abolished the faculty's Academic Council. Later, he committed what to Stout seemed the most serious offense of all: he began distributing about the campus reprints of an article by Historian Arthur Bestor Jr. (TIME, Jan. 5) of the University of Illinois. The article was called "Aimlessness in Education," and it echoed Biologist Richardson's opinions completely. It denounced the brand of education that many modern pedagogues are preaching, called for a restoration of intellectual content to the U.S. curriculum.

A few days after that, Stout summoned Richardson to his office, told him that he had been hired to teach biology, that he should "mind your own business and stop being a buttinsky all over the campus." Richardson, still convinced that it is a professor's business to be concerned about educational philosophy, went right on discussing the matter with his colleagues. To President Stout, such talk amounted to a "vicious conspiracy." Last March he ordered Richardson and four other like-minded professors to show cause before the board of regents why they should not be fired.

Stout eventually changed his mind about the other four, but his attempt to dismiss Richardson raised an academic hue & cry far beyond Nevada's borders. At the University of Illinois, dozens of facultymen'signed a petition of protest; other petitions went the rounds at Stanford and the University of California. Meanwhile, four Reno lawyers offered to fight Richardson's case without fee. This week the case was up before the board of regents.

"I Will Defend . . ." At the hearing, the administration's special counsel, Harlan Heward, did his best against Biologist Richardson. To help prove that Richard son was nothing but a troublemaker, counsel tried to get Harold N. Brown, profes sor of education, to denounce the distribution of the Bestor article as an effort to split the campus. Surely, said Lawyer Heward, the article had angered Professor Brown. No, said Brown, it had not. "Well," cried Heward, "you must admit that the article wasn't any good." Answered Brown: "I never did agree with it, but that's a matter of opinion [Richar'd-son] had every right to send it, and I will defend the best I know how that right."

At week's end, the board of regents was still trying to decide about that right -- the right of a professor to hold to his own educational principles and to be a buttinsky when he feels those principles are en dangered. But whatever their decision, some facultymen felt that .Stoutism had already carried the day. Said Author Walter Van Tilburg Clark (The Ox-Bow Incident), as he turned in his resignation as lecturer in English: "It appears to me that the administration is seeking to reduce the university to a manageable mediocrity."

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