The panel answers questions.; 24:15 min.

Don Carleton:
Thank you, Doug. We have a few minutes for some questions and we have some microphones set up too. If anyone would like to come up and ask any of our panelists a question about any of the topics that they discussed tonight. Yes.

Teresa Bond:
This is for Mr. Speck. My husband was a student here in the 1960s. And his story about the paving of the West Mall was to keep people, the students, from protesting. Do you want to talk about that and is that really why it was paved?

Larry Speck:
It is very hard to attribute motive to some of these things. But the truth of the matter was, that was a period of growth in the university student population. And whereas the previous landscape scheme which was sidewalks and a big green sward down the center, not so different from the South Mall. That was fine when you didn't have too many people coming in that west entry. But as the population got greater and greater, the grass just flat got worn out. And I can remember being on the campus some in that period and it was pretty muddy over there. So there certainly could have been a motive that simply said that we need to toughen up the place because it's getting harder use than it used to have. And then you know there could have been other motives as well. The truth of the matter is, as an inhabitant of that West Mall, it's a pretty good job because one of the things it did was to make lots of places to sit. They did the planters in such a way that it provided seats. And it also provided seats so that you could put tables up and you could have group dynamics of selling brownies or hawking whatever. It didn't reduce the political content of the West Mall one iota, I don't think. And in fact it's probably much more intensively political than it ever was before. But it was a pretty good landscape design. It was a transformation and it did give a different character, but certainly given the fact that the student population continued to escalate, and the use of that mall continued to escalate, you look at those stone benches now and even they have taken hard wear and need replacement at this point. So it's probably a good move, whatever the motive.

Don Carleton:
Do we have another question?

Unidentified male:
The brick wall on the west edge of campus? Surely that was about keeping out demonstrators?

Larry Speck:
That was actually about making the University distinct from the outside populace. (laughter) Okay, I said it really nicely, didn't I? (laughter) And I think it was not just protesters, it was also hippies and it was a kind of person they didn't want so much associated with the university. It was a way of distinguishing between, "this is the campus and this is the rest of the city." And I think that is a landscape decision that deserves re-thinking at some point. Even at the Blanton recently, that was altered significantly right where Congress Avenue meets the campus at MLK. And I think it's a softer, gentler, more welcoming gesture.

Dick Holland:
I'd like to say one thing about the title of the book. A few people have said, you know, where did this title come from? And it was not an easy thing to come up with the title for this book. I thought about, "We're Texas," but that's already taken. I thought about "Texas, Our Texas." There were several things that seemed possible. And then Susan Clagett loaned me a book from President Faulkner's library called The Harvard Book. And it's a book of essays written by Harvard graduates about Harvard University. So I thought well, The Harvard Book, The Texas Book, well Texas is a university. It's a state. And then I remembered in the 1940s and early 1950s, when I would listen to Texas football games on the radio. Everybody just talked about Texas. Nobody called it UT. It was like, how did Texas do this weekend? And everybody just called it Texas. So, with Susan Clagett and President Faulkner's Harvard Book, and me listening to the Horns on the radio in 1952, well that's where the title came from. And somebody suggested that it might not make our friends in College Station very happy either.

Don Carleton:
Any other questions? Yes. Harold.

Harold Billings:
Harold Billings. To some extent, Doug [Laycock] answered a question I felt like asking. We've talked and heard about the projection of shadows, shadows of regents, shadows of history of different sorts on the University. I was curious as to what the panel might have to say about perspective shadows of what's going on now and what the reflection of those shadows might be 21 years from now or so. Doug [Laycock] has commented on some of that. I think we on campus all still continue to live under the shadow of the Civil War. Fortunately, we continue to live under the shadow of the Constitution. I hope that continues. We still continue to some extent to live under the shadow of the Magna Carta. I hope that continues to exist. I think in terms of the university, it's most important that the shadow is cast by its faculty, its staff over the cumulative years and also the shadow cast by the students. To some extent, I think that's probably the most important shadow of all. So, as I said, to some extent, Doug [Laycock] answered what I was going to ask about perspective shadows through future history. But I think it's really important about the students. That's more of an observation than a question.

Larry Speck:
Well actually, I'll take that as a question because this is something that disturbs me about the state and sometimes disturbs me about the university because I'm a Texan in both regards. But you know what I love and love about Texas and I love about this university is this kind of swashbuckling, don't take no for an answer ambition. You can definitely see it in the architectural heritage of this heroic period. They were heroic. They were bigger than life. Their ambition was huge. Nobody could tell them you can't do that. Of course you can do that. You do it if you want to do it. And I hope that's a shadow we always live under, that we continue to have that sense that we can do anything we want to do bad enough. And that's in our core purpose and core values actually, that line of doing whatever you want to do, having that ambition. But sometimes I wonder if we're really living up to that in the way we could. And I hope that's something we remind ourselves constantly, that's our heritage. That's who we are. We need to be doing that.

Don Graham:
I think that process is ongoing. At this very moment, the English Department and I'm sure other departments around campus are going through…we have endless meetings, not nearly endless meetings, but numerous, long meetings, about how to move from good to great. It has been a very useful process to try to define what our goals are going to be in the near future, over I think, the next ten to twenty years. Anyway, the new president, Powers, has sort of started this going and it has been…I've been in the English Department for a while and it's the only time I've ever heard this kind of discussion carried out through various committees and it's going to result in a document that will be sent to the tower and it is kind of exciting to see the pooled knowledge and ideas of the various members of the English Department. I don't know about the other departments. I'm sure they're doing the same thing to try to move us to another level, not down, but up.

Dick Holland:
The person who hired me in my first job at the University was Harold Billings.

Don Graham:
He has a lot to answer for.

Dick Holland:
He does. (laughter) I worked in the tower of the main library and then helped the library move to PCL. Then I bolted and I went down to San Marcos where I was a special collections librarian at Southwest Texas. I was down there ten years and then I came back here and I detected a real change in the University of Texas between the time I left and the time I came back. I thought it was much for the better. I live here. My wife, Cynthia Bryant the law professor and I live…we can walk from here to our house in ten minutes. We can see the tower of the main building out of our bedroom window. But there's something about morale or ambition or something. There was a different spirit. I really started teaching for the first time in the Liberal Arts Honors when I came back. I don't know, people's step was quicker. Things looked better. I don't know. I'm not saying I was discouraged because I worked for Harold for sixteen years, but I think I detected a qualitative difference. You know, maybe it went back to Peter Flawn's "war on mediocrity." You remember that. That was a significant thing. And just the fact that Larry Speck and Don [Graham] under President Faulkner were getting together to think about the University in a serious way, and what Don Graham was talking about what his department is doing. I think it's indicative of a lot of positive thinking that's still going forward.

Don Carleton:
Anyone else? Okay, right here.

Unidentified male:
I know that Walter Prescott Webb was running buddies with J. Frank Dobie and they contributed a lot to our modern day impressions of Texas historically. It seemed that in my reading and studying, of personal study in Texas history that Texas as a frontier state had a lot to do with the cultural and personality development of modern Texas. Do you see us losing our contact or the influence of, as was spoken earlier, the shadow of Texas as a frontier? I know there was one book that was written about the empire for slavery, an empire for slavery that talked about Texas as the last place where slave labor as a base for the economy might have a chance to breech its dying role in history. Are we losing touch with our contact with Texas as a frontier, an open place where personalities are formed by the openness of it? You go out on the frontier and make your way? I just wanted to hear your impressions on that, given your study of J. Frank Dobie and his friend, Walter Prescott Web.

Don Graham:
Well that would take us the rest of the evening. That's an interesting question. I would just say from my very small perspective with regard to this, I have contact with students every semester. Most of my students…one time, and this was actually a few years ago, I had a class of 45 and 41 of them were from Houston. And their knowledge of, and connection with agrarian ranching traditions and so on, were remote to say the least. One of the continuous pleasures of teaching the course I teach, which was Dobie's course, is to kind of bring that whole perspective. They do connect with it, but it takes a bit of work and it takes a bit of reading. I discovered…I'll just give you one quick example. I grew up on a cotton farm and for all my career I've been talking about…I teach a book that deals with a cotton farmer, and I mention, in passing, chopping cotton. About two years ago, I was going through a passage in which Dobie actually was talking about, he was obviously on a ranch, but he did raise one crop of cotton. He mentions chopping cotton. I discovered that my students thought that meant that they cut the cotton down. So they had lost that whole connection with that language. A lot of times I feel like I'm teaching Chaucer or something. (laughter) But it is…I enjoy it and the students respond to it. Ten years ago, they would have known about Lonesome Dove, but everything changes, it's an amnesiac culture in many ways. I think somehow they do connect. They're open to it once they're presented with the material. I think Texas history, I don't want to pick on high schools, but I think Texas history is not very well taught. That's my general view. I once made a crack about that in an article in Texas Monthly and I got this scathing…I said, everybody that I knew had taken Texas history under a coach in high school. And I got this guy writing in saying that I had dishonored all the great coach history teachers in the state.

Male voice in audience:
…all three!

Don Graham:
Yeah, right. All three of them. I think Texas history is a live issue. But you have to get at it in a way that they can connect with because a lot of their experience is basically mall-centered, rather than land-centered. I sometimes feel like eventually one of us up here, I don't know about Doug, but we'll be the last living Texan. (laughter)

Doug Laycock:
It is impossible to underestimate how little our students remember. Our freshmen remember very little before about 1998. Because in 1998, they were ten years old. It's been a while since my wife taught "intro soc.," [Introduction to Sociology] but when she used to teach it and she talked about Jim Crow, and what Austin and Texas was like, before about 1963 or 1965, not only did they not remember it. That's not surprising. They didn't believe it! Black students didn't believe it either! It was so alien and outside their experience. They could not imagine that their parents and their grandparents had actually lived that way. And so you get quotes like, (this isn't a Texas quote, but it illustrates the point). A black student in Mississippi a few years ago, quoted in Newsweek, "What's the civil rights stuff got to do with us?" So of course they've lost contact with the ranching tradition and the rural tradition. When I was growing up in the 1950s, TV was full of westerns and they were wholly inaccurate and absurd, but it showed a market judgment that people were interested. Well the westerns are gone which shows smart people that run the networks don't think there's much interest in that anymore. And I think that's just inevitable. A good teacher could make the connection and help students understand and relate to it again, but you can't take it for granted. It requires a good teacher.

Don Carleton:
One more question.

Bruce Davis:
This is more of an observation and a memory. I tied together three things. My name is Bruce Davis and I went to UT from 1966 to 1970 and then from 1972 after I got out of the army to 1975 in the Graduate School of Architecture. I was at the Chuckwagon when the "Chuckwagon riots" happened. I want to tie a few things together going back to the question about the end of the West Mall. It was a lot more than that and has to do with the long shadow that Frank Erwin cast. In those times, with the kinds of passions that were running around the University, it filled us so passionately with our anti-war and anti-Erwin feelings, the Chuckwagon became a kind of pinnacle of a space where we gathered. There were also two other spaces, the YMCA at the corner of 22nd and Guadalupe, and most importantly, the Methodist Fellowship Center which is now a parking lot and the YMCA is now a School of Scientology. (laughter.) In a period of …Was that funny? That's good. Within a period of a few months of the closing of not just the Chuckwagon, but the Student Union for "re-modeling," and the reconstruction or deconstruction of the West Mall, the YMCA was gone. The Methodist Student Center was gone. And there ceased to be a place within a few months, a space! for political discussions to occur. So at that moment at noon, and I forget exactly when it was, I was up in a tree on the west side of the Student Union with the only video camera I could get. I was majoring in English and the English Department had one Sony video camera and I was up in a tree. I put that camera on the tower because when it struck noon was when the State Troopers, the Highway Patrol, the Texas Rangers, and the local police were going to move into the Union. They were all lined up right there where the wall is now, on the side of Guadalupe, on the west side of the Student Union. At that same time, a friend of mine, who was head of the shuttle bus drivers, shut down Guadalupe by poking holes in the tires of the shuttle buses, shutting down Guadalupe. At that same time, the president of my high school class, who went on and became a district attorney in San Antonio, Sam Millsap, who went to the same school as Julius Whittier and I at Highlands High School, was standing there in the Chuckwagon, trying to get people out of there. So when you deconstruct spaces as Erwin did for what we were doing and in what we believed strongly, politically as you can hear strongly in my voice, then we found new places to go. And we found marches, and we were still anti-war. But the spaces were gone. And that's how long a shadow Frank Erwin could cast in many ways. Very complex man!

Don Carleton:
Thank you. Where's Betty Sue when we need her here? (applause)

Dick Holland:
There's a chapter, about, I want to say, exactly what you're talking about, by Betty Sue Flowers who's in Amsterdam this evening, about the Chuckwagon. You're absolutely right about the importance of the University Y. That was a great gathering place for all kinds of things. And as I remember, Larry, that was also a notable building. Seems like it was. Anybody?

Larry Speck:
You know, I think you're absolutely right about the…and that was true not only at UT, but all over the United States. There were campuses that were finding those fertile grounds for foment on the campus and destroying those places. By destroying the spaces, they hoped to diffuse the protest, but it didn't work. That was a really wonderful tying together of the Erwin piece, the architecture piece, and the civil rights piece, because all of those really were a part of that era, too. And actually, I was on the campus. I did not go to the University of Texas, but I had a lot of buddies who did and were on the campus in that era. And it was an amazing place in the late 1960s. It was an amazing place. It had had all that fire, ambition, and drive, but it was just re-directed a different way. It was very much in the legacy of this university, I think.

Audience member:
Dobie would have been proud!

Larry Speck:
He would have!

Don Carleton:
I want you to join me in thanking the panelists tonight for the presentations. (applause) This will conclude our program, but I want to invite all of you to stay and enjoy some food. We still have food here, I hope. Yes, we do. We still have wine. And I also invite you to visit with the authors who will make themselves available to sign your books. You may also of course, purchase some additional books, if you would like. We have that set up over there. But I want to thank all of you for being here tonight. Thank you. (applause)

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