UT president lambastes Board of Regents at faculty meeting

On this day in 1944, during one of the most notorious quarrels over academic freedom in Texas history, University of Texas president Homer Rainey made a dramatic public statement of grievances against the UT Board of Regents before a general faculty meeting. Some regents had loudly sought the dismissal of pro-New Deal and pro-union-labor faculty and the censorship of leftist authors. The regents seized on Rainey's public statement as an opportunity to fire him on November 1. Regent Marguerite Fairchild cast the sole dissenting vote. The students went on strike, and 8,000 marched in mute mourning from the campus to the Capitol and the Governor's Mansion.