Law School Recruiting

Allen was one of the out-of-staters attracted two years ago when the Law School began a program to improve the quality and variety of its teaching. Law Dean J.B. Morse recruited some of the best lawyers in the state to teach at Ole Miss. The Ford Foundation gave the Law School a $5 million grant to turn an already good school into the intellectual center of the state. Last year, Morse arranged to have a team of Harvard Law professors fly down to Ole Miss and teach, each for a two-week stretch. This fall, he hired five of the seven Yale Law School graduates who decided to go directly into teaching.

The newly-established dialogue at Ole Miss is most encouragingly illustrated at the Law School. As only a Southerner could, Dean Morse has been able to bring a group of students and teachers with an incredibly diverse range of opinions into an uneasy truce.

With an enrollment of only about 450, the Law School is housed in a single building. A coffee pot is kept brewing in the ground floor hall, and there is an easy Southern friendliness even between political opposites. Professor make themselves readily accessible, and do not hesitate to speak candidly.

Aaron Henry, a state NAACP leader, and Marion Wright, one of the six Negro lawyers in Mississippi, have both spoken at the Law School this year. A few years ago, they never would have been invited. In contrast, Medford Evans, a long-time representative of the White Citizen's Council, spoke at the Law School this fall, but his reception was substantially less favorable than in the past. Evans was pressed, as Don Allen recounts it, and inconsistencies in his views were sharply attacked.

A Basis for Dialogue

Tension still exists at the Law School, and there is a tendency to avoid the explosive issue of race. But as one of the Law School professors puts it, "There's a real basis for dialogue here. Just scratch the surface, and you find people directly caught up in the most important problem of this century."

Though the Law School has nine Negroes, it also still has its die-hard segregationists. But most of them are clearly on the defensive. In the last few months, Dave Clark, a freshman, has become the standard bearer in a small-scale campaign to return segregation and conservatism to the Law School. Complaining of the "Yale invasion," he has written a number of letters to the editor of the Mississippian, the University daily, attacking Dean Morse and the "leftists" that are "leading the Law School down the road of liberalism."

Sitting Separate

When Aaron Henry and Marion Wright spoke in a Law course on "Political and Civil Rights," Clark sat in a chair outside the lecture room, refusing to sit in on any lecture given by a Negro. But even Dave Clark's questions from outside the room have added to the potential for creative dialogue.

If the Ole Miss Law School, over the next two years can encourage Dave Clark, and others like him, to reconsider the ideas by which they were raised, then it will have contributed more to Mississippi than all of the civil rights workers in the state combined.

But it may not get the chance.

Just two weeks ago, the Board of Trustees passed a resolution aimed at preventing professors, particularly certain Law professors, from engaging in any kind of civil rights activity.

Next year, the original Ford grant will expire. If the Ford Foundation does not renew the grant, or if the Board Trustees forces Dean Morse to refuse it, the Law School will be crippled. As one Law professor put it, "It would be much worse if the Ford grant were cut off than if we'd never gotten it in the first place. It'd be difficult to have to give up the extra secretaries, the xerox machines, to think back after we've expanded so much." More importantly, it would be difficult to reconstruct the creative dialogue without the funds to keep attracting top-notch teachers.

Don Allen sums up the difference between the atmosphere of the Law School and that of the undergraduate college very simply: "At the Law School you can say anything you want."