Though the college, too, has made progress since the Meredith year, the characterization of Ole Miss as a "Greek country club" still fits pretty well. Sororities and fraternities have an inordinate amount of power. Education, for most of the undergraduates, is still of secondary concern.
Evans Harrington, a novelist and member of the English department, taught at Ole Miss throughout the Meredith affair. Harrington is one of the leaders of the Ole Miss chapter of the Association of American University Professors, which has fought a series of battles for academic freedom for the last four years. Just this summer, the AAUP got the courts to throw out the clause of the Mississippi loyalty oath which requires teachers in state schools to list all the organizations they have belonged to or contributed to in the last five years. The court case was surprisingly simple to win, but preparing the case, Harrington explains, took all the spare time he, and several other Ole Miss professors had for most of a semester. The AAUP, Harrington says, simply does not have the energy it did during and just after the Meredith crisis. Many of the professors who left Ole Miss were AAUP members, and those who have stayed just don't have the time or drive for very many more fights.
Censorship
In the last week, there has been another indication that Ole Miss and Mississippi society will not tolerate the kind of academic freedom commonplace at most other state universities. During a faculty art show last week, Robert L. Tettleson, chairman of the Art Department, personally took down a painting by Jairo Amaris, an assistant professor of Art. Amaris had been hired under an agreement stipulating that none of his work would ever be censored. When his painting was romoved, Amaris took all the rest of his works out of the show. The AAUP will consider whether or not to defend Amaris's freedom from censorship. If it does, the fight will be a long one, and Amaris's nine-month contract will probably be allowed to expire in the meantime. Amaris was generally considered one of the most exciting teachers in the Art department. If he leaves, or is forced to leave Ole Miss, the closed society will once more have asserted and defended itself at the cost of excellence.
Little Reaction
After the Meredith riot, another member of the Art department had his works censored. Members of the Art department and others in the University vehemently protested the censorship.
The national press picked up the issue, and charges against the professor were dropped.
This time, however, the censorship has gotten very little notice. The Mississippian reported the event only by printing a letter to the editor. More significantly, the University has learned how to handle such cased more delicately. Tettleson has cancelled Amaris's graduate art seminar for the rest of the year, and may even close the faculty art show to avoid having to deal further with the censorship issue.
Harrington is clearly discouraged. "We are all just getting tired," he explains. "It used to be exciting to fight for clear-cut rights, but things have gotten to be more tiring then exciting now."
"Some of the others have just about come to the breaking point," he says of other faculty liberals. Many of the liberals are in either History or Political Science, and have to deal constantly with the race problem. "At least I can get away from it in my work," Harrington remarks. "Still, it's in my blood. All four of my novels have turned out to be mostly diatribes, complete with stereotyped Mississippi characters."
Who's Silver?
Among the students, the same sort of back sliding is clearly occurring. Last week, when historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. '38 spoke at Ole Miss, he said he wished that his friend James Silver could have been there. After the speech, a number of the students asked who Silver was. As one amazed faculty member put it, "Most of them seemed to think he was some New York Jew." The central figure in the post-riot struggle against the closed society has largely been forgotten.
The post-riot changes were perhaps most clear last spring when more than 6000 people jammed the Ole Miss coliseum to hear Bobby Kennedy. They gave him two standing ovations, and there was little, if any, overt harrassment. In 1962, only four years before, the two Kennedys had been bitterly resented in Mississippi, and at Ole Miss. Bumper stickers were circulated reading. "The Castro Brothers Are in the White House," and "Mississippi: Kennedy's Hungary."
It would be ridicuously inccurate to see any significant swing to the Left at Ole Miss. Liberalism has been tolerated in the last few years. There has never been a place at Ole Miss for any real rebellion, but in the past, the students have consistently elected liberals and moderates as editors of the Mississippi. Even the Mississippian's temporary summer editor. Bob Boyd, criticized the Oxford school system for failing to observe federal desegregation guidelines. Boyd also attacked Representative Jamie Whitten (D.-Miss.), a conservative segregationist from Oxford's congressional district.
Conservative Editor
This fall, however, it quickly be came clear that the Mississippian had