This fall, the school paper, the T.S.U. Herald, suddenly began to print articles and editorials highly critical of the administration and, in some cases, of the faculty. The monthly Herald had previously been the equivalent of the sad product of countless small college journalism departments, where the students learn type sizes and newspaper lingo by transcribing the college's official press release. But, under the editorship of Charles Johnson, the Herald underwent a change that was quite disturbing to the administration.

In the November issue, Johnson had Mack Jones, the government instructor and SNCC advisor who was subsequently told that his contract would not be renewed, write a long, scathing editorial on the inadequacies of the T.S.U. approach to education. "The achievement level of students entering Texas Southern hovers somewhere around the junior high school level," Jones wrote, "and the achievement level of the average graduate of this institution is something less than the twelfth grade."

Jones attacked the intentional clouding of the "achievement gap" between Negro and white college students. "If a student has done well in high school, notwithstanding the fact that he has only reached the eighth or ninth grade level, and if he continues to do well in situations where he is judged on the basis of a curved score, he has no reason to think that he is something short of brilliant. Thus the student will likely make less effort to close the gap.

"The T.S.U. student," Jones concluded, "must distinguish between the trappings of higher education and higher education itself."

In the January issue of the Herald, an editorial appeared quoting an unnamed professor as saying, "I don't care what anyone says about me in this school . . . I have failed a whole class before, and I can still do it. I can harm you, while you can't do me a thing."

Not Nice

And in the February issue, the Herald printed another editorial attacking poor teaching at T.S.U. "Students who are really interested in their education," the editorial advised, "can stay away from these instructors and their classes, because by helping them to keep their jobs, we are only hurting ourselves and our future job opportunities."

Finally, Dean Jones called Johnson, and Hera'd faculty advisor Mrs. Mary V. Mabry into his office and, according to the account which the Herald subsequently printed of the meeting, Dean Jones "reprimanted [the Herald representatives] for printing allegedly controversial subjects." Jones charged, the Herald reports, that the paper was 'negative,' and he 'suggested we write about nicer things than we have been reporting.'"

Students have long chafed under the restrictive, and highly centralized administration. Dean Jones, a member of a local draft board, has been accused by students of using his influence within the Selective Service System to intimidate male students, and to get rid of troublemakers. Herald editor Johnson is presently classified 1-A, because, he charges, the University never forwarded his II-S deferment papers to his local draft board.

The administration has also been accused of bugging phone lines of students suspected of "troublesome" behavior. Faculty AAUP meetings are always attended, one professor reports, by a few administration "plants." And during the demonstrations, Dean Jones openly told the students that other students and plainclothes policemen would be circulating among them with tape recorders and cameras, and that any evidence they gathered would be used against the demonstrators.

Since their formation in the wake of Foreman's October visit, the Friends of SNCC have been a small thorn in the administration's side. Dubbed a "provisional campus organization," they were allowed to meet in the religious center, and, theoretically, to use university facilities, just like any other full-fledged campus organization. But in March, the administration apparently thought it had found the issue with which it could gracefully get the Friends of SNCC out of its hair. A group of Negro performers, known as the Gospel Singers, were arrested in East Texas, and allegedly beaten by local police. The next week, the Friends of SNCC organized a march of T.S.U. students downtown to protest the police brutality and demand an investigation by the assistant attorney general of Texas, whose office is in Houston. About 100 persons marched from the campus to Houston's M&M building, their chants of "Black Power, Black Power," getting big play in the Houston papers.

The week after the march, Dean Jones told the Friends of SNCC they would no longer be considered a campus organization, and would no longer be allowed to use any campus facilities for meetings. At the same time, Mack Jones, the faculty advisor of the Friends of SNCC, was told that his contract would not be renewed the following year. The administration indicated that Jones had been fired for academic reasons alone; that the university had a surplus of teachers in his field, international relations, and that Jones had promised to obtain his Ph.D., and had not yet done so. Jones says he will receive his doctorate on schedule this June, in spite of the fact that he has been teaching a full load of courses all year. In his letter to the chairman of the division of social sciences, Jones wrote, "I am sure that my association with the campus-based Friends of SNCC had nothing to do with my firing. After all, Texas Southern is committed to the emancipation of the Negro. And we do not bow and scrape simply to please powerful persons external to the University."

After Dean Jones' announcement that SNCC had been kicked off campus, the Rev. Kirkpatrick and Millard Lowe, student co-chairman of the Friends of SNCC, along with Lee Otis Johnson, a former T.S.U. student, and Franklin Alexander, the DuBois Club chairman from Chicago, organized a protest rally. When Jones answered the SNCC group's appeal with a letter saying that he could not reconsider his decision, Kirkpatrick called for a boycott of the school. Johnson, who was indefinitely suspended by Dean Jones in December for making boisterous speeches in the university's coffee shop, led a march through the halls of campus buildings, warning students in the classrooms that if they did not join the boycott, they would be locked in. Several of the university's main doors were boarded and chained closed, and students blocked off Wheeler Street, protesting the "highway through our campus."

Concerned about the potential explosiveness of the situation, a group of faculty members recommended the next day that the administration reinstate the Friends of SNCC immediately, issue a statement clarifying the circumstances of Mack Jones' dismissal, and promise not to call the police. The administration, however, refused. At the meeting of the T.S.U. chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the faculty members voted to ask the AAUP's special committee on academic freedom investigate the circumstances of Jones' release.

The SNCC group began to draw up a list of grievances which students, throughout the period of the boycott, had begun to voice. And they agreed to call off the boycott until negotiations could be arranged with the administration on the following Monday. Late Sunday afternoon, however, the administration filed charges against Lee Otis Johnson, for disturbing the peace. He was taken to the county jail, and quickly released. Arguing that the administration had "played dirty," the Friends of SNCC resumed the boycott Monday morning, and released a far more comprehensive list of demands, including increasing teachers' salaries, changing women's curfew hours (freshmen must be in every night at 9 p.m.), improving the food in the cafeterias, keeping the library and coffee shop open later at night, and having Dean Jones removed from the Draft Board.