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Depression The University ofMissouri is not a cheap institution, despite the cheapness ofits appropriations, sometimes; it is a distinguished institution-distinguished because ofthe men we have been able to keep during these last few years. - Walter Williams 13 By just about any standard of measurement, Stratton D. Brooks's seven-year presidency ofthe University of Missouri was a disappointment. In his previous job, as president of the University of Oklahoma, he had earned widespread respect for his deft leadership style and aggressive, determined resistance to politicians who were out to inflict the spoils system on that state's major institutions of higher learning. His grit traveled well to Missouri, but his management skill, alas, seemingly had not. He was also unlucky.Through no fault ofhis own, he was hammered by the press early in his administration about the high costs ofthe remodeled president's home. "Nearly $68,000 has been spent," grumbled the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, among many others, "to remodel a $10,000 house." The renovation had been planned long before Brooks assumed the presidency, but he endured the criticism anyway, and it put him on the defensive from the outset. Though he was a native Missourian-he had been born on a farm near the tiny community ofEverett in I869-Brooks never quite connected with the Missouri legislature. As a result, state appropriations actually declined during the 1920s, though student enrollment was increasing and Missouri, like the rest of the nation, was prospering. Brooks also found himself at odds with his own faculty over admissions requirements and a number ofother governance issues. Thus did the university flounder and stagnate during the Roaring Twenties, a period of what should have been dynamic growth and development. I With only a handful of solid supporters among the curators, the legislature, the faculty, and in the news media, Brooks felt increasingly isolated and powerless. And vulnerable. One more public controversy could do him in. During the spring of 1929, there was one, and it did. 1. St. Louis Post-Dispatch. January 23, 1926. Stephens, A History of the University of Missouri, 500 ff. Olson and Olson, The University of Missouri, 65. 207 208 ACreed for My Profession It was neither faculty governance nor the dreary condition ofthe university's finances that brought Brooks's troubles to a head, however. Instead, it was a small-bore research project done by a sociology class that got sensationalized in the press and distorted by those who learned of it. Thus a relatively innocuous affair escalated to the point where, as one historian put it, there was "raised an insuperable barrier between President Brooks and his faculty on the one hand, and between Brooks and the Board of Curators on the other, and which led eventually to his dismissaI."2 Students in a sociology course, The Family, had been divided into several small committees, each assigned to study some aspect of family life. One of those topics was how the economic status of women might affect sexual relations between men and women. The group appointed to examine this phenomenon was led by an energetic graduate student who hoped to write a paper on the subject for his major professor, Max F. Meyer. The student developed a questionnaire, to be mailed to six hundred men and women, each of whom would be asked to respond anonymously. Professor Meyer helpfully provided the graduate student with University of Missouri envelopes he had on hand bearing the return address "Bureau of Personnel Research." Newspaper reporters got wind of the survey, however, and wrote accounts of it so lurid they triggered an uproar throughout the state. Angry editorials denounced the "sex questionnaire," as it was called, as an irresponsible use of the state university's resources. Irate citizens across Missouri circulated petitions demanding that everyone associated with the questionnaire be summarily fired. Brooks was furious with the sociologists; when he was interviewed by the press, he blasted the survey, as one observer put it, "in picturesque and intemperate language,"3 expelled the graduate student who had developed the questionnaire, and placed Meyer and another sociology professor on suspension. Brooks's tirade against members ofhis own faculty touched offan extensive and prolonged investigation by the national office ofthe American Association of University Professors. The AAUP's well-researched report on the matter, circulated nationwide, deplored the university president's refusal to defend academic freedom and, worse, his lack of fairness and honesty in explaining the research to the general public. Or...

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