Trouble in Louisiana

That terrible Northerner, General William Tecumseh Sherman, was the first president of Louisiana State University. During the Civil War, he told the Unionists to spare the school from war's hell. As a result, L.S.U. never really knew what trouble was until Huey Long came along.

Huey never went to college, but he knew what he wanted. With the help of his hand-picked president, big, thick-skinned James Monroe Smith, he spent $13,500,000 on a building plan, blew another $3.5 million a year for such furnishings as professors, a football team, a country club for the students, a highbrow quarterly, and a university mascot--a Bengal tiger in a $12,000 cage.

Huey put L.S.U. on the map and underlined it in red. With 8,500 students (up from 1,600), L.S.U. became the South's second biggest university.* Then in 1939 "Jimmy the Stooge" Smith was convicted of embezzlement, sentenced to 24 years in prison. (He was pardoned this spring.)

One thing Huey insisted on: he wanted a good medical school for L.S.U. New Orleans' proud, private Tulane University, which boasts one of the finest medical schools in the South, had refused Huey an honorary degree. Huey swore he would make Tulane look like "a little red school-house." In one year, right under Tulane's nose in New Orleans, Huey built a $1.5 million medical school. When everything else that Huey built came tumbling down, the L.S.U. Medical School stayed up. Under the conscientious administration of Dean Beryl Iles Burns it has kept its American Medical Association rating.

Last week the medical school's reputation was in danger. Both the A.M.A. and the Association of American Medical Colleges were watching it closely. The trouble began with the latest move of the new president of L.S.U. Bluff, 6-ft., bellowing William ("The Conqueror") Hatcher began his presidency by firing a dean who had once opposed Hatcher's promotion to a full professorship.

In September President Hatcher did it again. Without warning, he hired a new dean for the Medical College, thus forcing out able Dean Burns. Twenty-three members of L.S.U.'s medical faculty resigned. Four more quit last week. Said President Hatcher, "Each . . . will be replaced by an outstanding medical specialist."

*Biggest: University of Texas.

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