Field of Dreams 
Reporter
Class Warfare
Last winter Sul Ross State professor Larry Sechrest publicly blasted his students and neighbors in Alpine as "just plain stupid." The town's reaction hasn't exactly changed his mind.
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The university goes out of its way for working people, offering fifteen classes on weekends, for example. Once a month, Matt Branstine, a junior high school principal in Gruver, a Panhandle town 32 miles from Oklahoma, drives his wife and two kids 490 miles south to Alpine so he can take weekend classes for his superintendent certification and his wife can do the same to become a licensed professional counselor. "I could go to OU or even KU," he told me, "but Sul Ross does a better job preparing administrators than anybody else. Yes, it's a small, open-enrollment school, and the average student will score a little lower on tests than at other schools. But Sul Ross is also set up to give a lot of service, like smaller classes, with Ph.D.'s instead of grad students teaching them."
I went to one of Sechrest's classes, macroeconomics. There were thirteen students—five Hispanic and eight Anglo. "Let's talk about money," the professor said at the outset. He was a surprisingly engaging and sometimes funny teacher, even as he wrote words like "fungibility" and "marginal utility" on the board. And about half of the kids actively engaged him with questions and answers; they were no better or worse, I thought, than the teenagers in the UT classes of my youth. The big difference: They really wanted to be there.
Both Marta and Sally told me they were disappointed that the university hadn't done anything about the man who essentially thinks they're morons. But they were determined to do something on their own. As Marta said, "I'm going to prove him wrong."
"IT WAS REALLY TENSE FOR a month or so," said Sechrest, sitting in his office. "But I never discussed it in class. It was never brought up. In fact, with one exception—one of the professors—not a single human being has walked up to me and said anything negative." Sechrest is big and burly, with a gray beard and hair that just touches his shoulders. He wears thick glasses that are out of style. He looks, in short, like a wacky college professor. His office is jammed with books, from The Bell Curve to The Fountainhead. He said that, except for the hateful e-mails, most letters had been positive; some agreed with his comments about education but didn't like the way he put them. Some of the faculty wouldn't talk to him, but that suited him just fine.
Sechrest was born in Detroit, and his family moved to Dallas when he was eleven. He went to UT-Arlington, where he got his bachelor's in history and philosophy and his master's and Ph.D. in economics. He got married, taught at his alma mater for five years, and came to Sul Ross in 1990. He has written much about economics (including a book called Free Banking), as well as politics and morality for various small publications. He's a libertarian, supersmart and full of the idealism of Ayn Rand, who believed in the brainy, determined individual above all else—especially the weak and the stupid. "What is the thread that runs through all of the moral problems we see around us?" Sechrest asks in one of his articles. "It is the failure to put the individual and his rights at the core of our thinking."
He wrote a shorter yet similar version of "Strange Little Town" in 1998 ("Trafficking With the Brain-dead") without controversy. It didn't name the university, but he called his students some of the same things ("Most of them are worthless clods"). So he never expected the reaction he got this winter. He thought, he told a reporter in February, that he'd written "a Mark Twain sort of thing." Besides, he never thought anyone would see the magazine. "It's not online," he told me, "not sold in stores, and to the best of my knowledge, only two libertarians in Alpine subscribe to it." He said the story was never intended to be a screed. "My intention was not to foment some revolt or reform, though I've long thought that was necessary."
Sechrest isn't the first transplant to stir up the locals. In the late sixties H. Allen Smith, a New York journalist and humorist (his first novel, Rhubarb, concerned a cat that inherited a baseball team), fled the big city for the little pleasures of Alpine. Once there, though, the cantankerous Yankee who once wrote "On Monday mornings I am dedicated to the proposition that all men are created jerks" inevitably rubbed his new neighbors the wrong way. After several altercations with the construction contractors who were building his home (he accused them of cheating him), Smith told two visiting Time reporters that he'd never seen "such a goddamned bunch of bigoted, pious, lying, cheating bastards in all my life" than those in Alpine. Smith didn't realize he was on the record, but like Sechrest, he was unapologetic once the story came out. Angry phone calls and threats of violence followed. Smith ultimately made peace with the locals and even became friendly with them. Sechrest is not so optimistic about his chances. "Until now," he told me, "I did think these people were friendly and tolerant. I'm ready to retract some of that now."
MAYOR MICKEY CLOUSE STOOD IN Cowboys and Cadillacs, a store owned by her son, surrounded by cowboy kitsch and high art, from bronze sculptures to life-size cutouts of Clint Eastwood. "I'm sure Sechrest has some good points about the educational system," she said, "but it's not only here. It's all over." Clouse has the steely good looks of Kay Bailey Hutchison, and she easily slips into her role as civic leader. "He's done us a favor," she said. "We had become complacent. We didn't recognize what we had until someone made us. Now we intend to make We Love Alpine Week an annual affair." But her political veneer cracked when she talked of how Sechrest had insulted her own children; her four boys went to Alpine High and then Sul Ross. "I resent him saying that about my kids," she said, her eyes narrowing. "You're walking on the fightin' side of me when you talk about my kids."
Over at Railroad Blues on a Friday afternoon, the fighting words were fueled by beer and camaraderie when a collection of journalists, lawyers, professors, businessmen, and students got together for their weekly powwow on politics, the city, and, of course, Sechrest. "What he said about Sul Ross is fair play," offered Jack McNamara, a journalist and former Marine who was born in Alpine and raised in the area. "We say that ourselves. But the race stuff—the accusations of miscegenation—it was like reading something from the fifties. And it's not to be tolerated." Others around the table nodded. One of them said, "People in Midland asked me, 'Why haven't you shot the bastard?'"
The group usually sits at a picnic table just outside the crowded club's front door. Professor Dale Christophersen, sitting across from McNamara, disputed Sechrest's claim that he's a lone voice in the educational wilderness. "Everybody from the top to the bottom at Sul Ross is aware of these kinds of challenges," he said. Attorney Rod Ponton said, "Sechrest is like a wino who's down on his luck, and everyone's pissing on him and he thinks it's a compliment." "The whole thing is kind of sick," added Christophersen, his voice rising above the din. "I think he's one of those guys who read Ayn Rand when he was too young."
A couple of drinkers quietly dissented from the rest. One said he had witnessed one of the obscene phone calls—a bunch of people at a bar calling Sechrest and screaming into the phone. "They proved him right," he told me. Another, a Sul Ross student and a Hispanic, said, "It's his opinion. And Alpine reacted in an ignorant manner—the parade, death threats, vandalism. It reiterated his point."
Almost everybody hates Sechrest, and Sechrest, well, it's not like his cup runneth over either. So why does he stay? Well, he told me, he's a tenured professor who makes a decent salary ($72,000), and, he added, he can do whatever research he wants to, such as write inflammatory articles for obscure journals. He also loves the Alpine countryside and, as he wrote, the "seductiveness of these wide, open spaces." Of course, there's really no challenge in falling for the charms of nature, especially in this part of West Texas. As good teachers know, the real challenge is the wide, open spaces in the minds of their callow students. Sure, at Sul Ross the kids ain't Ivy Leaguers. But, thank God, Alpine ain't New Haven either. Sechrest knew, or should have known, both before he came here.
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