UT President Homer Rainey and the Long Memory of Academic Freedom at UT
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
May 19, 2026
There are moments in a university’s history when the question becomes larger than any single president, professor, book, department, or policy. The question becomes whether a university will remain a university at all.
The firing of Homer Price Rainey, the twelfth president of The University of Texas at Austin, was one such moment.
Rainey served as UT president from 1939 to 1944. By many measures, his presidency strengthened the institution. He helped open the Latin American Institute, expanded the graduate school, increased the faculty, supported the College of Fine Arts, organized the management of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, and grew the university’s library holdings. In other words, he was building UT into a serious public research university with intellectual breadth, scholarly ambition, and public purpose (University of Texas at Austin Office of the President, n.d.).
But Rainey also believed that a university could not fulfill its mission if political appointees dictated what faculty could teach, which ideas students could encounter, or which scholars should be punished for their views. That conviction brought him into direct conflict with the UT Board of Regents.
Beginning in the early 1940s, regents pressed Rainey to remove faculty whose views they disliked, including economics professors associated with New Deal ideas and faculty who defended federal labor laws. The conflict deepened when regents objected to the teaching of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, a work they viewed as politically suspect. Rainey publicly protested this interference. On November 1, 1944, the regents fired him (Green, 1995; The Daily Texan, n.d.).
The response was extraordinary. Some 8,000 students went on strike and marched from the UT campus to the Capitol and Governor’s Mansion. According to historical accounts, mourners carried a casket labeled “academic freedom,” while the Longhorn Band played Chopin’s “Funeral March.” (The Daily Texan, n.d.; Wilder, 2012).
The message was unmistakable: when political power suppresses teaching and scholarship, something vital in public education dies.
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| Source: UT History: The President Rainey Controversy |
That warning matters today.
Rainey was not reinstated. But history vindicated him. He became a national symbol of academic freedom, and the episode remains one of the clearest warnings in UT’s history about what happens when governing boards confuse stewardship with ideological control (Green, 1995; Wilder, 2012).
That warning matters today.
Universities are not fragile because faculty disagree, students protest, or controversial books are taught. They are fragile when fear replaces inquiry; when political pressure determines curriculum; when administrators anticipate punishment; when faculty governance is weakened; when entire fields of study are treated as suspect because they examine race, gender, labor, colonialism, inequality, or power.
The Rainey story reminds us that academic freedom is not an abstraction. It is the condition that allows a public university to serve the public honestly. Without it, universities become instruments of power rather than spaces of knowledge.
In 1944, students understood this clearly enough to march behind a coffin marked “academic freedom.” Eighty years later, the question is whether we understand it clearly enough to prevent history from happening again.
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Reference
University of Texas at Austin Office of the President. (n.d.). Homer Price Rainey. https://president.utexas.edu/past-presidents/homer-price-rainey/
Wilder, F. (2012, June 13). The war on public universities, Texas Observer. https://www.texasobserver.org/the-war-on-public-universities/
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