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- Dr. Jean Battle
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Jean Battle
JB: Yes. Dr. Allen had ruled that we would not hire any faculty from the University of Tampa or Florida Southern College, so we would not be raiding their faculties. There would be at least 10 or 15 people in my office at a time interested in positions at USF.
We were in great need for a person in the guidance office, and I knew Dr. Bott who was in charge of guidance services at Florida Southern College. So I was able to hire him as a guidance counselor. He worked his way in and became a very popular professor who developed our guidance program for the K-12 teachers.
LB: In 1964, didn’t you hire a number of faculty members?
JB: Yes, we hired quite a few. I remember hiring Dr. Jim Chambers from the University of Tampa. He had resigned before he contacted us, which made it OK. We hired those faculty members who were most qualified and hired a lot of them because we had so many students in our programs. We had a good time with that.
We became accredited by the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges in 1963, which was much sooner than expected. This was mostly due to Harris Dean’s understanding of what was required by the Southern Association Accreditation Association.
The University of Tampa had a lot of Latin students from Tampa who transferred to USF. Many students, who could not afford to go away to college, came to USF. Many of USF’s students were poor and few of them had cars to drive to campus, so they car pooled.
LB: You had education faculty members who had dual appointments in the Colleges Education and Basic Studies. Was that a carryover from your experiences at Florida Southern College?
JB: Yes, I had been Dean of Liberal Arts at Florida Southern College. I believed that it was important that faculty members in the College of Education, especially those in the area of secondary education to have joint appointments in the College and in their subject matter area in the College of Basic Studies.
Faculty members who came to USF from the University of Florida wanted to continue the fight they carried on between the Colleges of Liberal Arts and Education at University of Florida. When they arrived, they found out that I was more for Liberal Arts than they were.
When Dr. Cecil Mackey came to replace Dr. Allen, the four associate deans for each of the four divisions in the College of Liberal Arts went to see the new president. He didn’t know much about higher education and they convinced him to abolish the College of Liberal Arts and form four colleges. They each became a dean in one of the four new colleges. When that president left they went back to having the four colleges in one, the College of Liberal Arts.
LB: You were Dean when the Johns Committee visited USF. How was that experience?
JB: The newspapers were always writing articles about USF being politically liberal in part because we had liberal arts professors. President Allen was actually a very conservative man. Then the Johns Committee came to USF. They had gone to Florida State University and the University of Florida, but their alumni would not have it. So they came to USF where we didn’t have alumni. We had a dean, whose name I will not mention, who sold out to the Johns Committee. He sent the committee everything he could get his hands on. I had written an article in which I quoted Emerson who said, “Great people could not be understood by ordinary people.” He sent the article to the Johns Committee without speaking to me about it. Senator Johns read it to the legislature and said that I had made that quote up because Emerson would never say anything like that.
We had a great time up to the arrival of the Johns Committee. They said, “Why are you using paperback books?” We said it was because they were less expensive for our students. The American Idea was a required course which was based on the first ten amendments of the United States Constitution. They questioned whether the course was about communism. They were looking for communists and homosexuals, and they seemed to think that if you were one you had to be the other. What a difficult time we had with the Johns Committee. We were discouraged.
They didn’t call me in to speak to them, but they kept referring to a paper I had written called, “The Purpose of a University.” Dean Cooper was called in to talk to them frequently because he was then Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, as well as, John Allen, because he was the president. Bob Shannon was using a book which they said was radical in its views. But when they called him in to question him about the book, he showed them that students were only required to read certain chapters of the book and not the radical ones in question.
They were hitting Dr. Allen with accusations from every direction. But he was great and he was invincible. We could not have had a better president to defend us at that time. When he gave a 25 minute presentation to the legislature in response to the Johns Committee investigation he received a standing ovation. That was the end of the Johns Committee for USF.