New Life at S.M.U.

Some very warm memories were evoked by a piece in the New York Times sports section on Christmas Eve — “New Life at S.M.U. With a Bowl to Play.”

Why, you might well wonder, would Stan Katz care that Southern Methodist University was playing in a football bowl game for the first time in more than 20 years? Answer: I was a trustee of S.M.U. from 1988 to 2000. Why, you might ask, was an Ivy League Jew a member of the board of a church-related university? Answer: My close friend A. Kenneth Pye had just been appointed president of S.M.U., and he recommended me. I had been consulting with Ken, who was then a very prominent faculty member and administrator at Duke University, about various presidencies that were being dangled before him. My advice was that he should be very selective, and when he queried me about S.M.U., I told him that was surely not the right place for him.

S.M.U. had recently been given the “death penalty” by the N.C.A.A. for secret payments by the board of trustees to football players, and the university was trying hard to reestablish its reputation as a serious institution. A small group of trustees, led by the remarkable Ray Hunt, a local oilman, was pressing Ken hard to lead S.M.U. back onto the right path. Ray thought that Duke was the sort of institution S.M.U. ought to become, and that Ken was the right man to lead it there. Ken took Ray’s advice, not mine, and accepted — and then insisted that I join him.

And so, having been approved by the South Western Conference of Bishops of the United Methodist Church, I joined 46 men and women, almost all of whom were either alums or residents of Dallas, on the board. I had never before been in Dallas, and had been under the impression that “Dallasite” was some sort of synthetic construction material. But the S.M.U. experience turned out to be one of the most valuable of my educational career. I liked my colleagues on the board, the university administrators and the faculty. I began to learn what was involved in managing a smaller, underendowed, private, church-related university in a very different region of the country than the northeastern United States, where I had always lived and worked.

Of course I also learned a lot about big-time football, even though I had always been a football fanatic and had considered myself reasonably au courant with intercollegiate athletics. But I had no idea how committed some of my colleagues on the board were to reclaiming S.M.U.’s past glory on the gridiron — this was the university, after all, of Doak Walker, Eric Dickerson and Craig James. But we were starting from scratch after the Death Penalty, and my personal opinion was that we could not become dominant athletically without breaking the N.C.A.A. rules again. When a motion was made to reenter Division I football during one of my first board meetings, I was the only trustee (of the 47 on the reorganized, post-scandal, board) to vote against — but I acceded to Ken Pye’s request that I be recorded as “abstaining,” so that the newspapers would not report that the board had been divided. My impression is that S.M.U. has indeed played by the rules, guided by a series of strong athletic directors and by its remarkable president, Gerald Turner, who succeeded Ken when he passed away suddenly.

I confess, however, that I wonder whether the football stalwarts on the board think that appearing in the Hawaii Bowl, in which S.M.U. whipped Nevada 45-10 last Thursday, really puts the university back where it should be athletically. I watched a few minutes of the game, but I have to say that it did remind me of watching a tough game in the old Southwestern Conference. SMU now plays in something called “Conference USA.” Only two of the schools in its division are what we used to think of as educational peer institutions (Rice and Tulane), but S.M.U. now competes successfully (six wins, two losses) in this league.

I just looked at the current list of trustees, and was fascinated to see that I served with eight or nine of them throughout the 1990s. Laura Bush has since joined the board, and of course S.M.U. is now home to the George W. Bush Presidential Center, since some of former President Bush’s most prominent financial supporters are board members and generous supporters of the University. Like some of the faculty, I fear that the George W. Bush Institute will be a political liablility for S.M.U. down the road, but we’ll see. I am sure that the trustees are proud of the fact that the S.M.U. endowment is now more than three times as large as it was 20 years ago, and I am also certain that they are also proud that S.M.U. now has a stronger faculty. I suspect that much of the credit should go to President Gerald Turner for his integrity and leadership, and Ray Hunt and the other long-time trustees who have always believed what Ken Pye hoped, that S.M.U. would become a nationally ranked university — and I don’t mean B.C.S. rankings. It’s good to have S.M.U. back.