Decision in Nevada

In the five years that he has been at the University of Nevada, Minard Stout, 49, has in one way chalked up a record that any university president might envy. He trebled state support coming from bond issues and appropriations, upped private gifts ten times. He raised faculty salaries 68%, set up colleges of education and business administration, a graduate school, a school of nursing, and a junior college in Las Vegas. But ever since he got Biologist Frank Richardson fired for accusing him of lowering academic standards (TIME, June 15, 1953), he has been the center of the bitterest storm ever to hit the university.

The Richardson affair seemed to poison the whole atmosphere of the campus. Lecturer-Author Walter Van Tilburg Clark (The Ox-Bow Incident) resigned in protest; other scholars charged Stout with everything from "favoritism" to "inhuman and capricious treatment," and last spring the American Association of University Professors censured the administration for violation of academic freedom and tenure. By that time, the Nevada legislature had gone out after Stout, too.

It invited a committee of outside educators to investigate the squabble, and after the committee concluded that Stout had indeed interfered with the faculty's freedom to criticize (though it praised his achievements), it decided to break the pro-Stout majority on the five-man board of regents by adding four anti-Stout men. When the state supreme court declared that such appointments were the province of the governor only, Governor Charles H. Russell promptly reappointed the same men. After that, Stout's reign was clearly near its end--and last week the end came.

After hours of tortured soul-searching, the board of regents decided that it could not work with a man the majority so thoroughly disagreed with, asked for and got Stout's resignation. But in spite of all the controversy he had stirred up, Minard Stout had also aroused a good deal of sympathy in Nevada for the dogged kind of courage he constantly displayed under fire. "His enemies," said the Las Vegas Sun, "will admit his accomplishments were almost enough to outweigh his mistakes."

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