[Vision2020] 'A Strange Little Town in Texas'

[Debbie Gray]

Speaking of Jon Stewart and his lovely news show, did anyone see it 
last night? He had a bit on a prof in Texas that wrote an article 
about the people in his small town... and how, umm, stupid they are. 
Here's an article about it...

http://www.detnews.com/2004/nation/0403/25/a11-102873.htm
Professor stirs tempest in Texas town

Acid-tongued teacher calls residents 'plain stupid;' cops now patrol 
his street

By Lee Hockstader / Washington Post
ALPINE, Texas — The cowboys, ranchers, retirees, immigrants and 
artists scattered around this sparse region of West Texas tend to 
live and let live, drawn more by the immense spaces and dizzying 
beauty than by one another. Cell phone service is now-you-see-it-now-
you-don’t, and it’s easier to glimpse a roadrunner than another car 
when you drive through the region’s sumptuous desert mountains.

Atomized, loosely knit and fiercely individualistic, citizens here 
are not much given to consensus. Or they weren’t until Larry Sechrest 
came along and called them all a bunch of morons.

Sechrest, 56, is a jowly, acid-tongued economics professor at Sul 
Ross State University, an institution best known for producing 
schoolteachers and rodeo performers. The chain hotel manager has 
lived in the little town of Alpine for 13 years, more or less without 
incident. But it is not a gross overstatement to say that if an 
unpopularity contest were held here these days, Sechrest might give 
Saddam Hussein a run for his money.

In January, Sechrest published a 7,000-word article in Liberty, a 
tiny libertarian journal, titled “A Strange Little Town in Texas.” 
After dispensing with the things he likes about Alpine — great 
climate, clean air, awesome scenery, low crime rate, friendly locals, 
frontier spirit, robust theater scene — Sechrest came to his main 
point.

“The secret problem is that the students at Sul Ross, and more 
generally the long-term residents of the entire area, are appallingly 
ignorant, irrational, anti-intellectual, and, well ... just plain 
stupid,” he wrote.

Harsh, yes, but Sechrest, a libertarian himself who grew up near 
Dallas, was just warming up. He dissed his students and neighbors as 
“some of the dumbest clods on the planet,” and his fellow faculty 
members as “mostly a waste of space.” As for the local schoolkids, 
many “are only a notch above retardation,” he said.

What happened next was an object lesson in the perils of roiling the 
waters in a placid small town — or, as City Council member Katie Elms-
Lawrence put it, “Sweetheart, you don’t defecate in your own back 
yard.”

Having written the article last year, Sechrest sent it off to the 
magazine, which is published in Washington state. He figured that was 
that. He said he never imagined it would find its way back to Alpine, 
population about 5,000.

Reaction come quick

Bad call. Not long after the magazine came out, around New Year’s, 
the article began circulating in Alpine and on campus. The effect was 
as if Sechrest had set off a colossal stink bomb.

Many wanted to know why, if Alpine and Sul Ross were filled with 
airheads, Sechrest stayed. (He said it was because of the money — he 
makes $96,000 a year as a professor — and his academic freedom, “most 
likely because no one has any idea what I’m writing about.”) Almost 
everyone in Alpine was furious. Most insisted Sechrest was simply 
wrong.

In the parking lot at Sul Ross on a blustery day recently, Mario 
Garcia, an alumnus, sat waiting for a friend in a pickup. A copy of 
Sechrest’s article lay unread on the dashboard, but Garcia, 44, said 
he knew enough about it to be ticked off.

“I’ve got friends who are graduates of this institution and are very 
successful,” said Garcia, a high school teacher. “I have a friend who 
graduated from here and developed the ham they use in the breakfast 
sandwiches at Burger King.”

Geoffrey Zukowski, 26, a sophomore history major who returned to Sul 
Ross recently after four years as a diesel mechanic in the Navy, 
acknowledged that the school is more wrapped up in sports than in 
scholarship, as Sechrest wrote.

“Sure, football is king — this is West Texas; it’s a way for the 
community to escape from the many-year drought and the fact that it’s 
hard to scratch a living from the dirt of West Texas,” he said. “But 
the fact is that students at this campus get better educations than 
those at larger campuses for the fact that they get more one-on-one 
attention.”

As Sechrest’s article made the rounds, he received a torrent of e-
mail, some of it merely irate, some aggressively obscene. The local 
newspaper and radio station denounced him. Vitriolic callers phoned 
late into the evening. One night, someone smashed the windows of a 
car parked outside his home. Another night, eggs were hurled at his 
house.

There were two death threats, Sechrest said, both phoned in to his 
campus office. The callers said they would “get” him and kill him.

“Not polysyllabic,” Sechrest said. “But, you know, effective.”

Classes cut

For years before Sechrest’s article appeared, he had been known at 
Sul Ross for humiliating his students, university officials said. 
He’d often vented to his colleagues about what he considered his 
students’ intellectual shortcomings. “Students know I’m deadly 
serious about things, and I expect them to be serious,” he said.

But he had never made an indictment so sweeping, or so public. And 
though he protested that he meant no malice, that his article 
contained “a core of truth,” and that it was in the tradition of Mark 
Twain and Alexis de Tocqueville, Sechrest’s defense fell on deaf 
ears.

The police, concerned for his safety, began sending a patrol car by 
his home. Sechrest installed motion-sensor lights around his house, 
at a cost of about $800. Like many people in West Texas, Sechrest is 
a gun owner. He keeps a pair of .45-caliber stainless-steel 
automatics at the ready, he said.

The reaction to Sechrest’s article didn’t stop at hostility. A 
petition circulated on campus calling on students to boycott his 
summer course offerings. Earlier this month, the university, citing 
budget cuts, informed him that he would be teaching — and paid for — 
just two summer courses, rather than the four he expected; the move 
would slash his income by $12,000. Furious, Sechrest accused the 
university of punishing him for his views and trying to drive him to 
quit.

In town, the Alpine Chamber of Commerce and other concerned citizens 
organized an “I Love Alpine” parade. A caravan of cars rolled down 
Holland Avenue, Alpine’s main street, some bearing banners reading 
“Dumb Clod Union” and “Dumber than Dirt.”

Sechrest refused to apologize, though he acknowledged that his 
article may have been insulting and harsh. But when pressed, he said 
that if he had it to do all over again, he wouldn’t write the 
article.

“I was not trying to cause a furor,” he said. “I really didn’t expect 
it.”

The president of Sul Ross, Vic Morgan, was philosophical. “Who knows? 
There’s an old saying in showbiz — I don’t care what you say about 
me, as long as you spell my name right.”


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Debbie Gray                            dgray@udaho.edu
Research Analyst                    208-885-4017
University of Idaho
Department of Ag Economics and Rural Sociology
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