Bill Priest revisited

The other side of the coin

In my recent post on Bill J. Priest and the creation of the Dallas County Community College District, I commented that the biography by Kathleen Krebbs Whitson is a “hagiography,” that is, an account of the life of a saint. According to Whitson's book, the never-wrong Priest was often betrayed by incompetence and intransigence—always in others. For example, here is her report on Priest's travails in his pre-Dallas post as founding president of American River Junior College in Sacramento in 1955:

Priest was hired as the Superintendent/President of the new college. He had the arduous task of not only beginning a new college, but also absorbing an existing college, Grant Technical College, into the new organizational structure. Grant Technical College had actually been the top two years of a kindergarten through fourteenth grade school in the local public school district. The faculty of the college levels, however, had tenure. That was the first hurdle. The new college being founded would not have tenure for the faculty. This was one of the first conflicts. The established faculty felt they should be grandfathered [with tenure] in the non-tenure for faculty policy. They sued and won. Now Priest was faced with a faculty in which some had tenure and some did not. Many of the former faculty of Grant Technical College felt that none of the new rules should apply to them. This perpetual problem more than doubled the efforts of establishing a new college.

Certainly Priest's task would have been greatly eased if only the tenured faculty of Grant Technical has simply rolled over and allowed him to strip them of their job security. What ingrates they were, failing to appreciate the great man's effort to reduce them to at-will employees!

Whitson's coda to Priest's ordeal in assimilating Grant Technical has this interesting twist:

There were continual lawsuits and the attorney was less than competent. He lost nine cases out of nine. Fortunately the Board of Trustees gave full support to Priest in the challenges he faced. In Priest's estimation, they were a quality board with a focus on the educational good for students.

Poor Priest! Saddled with a “less than competent” lawyer. (Who hired this lawyer, anyway? Did the president have no role in staffing the new college district?)

It's easy to offer a different take on this report. Was the attorney incompetent or was Priest pushing too hard against the rights of his faculty members and simply getting rebuffed by the courts? I'm curious to know more about what these nine lawsuits entailed.

By the way, the colleges of the Dallas County Community College District have tenured faculty in addition to part-time and temporary faculty, so it appears that Priest was unable to create an at-will system of faculty employment in right-to-work Texas. Furthermore, the two-tier system that was created at American River Junior College (now just American River College) went away as tenured faculty became the rule rather than the exception at the Sacramento institution. Neither in California nor in Texas was Bill J. Priest successful in establishing himself as an unfettered benevolent dictator. His accomplishments notwithstanding, Priest belongs to the patronizing era of father-knows-best. No doubt the great man would be aghast at the shared-governance practice that emerged in his wake.

One thing Texas does right

Although Perry can't count to three

The seven-college Dallas County Community College District is one of the biggest post-secondary education institutions in the world. The legendary Bill J. Priest was present at the creation in 1965, serving as DCCCD's first president. His starting salary was $35,000, more than the governor of Texas. According to Bill Jason Priest: Community College Pioneer, a hagiography by Kathleen Krebbs Whitson, “an editorial appeared in one of the major daily newspapers in Dallas extolling the integrity of the Dallas County Junior College Board for being willing to spend the money to bring in the very best leadership for the new junior college system.”

That information piqued my curiosity, so I looked up the current salaries of the DCCCD chief executive (a “chancellor” now instead of a “president”) and the Texas governor. It turns out that Chancellor Wright Lassiter earns $271,126 and Governor Rick Perry gets $150,000 (I didn't feel right using “earns” again). Good for Texas! Educators are still out-pointing politicians.

Priest enjoyed twitting his former colleagues back in California about the support for education that he was finding in Texas. “You're working in the wrong place,” he told them. Of course, not everything about Texas was to Priest's liking, but he deftly took care of that with some judicious prevarication. His extremely generous biographer deftly soft-pedals the deception:

Texas was a new experience for him. He knew Texas culture by reputation only. He had never lived in any part of the Bible Belt before. It was an anomaly to him that as a routine part of the get acquainted conversation came the question, “What church do you go to?” He soon discovered that agnosticism was equated with atheism in the Dallas area. In his mind, agnostic meant he believed in a supreme being and that the universe was far too complicated a creation for there not to be a God over all. His negative experiences with fanaticism and those taking advantage of others in the name of organized religion caused him to disassociate with formal denominations that seemingly gave human characteristics to God. This explanation was far too complex to explore in casual chit chat. Since he had been reared in the home of his grandfather, an elder in the First Christian Church, Priest had attended those services with him. Based on that history, First Christian became his answer.

One might have expected a better definition of agnosticism from an educator, as well as less willingness to lie to his new neighbors, but Priest appears to have been undisturbed by it. I guess that's just what a person has to do to survive in Texas.