Page 13 - The First Fifty Years

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DRIVEN 7

the University. Gone immediately were A.A. White’s selective
admission standards, which Blakely regarded as elitist. (Shades of
E.E. Oberholtzer!) Instead, Blakely opened admissions to anyone
with a flat C average (and 90 hours of college).18 According to
Mixon, the school’s new dean defined its purpose as

teaching traditional doctrine to large numbers of unscreened
students, with a tough grading system [based on Darwinian
selection] that flunked out half the class to identify those who
were worthy to graduate and practice law.19

Besides his open admissions policy and unqualified support for
the evening division, Blakely’s revamped vision for the College of
Law led to a starkly different policy regarding faculty hiring. For
Blakely, the primary purpose of a law school was to train students
to practice law so that they could serve their clients capably, and
the primary instrument for carrying out that mission was a corps of
outstanding teachers. He rejected White’s preference for selecting
professors from the national market in favor of hiring more
aggressively from the local bar, and specifically from the ranks of
the College of Law’s own growing list of graduates.20

Likewise, and in keeping with his view of a law teacher’s
proper role, Blakely did not expect professors to engage significantly
in research or publication. Indeed, in his first five years as dean,
Blakely and his new faculty hires published next to nothing21—
although Blakely himself would later become a publishing legend
through his masterful explication of the Texas Rules of Evidence in
the pages of Houston Law Review.

Beginning in 1963, for reasons and by means that need not
detain us here (in part because they are told so well elsewhere),22
Newell Blakely’s vision for the College of Law had begun to
encounter stiff opposition. Many of the faculty who had been hired
by A.A. White continued to cherish the educational ideals he had
championed. Among Blakely’s own hires, many became converts to
those ideals.23 Outside the walls of the College of Law, a President
of the United States was assassinated, the civil rights and women’s
rights movements gained force, the U.S. Government conducted
war in a faraway place while riots broke out on campuses
nationwide, and in general both society and the law began to move
away from Blakely’s understanding of law as “a self-referential and
neutral system whose formal content was independent of social and
community interests” outside the legal system itself.24

Newell Blakely resigned as dean effective at the end of the
school year in 1965. His successor, John Neibel, who had been A.A.
White’s last hire, succeeded him. Neibel struggled for almost a