English professor Marshall Terry, widely known as Mr. SMU, celebrated part of his birthday lecturing to a full crowd Wednesday in the Umphrey Lee Ballroom as the featured speaker of the Maguire Public Scholar Lecture. Terry spoke to a full house about the history of SMU, discussing the school’s successes and failures since it was founded.
The Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility, which presented the lecture, was founded in 1995 to encourage reflection to create ethical solutions to society’s problems. Tom Mayo, director of the center, spoke at the beginning of the lecture regarding its purpose.
“In the life of a school, few things are more important than the occasional revisiting of what we stand for and what our public responsibilities are,” Mayo said.
Revisiting SMU’s past
Terry began the lecture with a brief overview of SMU’s past, presenting its legendary figures such as Robert S. Hyer and Hiram Boaz with vivid detail, describing personalities that combined to create what the school has become today.
He also described the unique challenge of creating a university that would have to rely on the contributions of multiple citizens of Texas and Dallas, as opposed to having one benefactor such as the University of Chicago or Stanford.
“The dream of SMU almost ended in financial disaster,” Terry said.
According to Terry, President Willis Tate, whom he worked closely with, was the fulcrum president who moved SMU from its status as a college to its status as a university.
Tate, Terry said, insisted that SMU be an intellectually free university and that it “must pursue the truth and freedom of inquiry.”
In September 1955, Tate spoke at a Kiwanis meeting and discussed the difficulty of interpreting the nature of a university. According to Terry, Tate told the Kiwanis that “a university is not a football schedule,” but that “it’s a university to seek out the truth in every form and to teach new ideas.”
Creation of a Master Plan
According to Mayo, few people in the history of SMU have been as involved in the process of the university’s self-definition as Terry, who worked at the university for 50 years.
Former Provost Jim Brooks, who introduced Terry, said that he is a “rare individual” who understands that an institution’s historical roots should shape the future of the institution.
Terry was one of the primary authors of the 1963 Master Plan, which outlined the mission and values of SMU.
The Master Plan emphasizes the importance of the university educating students so that they can think and express themselves with logic and effect and do something of significance with their lives, probing the “ultimate questions of life,” and relating to “their own humanity.” The Master Plan is the basis of the school’s current strategic plan.
When constructing the Mater Plan, Terry said they “didn’t want to take any university as an exact model.”
One question the drafters of the Master Plan asked themselves was if a church-related university could become a great private university. They decided that, with consideration of the Wesleyan tradition of “think and let think,” it was, in fact, possible.
Assessing goals and objectives
“Has SMU been true to its goals?” Terry asked. “I may be presumptuous in grading the university, but I care a great deal about these things.”
One of the primary goals of the university since its founding has been protecting the freedom of inquiry. Terry believes this goal has been maintained, describing examples such as President Tate’s invitation of Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at the university in 1965.
“Though student conservatism and faculty specialization has not made SMU a hotbed of contentious ideas, I believe that freedom of inquiry has held firm,” Terry said.
Terry also believes that the school has lived up to its goals of active student participation, citing the creation of Student Senate and the placement of a student on the Board of Trustees, and maintaining its positive relationship with the church, saying that there has been no push to change the name of the university and that the church has given its assistance to the university.
“During the football scandal of the 1980s – and presently – the church lends moral and ethical guidance.”
Another original goal of the university was to serve society, especially the city of Dallas. According to Terry, it was a challenge for university founders to connect with and build a university in what he describes as a non-intellectual, but dynamic, city.
“The education department was once eliminated but now the pendulum has swung back, and there is a new education department,” Terry said.
The Bush Library
Terry believes that the current debate surrounding the Bush Library is in line with the university’s goal of free expression. He says that although there has been some split within the faculty and the church, overall the debate has been a “very healthy development for us.”
“Two months ago I was going to say there was disappointingly little debate,” Terry said. “But now it’s as if a fellow woke up and found an elephant in the room.”
Although Terry did not give his opinion of the Bush Library, he does believe that SMU will be chosen as the site.
“I do believe we’re going to get the library,” Terry said. “There are some challenges there and I believe very deeply that we’re up to those challenges.”
