Administrators vs. Trees at the University of Texas

( The author is a student at the University of Texas. )

NOW I'LL TELL you the story of Waller Creek. Waller Creek winds along the entire length of the University of Texas campus, furnishing the only break in the mass of buildings. Below my dormitory was a beautiful patch of huge cypress trees, oak trees, and a tangle of smaller trees. I'd been around, under, or in those trees ever since the summer after my junior year in high school.

Beginning a few weeks ago, as I walked to classes every morning I'd see myriads of silver flashes on the water. For some reason all the minnows liked to jump out of the water in the early morning, their scales catching the sun as they broke the surface. There were usually many larger fish around, too, because this stretch of the creek was the spawning area. I watched one perch for two weeks while it faithfully guarded its nest against the other fish. It was there every morning and every evening; then one day it was gone. All that was left was a layer of silt from a construction project that the university had just started a little further up the creek.

A couple of weeks later I saw some people I know carrying "Save the Trees" signs, They'd been trying to save five oak trees in front of the football stadium across the street. But the trees had already been bulldozed- which was to be expected, since they were in the way of the stadium expansion. The football stadium presently seats 65,000 persons, but Frank Erwin, chairman of the Board of Regents, had led a campaign to build a new deck of 14,000 seats. A lot of people here thought one of the last things this university needed was 14,000 more football seats and an extension of that concrete monstrosity to twice its present height. But nobody had been told about the worst aspect of the expansion plan. Erwin proposed moving a street over and completely destroying the stretch of Waller Creek I described. Even with the expansion he didn't have to destroy the creek (which he wanted to make into a concrete drainage ditch): the architecture students had drawn up an alternate plan that would have caused only a fraction of the destruction. Even if one considers the 14,000 seats justified, it's hard to justify ruining the creek.

In any case, Erwin has never been liked. He has always seemed more interested in the football team than in the rest of the university. Two years ago he touched off a furor when at Gov, Connally's birthday party in the University of Texas gym he publicly called peace demonstrators a "bunch of dirty nothings" that had no placate on the campus. From time to time, he has handed down other, similar bits of wisdom.

TUESDAY morning, I found about 30 students milling around a bulldozer they had stopped at Waller Creek before it could do a lot of damage. I helped guard the creek between classes during the day, and made a sign that I tied to a tree- just a small tree- a sapling not more than twelve feet tall. It switched around Shakespeare's tombstone epitaph to: "Cursed be he that moves our trees; Blessed be he that leaves them be." Tuesday night people slept in the trees so that the university couldn't send out a midnight wrecking crew.

Wednesday morning at 9 a.m. I found a crowd of several hundred students clustered around Waller Creek. Erwin was there with about 50 campus cops and a bulldozer. The local Sierra Club, at the instigation of some professors who were members of it, was trying to get a temporary injunction to stop the university from acting until it could look at the alternatives. For some reason, they weren't going to be able to get the injunction until about 10 a.m., but the university had sort of indicated that it would only clear away brush until 10 a.m. (You always clear away undergrowth before pushing down big trees- otherwise you have a big tangle that's hard to clean up.)

Erwin had decided, however, that he had better push down the trees before the injunction went into effect. He was ready at 9 a.m. to attack the trees. Unfortunately for Erwin, a lot of the university shared my feelings about the trees. So there were already hundreds of students out by the creek. A big group had had the guts to climb up in the trees before the cops arrived. A tree flag was flying from the tallest cypress.

ABOUT the time I arrived, Erwin called in an additional force of approximately 30 helmeted Austin police with clubs, 25 state troopers, and a hook-and-ladder fire truck that could reach the tree people. Feeling secure with his 100 cops, Erwin decided it was time to start. He sent the cops in with orders to "arrest everybody you need to; once the trees are cut down, there won't be anything to protest." (This is an interesting statement all by itself- there are all sorts of things you can do with it: "Go ahead and kill all the Vietnamese; then there won't be anything to protest.")

The cops mounted ladders, climbed up on the fire truck, and rode up in the scoop of the bulldozer to get the tree people. So nobody could complain about particular cops, they all removed their badges and any other source of identification. The most amazing part of the morning was that nobody got killed. Although nobody fought the cops in the trees, everybody held on. But if you're perched on a limb some 50 feet up, it's hard to keep from falling when a cop inches around the tree trunk and suddenly grabs one of your feet, out from under you, while another one yanks one of your hands off of the limb above you. They even sawed off one limb with a person still on it. The police lowered some people head first and shoved others into the uplifted bulldozer jaws. On the ground, they handcuffed their arms behind their backs and sometimes tossed them over their shoulders like logs (three cops per tree person) to carry to the vans. Twenty-seven people were arrested. The last person to come down was a gutsy girl in the top of a cypress. The police could never have reached her without the hook-and-ladder truck- she had somehow wiggled out to the tip of a big branch with nothing around her for handholds. When the police did get to her, they almost knocked her off the branch- she dangled for several minutes by her hands 100 feet or more above the creek bed. With her descent, and with the lines of cops to hold back everybody else, Erwin could do what he wanted. The tree people had failed in their attempt to hold the creek until the injunction was delivered.

Now Erwin sent in the saws and the bulldozer, with orders to "get the big ones first." They were in such a hurry to get the trees down that they used saws that had been built solely for trimming branches on the trunks. Erwin got so carried away with his own power that he even had his men cut the one big cypress which, according to the university's stadium plan, was supposed to have been spared.

THIS WAS the first time anyone had ever used police on this campus on any large scale to suppress dissent (a couple of campus cops had once chased a few people out of the Union who were sleeping there), and the city and state police had always avoided the campus. Erwin seemed to be trying to goad the students into a riot (but we're such a docile bunch that we never responded-besides, his side had all the guns). When the first big cypress fell, he raised his hands up, clapped, and cheered. To the students he said, "I don't give a shit what you think." To a young mother lamenting the trees, "I couldn't care less about you or your children."

The injunction came through, but the trees were all down by the time it did. In the meantime, I had to go to a class. When I got back, most of the protesters had left- there were just a few tough-looking lugs sawing up the remains of the trees and Frank Erwin with about 20 left-over police talking at a few students. I talked to a reporter from The New York Times and then wandered over to Erwin. He was explaining that our professors must not give us enough to do if we had time to worry about a bunch of trees. This sort of upset me, since I only average (at most) four hours of sleep a night precisely because my professors do give me so much work. He also told me he didn't understand why we were so upset- after all the university planted new trees where it could- whereupon I asked if we were supposed to be grateful because he planted a sapling pinoak (ugly and little even when it grows up in 40 years) for every 150-year-old cypresshe chopped down. Things continued in this vein for a while, with Erwin making disparaging remarks about "the long-hairs down the street" and the like, until he announced, "I don't have time to talk to a bunch of students. " and left.

The scene switched to President Hackerman, who had been sitting in his office hoping the whole thing would blow over. (I've talked with him on several different occasions, and he's a very nice sort of guy.) That afternoon, while I was in class, about 400 students picked up tree branches cut from the fallen trees and, like Birnam Wood advancing on Macbeth, dragged them to the tower, where they stacked the limbs in front of the doorway. The doors had already been locked by the campus police. (In the meantime, someone had started a fire in the janitor's closer in the tower which brought seven fire trucks. They put it out with one fire extinguisher.) When the students started banging on his outside door, Hackerman decided to keep cool and let in a few. He set up a meeting between six students and Erwin. During the meeting, seven carloads of state troopers moved into the tower with riot equipment. They stayed until the next morning. The meeting ended with Erwin saying that he wasn't going to do anything and four students walking out.

Erwin chucked when the group demanded his resignation. He ignored a similar demand by the Daily Texan. He also chuckled when the football-minded Texas-Exes gave him the "Distinguished Axe" award and a little poem that ended with "only Frank can kill a tree." By now everybody was mad at Erwin- the tree people and others who already resented the fact that he eliminated PEO. (PEO was a very successful program for admitting and funding a few highly motivated students from minority group- which counting blacks, Mexican-Americans, and Indians, make up 46 per cent of the state- who, for various reasons, could neither meet the SAT score requirements nor pay the money.) Erwin said that if we got too many minority students they would take over the campus. Everybody not already upset for one of these reasons was just mad because Erwin had broken the non-violent tradition on this campus by, for the first time, using force and outside force at that. He had completely ignored the students and faculty and their alternative plans and opinions; he had barely managed to stay inside the law by cutting the trees just before the injunction; and he had no business being on the campus trying to start a riot- if anybody were to urge on the bulldozers, it should have been the university administration.

The General Faculty of the university held a special meeting at which they adopted a resolution harshly condemning Erwin for his general actions during his term as Regent and especially for his behavior at the "Battle of Waller Creck." If he refused to resign, it said, the faculty would institute impeachment proceedings against him in the Texas legislature. That is a nice gesture, but it probably won't work because Erwin is so powerful in Texas. He was a successful lawyer who became a crony of LBJ and Connally, and rose with them. Connally appointed him a Regent in 1963, and he is also the Democratic State Committeeman.

Erwin rebutted the charges by saying he had only been defending the university against a bunch of SDS'ers trying to take over the campus. (There were maybe two or three SDS'ers at the creek the morning he was inciting to riot. For that matter, there aren't but about 12 active SDS'ers on the campus.) Erwin also implied that the faculty members who voted against him were somehow linked to SDS, and that the whole affair was cooked up by a coalition of trouble-making students and professors. After these public statements to the press and radio. even the Young Democrats and Young Republicans announced a joint campaign to send representatives all over the state refuting Erwin's statements. The governing board of the Law School voted 9-1 in favor of condemning Erwin.

Then the scandal broke about Erwin and a couple of other LBJ cronies who allegedly got government land with government collateral in the waning days of LBJ. The deal may actually be legitimate, but everybody has doubts about it. Erwin isn't the sort to sponsor a Geriatrics Center out of sheer goodness: (The center has never been built, and the land is still in his possession.) Anyway, Erwin's last statement to the Daily Texan was: "I'm not going to talk to you."

Last Saturday was another beautiful sunny day. About 250 of us gathered at Waller Creek to plant some trees, clean the place up and shore up the banks with rocks and logs. I only stayed a couple of hours, but it was really nice. I worked hard carrying rocks, and there were lots of apples, oranges, and singing. We even built a barbecue pit.

I knew the injunction would probably be dissolved since the big trees it was supposed to save were already gone, but I didn't care- it made me feel good just to be building something where somebody else had been destroying. Besides, there's still one nice stretch of the creek left, and maybe after all the uproar they'll be afraid to destroy it with any future projects. At least they're going to leave the creek and not cement it in.

Last Tuesday they bulldozed away everything we had built, but that was sort of expected. I spent half an hour trying to escort the last living thing in Waller Creek past the bulldozer, but it got scared when the dozen snorted, and I finally had to give up. The last living thing was a large old snapping turtle- who looked so very confused.

The bulldozers kept coming and kept coming, but the little twelve-foot sapling still wore its curse sign and still stood. One day, after about a week, the sign fell off. The next day the tree was gone.