By: Robert Boyer, Guest Columnist
Daily Texan
November 17, 1995

My own feeling is that the UT campus is a somewhat sacred ground and that the naming of a building for Jim Bob Moffett will be a sacrilege, one I cannot in conscience let pass unprotested, regardless of my low expectations that the regents will reverse their naming decision.

I think it ludicrous for a UT official to argue that the University is so fabulously inclusive that principle requires it to let Jim Bob Moffett buy his way into minor secular immortality by arranging to have a building named after himself. Sure, Jim Bob Moffett has the right to express his views at the University. He has a right to speak on the UT campus, for example on the West Mall, any time he wants, just like anyone else, provided he follows all the rules.

I am sure that he can afford to rent Bass Auditorium any day, and I bet that the University would be happy to let him speak on any topic.

I also believe that he has a right to fund whatever research he chooses via the University, even geological research in Irian Jaya (West Papua).

But Jim Bob Moffett has no right to have his name on a building, whether he offers to pay 15 percent or 1,500 percent of the cost. To have a building named after oneself is an honor, but not a right.

To stretch the ancient principle of academic freedom to cover the unseemly practice of purchasing honors is to make trash of the principle of academic freedom.

It was not wrong, merely gauche, for Jim Bob Moffett to give $2 million in return for getting his name on a $25 million building.

But it was an appalling error of judgment for the regents and the administration to offer him such a deal because of the disgrace it will now bring to the university, a disgrace that could have been avoided by due diligence by the regents.

As chairman of Freeport-McMoRan, which has not only been America's largest polluter but is also now the target of the recent OPIC letter charging extreme environmental damage in Irian Jaya (West Papua), Jim Bob Moffett is not someone whom the university ought to honor.

Because the chancellor makes tens of thousands of dollars annually as a Freeport-McMoRan board member, the whole deal just stinks to high heaven. Hasn't anyone up there heard that government officials ought to follow the principle of avoiding even the appearance of a conflict of interest? Geeeeesh.

Given the allegations that Freeport is involved in murder and torture in Indonesia -- well that's just about all that the University needs to be disgraced. And if my sources are right, the worst is still yet to come.

The entire UT community will long regret the regents having waived their policy of waiting five years after someone has died before naming a building for that person. As the Greeks said, "Count no man happy until he is dead."

Apropos the resignation over this issue of Steven Feld, I wish the administration and the state of Texas would take this occasion to learn that it is easier to raise millions for a building than to attract people of Feld's stature to the University.

If you look at the really great universities, e.g., Harvard, Berkeley, and Chicago, you will see that a crude measure of how much better they are than the University of Texas is the order of magnitude more professors they have with Nobel Prizes or memberships in the National Academy of Sciences or American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

I would rather see the University lose a building than lose a member of one of these academies. But I doubt that Texas will understand this point for about another century.

In this Moffett building naming fiasco, by far the greatest crime is that the administration failed to retain Feld, whose departure is a staggering loss to the University, one for which the administration must take full responsibility. The University chose between greatness and sucking up to the rich, and it chose wrong.

Can the naming of the building for Moffett be stopped? The chairman of the board of regents, Bernard Rapoport, is quoted on Nov. 10 as saying "When they went out to raise the money, they indicated to him (Moffett) that if he made the contribution that he made, his name would be among those on the building. It seems to me our honor is at stake." So, the University is honor bound to disgrace itself. However, there is one rational way out for the regents. A principle of law is that no contract can bind one to commit a crime. The regents simply need to realize that naming the building for Moffett will be a crime, a crime against the trust that the regents have to preserve and defend the good name of the University. If that means giving Moffett back his money, it will be a very inexpensive way to avoid disgrace. If that scares off future donors, it will be the price the university must pay for a mistake of judgment by the regents. But it is much wiser to be impoverished than dishonorable.

Hypothetically assuming for the moment that the building will eventually be named for Moffett, what alternatives do the faculty and students have? It seems to me that a concerted effort by the faculty and students to use the name Muller Hall (after the noted geneticist H.J. Muller) for the new molecular biology building, despite its official name, might be an effective form of dissent, a daily verbal reminder that the way things work at the University is not the way that things ought to work.

In law, the regents doubtless have the power to name UT buildings, and there is nothing the faculty can do about that or anything else that the regents officially decide. But the regents have no ability to control the phrases that people use informally to refer to things. If we all call it Muller Hall, then in the most important sense it will be Muller Hall.

Perhaps the faculty should hold a meeting to ask the regents to choose a new name, to suggest to them an alternative name, and to agree to use the alternative name informally until a new name is officially chosen.

Boyer is a professor of computer science.