Dr Vic Morgan is president of Sul Ross State University. With 18 years of leadership, he is the second longest reigning state college president in the history of Texas. The former math professor sat down with Big Bend Sentinel reporter Mark Glover to discuss the University’s past, present and future as an institution of higher learning in the Big Bend Region of Texas.
Glover: Dr Morgan, you served as unofficial, acting, interim and finally after a nation-wide search, the official president of Sul Ross State University after being appointed by the Board of Regents in 1989 during the Ann Richards Administration. What do you like about the job?
Morgan: Watching students develop, grow and graduate. The highlight for me of each semester is the Commencement Ceremony. That’s what we’re all about. Helping the students become successful.
Glover: After graduating from High School in Bangs, Texas you received a Bachelors at Howard Payne, a Masters at Vanderbilt and a PHD from the University of Missouri, all in math. If you had to do it over again would you still choose math?
Morgan: Absolutely.
Glover: How has math tweeked you and how can it help students?
Morgan: I think it makes me a better problem solver, a better analyst. But I don’t know how true that is; there are other good university presidents who are geologists, historians, writers. For students I think it helps them to come up with solutions. It’s the basis for anything you want to do.
Glover: What about the “flat earth” theory and the rumble that American students are lazy when compared with Indian and Chinese students?
Morgan: The ancient Greeks said the same thing about their next generation. We live in a global society. But that does not mean that nerds rule. Put the best American students up against the best Indians or Chinese and we’ll do just fine.
Glover: What about open enrollment at Sul Ross? Can anybody get in?
Morgan: We don’t have open enrollment. Our admitting standards require that a new college freshmen be at the top ten per cent of their graduating high school class. If not then they must score at least a 20 on the enhanced ACT test or 920 or better on the verbal and math SAT and be in the upper half of their graduating High School class. If they don’t meet these standards they can be admitted probationally based on performance scores or if all else fails, they can appeal by writing an appeal letter. This shows motivation and an interest in attending college. Kids deserve an opportunity to go to college.
Glover: What is your philosophy of education?
Morgan: Our goal is to help students learn to learn, not to fill their heads with facts and figures. To teach them to learn to make effective decisions and become effective citizens. They’re not going to enter the job market and stick with a company for thirty years like their parents did. They’re jobs don’t even exist yet and likely they won’t last more than 3-5 years. They have to know how to re-train themselves.
Glover: What is the most frustrating part of your job?
Morgan: Funding is always frustrating. We can’t pay faculty and staff what they’re worth. And 85 per cent of our students have a documented financial need as compared to UT Austin where it runs 12-20 per cent. 65-70 per cent of our students are first generation college students. (Dr Morgan earns a reported $ 200,000 per year plus benefits).
Glover: Is Texas Tech taking over Sul Ross State University?
Morgan: If they are, they haven’t talked to me about it. It’s a legislative process. It has to go through Austin first.
Glover: Your wife Mary Jane, among other posts, is part of the TAKS Committee at Marathon Independent School District.
Morgan: Yes, She got involved two years ago when they were a low-performing school, helping to revise curriculum and provide tutoring. Now I believe they are a recognized school and doing well.
Glover: Marathon rancher Jack Pope helped save Sul Ross at one point.
Morgan: Yes, Jack was a member of the Texas Supreme Court in 1985 and helped fight off an attempt to close the college by suggesting to the legislature that if they did close it, they’d be building another soon to do the same thing.
Glover: Being on the edge of the desert, some people look up at the university on the hill and see it as a water guzzler, with all the green grass. Have you considered expansion of your x-scaping and/or a water recovery system?
Morgan: Nothing formally planned. But we do live in a highland grass plain. That’s why the cattle industry flourishes here.(We grow) No exotics (grass).
Glover: I hear you’re a motorcycle riding enthusiast. What kind of bike do you have and what’s your favorite rides?
Morgan: I ride a BMW R1150 RT. My favorites rides in Texas are: River Road, Scenic Loop, Wild Rose Pass.
Glover: I understand the utility bills at Sul Ross run $90,000.00 a month. Is their any plans for alternative energy systems?
Morgan: I don’t know if $ 90,000 is right but I do know its high. As we speak we’re installing a solar energy system at the pool to heat the water. No other programs are planned other than conservation, meaning that every building we build is built to save energy.
Glover: Do you have a re-cycling program at Sul Ross?
Morgan: We recycle paper, cardboard. We had a student program re-cycling cans.
Glover: What is your philosophy on re-cycling?
Morgan: We need to do it. At a small institution, if it is not economical, then you are taking (funds) from some other place to do it. We have to do it at the expense of something else. But it’s the right thing to do. We live on a space ship and more and more we are understanding what that means.
Glover: Recently during the re-accreditation process with the Southern Association of Colleges, the theme of Sul Ross’s unique location was trumpeted.
Morgan: Accreditation basically means we are compliant with about 75 things that all institutions must do to serve our regions. We then must develop a plan to improve student learning. Our new Quality Enhancement Plan hopes to improve learning by using our great outdoor environment and emphasizing outdoor activity to improve student engagement and critical thinking.
Glover: What does it mean to be a small university in the middle of nowhere?
Morgan: We provide teacher training in rural west Texas. 60 per cent of our students take some type of teacher certification class. We provide teachers, administrators, counselors, principals, superintendents… We were founded as Sul Ross Normal College, a college to train teachers. Our first student, Janie Macou, graduated here and went on to teach at the Centennial School in Alpine for 35 years. Janie Macou typifies who we are and what we are. But we do lots of other things. We have an outstanding Agriculture and natural Resource Management, Biology and Geology programs as well as outstanding programs in the humanities, the arts and business administration.
Glover: Some in the field of education are concerned with the burgeoning ratio of administrators to faculty. I think Sul Ross has three administrators for every instructor. Doesn’t that create a lot of beaurocracy?
Morgan: Define an administrator? We have less than four hundred employees of which one hundred are faculty. The faculty would be upset if I took away their secretaries, custodians, grounds keepers, record keepers, etc. We have cut administration. Two years ago we had 5 V-P’s today we have 3.
Glover: How do you see the future of Sul Ross?
Morgan: There will be more distant learning and web-based classes. But these type of classes do not broaden the student’s perspective. A big place in education is the residential campus where students get their degrees and grow-up. On campus you learn a lot about people and much of that learning takes place outside the classroom: bull sessions, roommates, student organizations, etc.
Glover: When the time comes, what will be Vic Morgan’s legacy at Sul Ross?
Morgan: I don’t know if I’ll have to leave a legacy. Perhaps getting credit or blame for tearing down the old buildings. But we have enhanced the academic progress and rebuilt the campus. The next president will need to raise a lot of money. We’ve got a damn fine faculty, and an outstanding library. You know the oldest institutions in America are universities. That’s because they provide a pretty incredible product.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Libertarians: Dr Larry Sechrest
Politically, being a Libertarian throws you in neither the conservative or liberal camp. For Dr Larry Sechrest, Professor of Economics at Sul Ross State University and libertarian, this means yes on legalized drugs, prostitution, gay marriage and gambling and no on Food Stamps, income tax, government bail-outs and the Patriot Act.
“Libertarians,” Sechrest said, “say to liberals and conservatives alike, ‘a pox on both your houses’.”
He sat behind his monitor in his office wearing black, peering through thick glasses, his white beard and modified Prince Valiant haircut, distinctive. Ceiling high shelves cover the walls, stuffed with volumes authored from Al Gore to Shakespeare, Marx to Ayn Rand. Drawings of sailing ships speck the few un-booked areas and a cleared spot on one shelf harbors a framed photograph of his wife, Molly.
“Most Americans don’t understand that the spirit of our Founding Fathers was significantly Libertarian,” Sechrest said.
Libertarians believe that the fundamental threshold condition for a peaceful life is the absolute respect for a person’s rights including the right of private property. What you do in your own house is your business, provided you don’t harm anybody. The biggest components of a libertarian government are a police force, armed forces and a legal system. Sechrest believes that our federal government could function adequately with a 500 billion dollar budget under a Libertarian regime rather than the 3 trillion dollar budget we now have.
According to Sechrest, three watershed characters in America’s history were the fundamental philosophical forces that pushed the US away from its founding principles into the present “intrusive economy.”
“Abe Lincoln was a huge nationalist, a virtual dictator. He wanted to exploit one part of the country for the benefit of the other. He introduced the draft and the income tax. He arrested the entire Maryland legislature. He suspended Habeas Corpus,” Sechrest said. “Like George Bush and his Patriot Act –it was to hell with civil liberties.”
“There’s a mythos in our country about Abe Lincoln. He was not a poor man. He was in fact a highly paid attorney for the railroads and he proved his color with the Land Grants of 1862 (benefiting the railroad companies),” Sechrest said.
“John McCain’s hero, Teddy Roosevelt, wanted to rule the world. He was a die hard imperialist and loved war,” Sechrest said. “He believed that we were the right hand of the Messiah, instruments of God, like the Neo-Cons believe today. He was a good shot, educated, and a good writer but a dangerous man. His ideas were like the Monroe Doctrine on steroids.”
“The other Roosevelt, FDR, was a monstrous president, not a savior, as most people think, but a destroyer. Many of our traditions of welfare were inspired by his administration. Two big myths: that he got us out of the depression and that WWII was good for the economy – both false,” Sechrest said. “He admired Stalin and Mussolini. He created the Cold War by giving Eastern Europe to Stalin. By his actions he subjected 100,000,000 people to communism.”
Sechrest believes that the best US president in the last half-century was Ronald Reagan, though Calvin Coolidge was even better in the 1920s.
“Reagan was remarkably bright and a better intellectual than Al Gore. Based on his speeches he was a good president, but his policy was not consistent,” Sechrest said. “He spent too much and opposed true free trade.”
Sechrest is warm to the enlightened self interest philosophy of Ayn Rand. He believes that we should have a right to control our own destiny. But he agrees that many people cannot seem to get past the title of one of her famous books The Virtue of Selfishness because words like greed and selfishness have an anti-biblical connotation. “It’s not Jesus,” Sechrest explains.
“Greed is good as long as nobody has political privilege. But when you have somebody benefiting at the expense of others, it trumps the voluntary choices of others. And every dollar in a politician’s hand is a dollar wasted,” Sechrest said.
But who takes care of the poor, the disenfranchised, the have-nots under the libertarian system?
“There are zero social services enumerated in the constitution,” Sechrest points out. “Before government welfare, people, churches, fraternal organization took care of their own. This is true benevolence not forced benevolence through taxes, at the point of a gun.”
“There is also no enumeration in the constitution for income taxes. When you have more disposable income you can give more,” Sechrest said. “Furthermore, in a libertarian world of little regulation, no subsidies, no effective labor unions, and low taxes, there would be many more opportunities for people to advance economically.”
Critics of Libertarianism, such as Norm Chomsky, suggest that such a system based on pure competition inevitable leads to war. Sechrest disagrees.
“Chomsky like so many leftists have misunderstood competition. It is the life blood of a free society and is the opposite of war because it requires cooperation, because all people’s rights are respected. People voluntarily buy or sell their goods and services. It is the one and only real peaceful system,” Sechrest said.
Peace is something Sechrest did not experience after writing an article called “A Strange Little Town in Texas,” for Liberty Magazine in 2004. In the article he suggested a masters degree at local Sul Ross State University “is equivalent of a diploma from a high school 30 years ago.” Students there, understand “ artificial insemination of a goat but don’t know why the ninth amendment is in the constitution.” Or working with Dan Rather’s quote, “SRSU is possible the most overlooked little university west of the Mississippi,” Sechrest suggested, rather “one of the best high schools in west Texas.” There were other remarks: inbreeding amongst the local populace, the concentration of over-the-hill hippies in Alpine and a few other non-politically correct features in the article. It all led to an uproar, instigating threatening phone calls, including broken windows at his house, at least two death threats, and a general ostracizing.
Today Sechrest looks backs and is amazed that people largely ignored the principle goal of the article and that was “to bring attention to the very poor quality of education in this area.” He also regrets that many people in the area “discredited themselves by acting like thugs and barbarians” and that “the media which reported on the events never knew that dozens of area residents (not to mention hundreds from other parts of the country) have told me that they agreed with what I said.”
Sechrest has over 50 essays published in academic journals, reference works and other periodicals. He is the author of Free Banking: Theory, History, and a Laissez-Faire Model, now in its second edition. He has recently finished a 1300 page manuscript on merchant sailing vessels and includes some of his own sketches and drawings. It is presently being reviewed by publishers in London with the working title: Encyclopedia of Speed under Sail. He’s listed in Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in America, and Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers. He is also on the editorial boards of three scholarly journals and as this writer can attest; one of the students’ more popular teachers in the SRSU Business School.
Sechrest was asked about the proposed US-Mexico border wall.
“It’s absurd, ridiculous. It expresses the hubris of all politicians. They think everything they do will work. Politicians are ever creating barriers to prevent people from cooperating with other people. They think if we build a wall, people suddenly won’t be able to come across the border. Nonsense. More people drank per capita during Prohibition than they did before it. Tell people they can’t do it and they’ll do it even more,” Sechrest said.
On La Entrada al Pacifico, the proposed truck route linking the United States with the Mexican seaport Topolambapo:
“If it’s such a good idea then let the Mexican truckers pay for it. Why should the American people pay for more traffic on their highways?”
He also addressed the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“It is not free trade. Real free trade can be summed up in one sentence: We’ll trade our stuff for you stuff and there’ll be no tariffs. The NAFTA agreement is something like 1269 pages long.”
What is his view on bureaucrats and economists?
“What I’d like to see is that these government people go out and find a real job.”
He laughs. “Or at least consult economists before they open their mouths.” A twinkle of mischief forms behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “But only good economists, free-market economists, like me.”
“Libertarians,” Sechrest said, “say to liberals and conservatives alike, ‘a pox on both your houses’.”
He sat behind his monitor in his office wearing black, peering through thick glasses, his white beard and modified Prince Valiant haircut, distinctive. Ceiling high shelves cover the walls, stuffed with volumes authored from Al Gore to Shakespeare, Marx to Ayn Rand. Drawings of sailing ships speck the few un-booked areas and a cleared spot on one shelf harbors a framed photograph of his wife, Molly.
“Most Americans don’t understand that the spirit of our Founding Fathers was significantly Libertarian,” Sechrest said.
Libertarians believe that the fundamental threshold condition for a peaceful life is the absolute respect for a person’s rights including the right of private property. What you do in your own house is your business, provided you don’t harm anybody. The biggest components of a libertarian government are a police force, armed forces and a legal system. Sechrest believes that our federal government could function adequately with a 500 billion dollar budget under a Libertarian regime rather than the 3 trillion dollar budget we now have.
According to Sechrest, three watershed characters in America’s history were the fundamental philosophical forces that pushed the US away from its founding principles into the present “intrusive economy.”
“Abe Lincoln was a huge nationalist, a virtual dictator. He wanted to exploit one part of the country for the benefit of the other. He introduced the draft and the income tax. He arrested the entire Maryland legislature. He suspended Habeas Corpus,” Sechrest said. “Like George Bush and his Patriot Act –it was to hell with civil liberties.”
“There’s a mythos in our country about Abe Lincoln. He was not a poor man. He was in fact a highly paid attorney for the railroads and he proved his color with the Land Grants of 1862 (benefiting the railroad companies),” Sechrest said.
“John McCain’s hero, Teddy Roosevelt, wanted to rule the world. He was a die hard imperialist and loved war,” Sechrest said. “He believed that we were the right hand of the Messiah, instruments of God, like the Neo-Cons believe today. He was a good shot, educated, and a good writer but a dangerous man. His ideas were like the Monroe Doctrine on steroids.”
“The other Roosevelt, FDR, was a monstrous president, not a savior, as most people think, but a destroyer. Many of our traditions of welfare were inspired by his administration. Two big myths: that he got us out of the depression and that WWII was good for the economy – both false,” Sechrest said. “He admired Stalin and Mussolini. He created the Cold War by giving Eastern Europe to Stalin. By his actions he subjected 100,000,000 people to communism.”
Sechrest believes that the best US president in the last half-century was Ronald Reagan, though Calvin Coolidge was even better in the 1920s.
“Reagan was remarkably bright and a better intellectual than Al Gore. Based on his speeches he was a good president, but his policy was not consistent,” Sechrest said. “He spent too much and opposed true free trade.”
Sechrest is warm to the enlightened self interest philosophy of Ayn Rand. He believes that we should have a right to control our own destiny. But he agrees that many people cannot seem to get past the title of one of her famous books The Virtue of Selfishness because words like greed and selfishness have an anti-biblical connotation. “It’s not Jesus,” Sechrest explains.
“Greed is good as long as nobody has political privilege. But when you have somebody benefiting at the expense of others, it trumps the voluntary choices of others. And every dollar in a politician’s hand is a dollar wasted,” Sechrest said.
But who takes care of the poor, the disenfranchised, the have-nots under the libertarian system?
“There are zero social services enumerated in the constitution,” Sechrest points out. “Before government welfare, people, churches, fraternal organization took care of their own. This is true benevolence not forced benevolence through taxes, at the point of a gun.”
“There is also no enumeration in the constitution for income taxes. When you have more disposable income you can give more,” Sechrest said. “Furthermore, in a libertarian world of little regulation, no subsidies, no effective labor unions, and low taxes, there would be many more opportunities for people to advance economically.”
Critics of Libertarianism, such as Norm Chomsky, suggest that such a system based on pure competition inevitable leads to war. Sechrest disagrees.
“Chomsky like so many leftists have misunderstood competition. It is the life blood of a free society and is the opposite of war because it requires cooperation, because all people’s rights are respected. People voluntarily buy or sell their goods and services. It is the one and only real peaceful system,” Sechrest said.
Peace is something Sechrest did not experience after writing an article called “A Strange Little Town in Texas,” for Liberty Magazine in 2004. In the article he suggested a masters degree at local Sul Ross State University “is equivalent of a diploma from a high school 30 years ago.” Students there, understand “ artificial insemination of a goat but don’t know why the ninth amendment is in the constitution.” Or working with Dan Rather’s quote, “SRSU is possible the most overlooked little university west of the Mississippi,” Sechrest suggested, rather “one of the best high schools in west Texas.” There were other remarks: inbreeding amongst the local populace, the concentration of over-the-hill hippies in Alpine and a few other non-politically correct features in the article. It all led to an uproar, instigating threatening phone calls, including broken windows at his house, at least two death threats, and a general ostracizing.
Today Sechrest looks backs and is amazed that people largely ignored the principle goal of the article and that was “to bring attention to the very poor quality of education in this area.” He also regrets that many people in the area “discredited themselves by acting like thugs and barbarians” and that “the media which reported on the events never knew that dozens of area residents (not to mention hundreds from other parts of the country) have told me that they agreed with what I said.”
Sechrest has over 50 essays published in academic journals, reference works and other periodicals. He is the author of Free Banking: Theory, History, and a Laissez-Faire Model, now in its second edition. He has recently finished a 1300 page manuscript on merchant sailing vessels and includes some of his own sketches and drawings. It is presently being reviewed by publishers in London with the working title: Encyclopedia of Speed under Sail. He’s listed in Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in America, and Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers. He is also on the editorial boards of three scholarly journals and as this writer can attest; one of the students’ more popular teachers in the SRSU Business School.
Sechrest was asked about the proposed US-Mexico border wall.
“It’s absurd, ridiculous. It expresses the hubris of all politicians. They think everything they do will work. Politicians are ever creating barriers to prevent people from cooperating with other people. They think if we build a wall, people suddenly won’t be able to come across the border. Nonsense. More people drank per capita during Prohibition than they did before it. Tell people they can’t do it and they’ll do it even more,” Sechrest said.
On La Entrada al Pacifico, the proposed truck route linking the United States with the Mexican seaport Topolambapo:
“If it’s such a good idea then let the Mexican truckers pay for it. Why should the American people pay for more traffic on their highways?”
He also addressed the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“It is not free trade. Real free trade can be summed up in one sentence: We’ll trade our stuff for you stuff and there’ll be no tariffs. The NAFTA agreement is something like 1269 pages long.”
What is his view on bureaucrats and economists?
“What I’d like to see is that these government people go out and find a real job.”
He laughs. “Or at least consult economists before they open their mouths.” A twinkle of mischief forms behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “But only good economists, free-market economists, like me.”
Meeting Jeff Fort
Former two-time Tyco International Ltd. CEO, Jeff Fort, has found a lot to do since leaving the giant conglomerate. Exploring for petroglyphs at his Pinto Canyon Ranch in a big-tired Jeep fills part of his time. Testifying against ex-officers of his former company fills another.
“I spent five days in New York giving deposition last month,” Fort said, leaning back in his chair. “The civil part of the matter is not over.”
The waiter came and Fort let me choose the wine, “as long as it’s red,” he said. I went for the 2004 Hendry Block 28 Zinfandel. Fort nodded. He was casually dressed, lean and maybe sixty. Only one table remained open at the Cochinelle that night.
Fort served as CEO for Tyco from 1982 to 1992. He brought in Dennis Kozlowski to fill his shoes. In ten years, Kozlowski added hundreds of companies to the TYCO banner and billions to its sales but calls of impropriety from shareholders, about the time that ENRON and WORLDCOM came down, instigated an internal investigation.
“They had quite a lifestyle,” Fort said, referring to Kozlowski, the CFO and the general counsel for Tyco.
Kozlowski bought an 18.5 million dollar penthouse on Fifth Ave., then stocked it with art. To avoid New York sales tax he showed an out of state address.
“He was shipping empty boxes to New Hampshire,” Fort said.
Tax evasion brought on the heat, but the company’s internal investigation showed many other problems too. After negotiating with Kozlowski to step down voluntarily, which saved Tyco 120 million dollars in potential severance fees, Fort returned to Tyco to serve as interim CEO in the summer of 2002. Criminal charges were brought against Kozlowski and three other Tyco associates. Two trials later, Kozlowski and one other former employee are now serving time in a New York State penitentiary.
And Fort is glad to spend his time in Texas.
“I love the mountains out here,” he said.
He visited west Texas a little over ten years ago after getting a tip from his friend Tim Crowley.
“I grew up in the northeast and hiked a lot in New Hampshire and Vermont. But big open spaces are shrinking. And that’s why I’m out here,” Fort said.
Fort has put all 90 sections of the Pinto Canyon Ranch under a conservation easement.
“A conservation easement is a permanent burden to title,” John Karges of the Nature Conservancy, in Alpine, Texas, said. “The landowner agrees to a certain amount of conservation. No sub-division is allowed and coordination with certain agencies like U.S.Fish and Wildlife to monitor the health of the land is suggested. Conservation easements are helping to protect American wilderness.”
“I’m sensitive to the environment. I’ve seen what development can do, if capitalism runs unfettered.” Fort leaned back and swirled the Zin in his glass.
When asked about America’s version of democratic capitalism, he stared for a moment, then said, “I’m a big fan of capitalism. I think it’s the only way to go. The trick is, regulation and how to craft it.”
The waiter served a green salad and before lifting his fork, Fort said, “Innovation. Capitalism. You never know where it’s going to pop-out. It’s always moving. Business tries to find ways around regulation, which is neat and good because the government is not very good at crafting good regulation.”
I mentioned that I lean left, politically.
“Did communism work in Russia?” he asked, like a father, like a wise man.
I shakes me head.
“And now they are run by thugs, nothing subtle about it,” Fort said. “The big difference between Russia and us, is our legal system. Our law has teeth.”
I thought about Kozlowski in the pen and his art and the gray and red walls of the restaurant.
“In Russia they’re buying up art,” Fort said. “Sotheby’s, Christies. They buy it to be ‘Big Guys’.”
There was half a bottle of wine left and he poured us each another glass. The ring on his finger was some type of yellow stone, flat, aged and rectangular.
“I like my wine red, thick and rich,” Fort said.
Fort is a big supporter of The Center for Big Bend Studies.
“I love what they’re doing.” His eyebrow quirked. “They taught me how to find the sites.”
The center has documented over 450 archeological sites on the Pinto Canyon Ranch including wikiups from the ancient Cielo Complex people.
“The vibes you get from an 8000 year old spear head,” Fort said. He shakes his head.
“Awesome.”
Fort’s wife, Marion Barthelme, is a free lance writer and a Time Magazine correspondent. She is also the former wife of short story meta-fictionalist Donald Barthelme, who died in the late 1980’s at 58.
Somehow, I recalled an opening to one of his stories: “The death of God left the angels in a strange position.”
“Does she find it scary?” I asked.
“To come out here?” He asked.
I nod.
“It is scary. But after a while you get over it.”
Marion spends most of her time in Houston.
The waiter came by with the check and I asked Mr Fort if we can split it, hoping that he’d say “of course not.”
“No way,” Fort said. He put his glasses on, examined the bill, then laid his credit card on the table.
Tiny rocks crunched under our feet as we walked out through the dim lit courtyard. The Marfa wind howled. We reached the curb and Fort’s hot rod Jeep.
“Can I call you if I’m fuzzy on the facts?” I asked.
“Sure, call me any time.”
“I spent five days in New York giving deposition last month,” Fort said, leaning back in his chair. “The civil part of the matter is not over.”
The waiter came and Fort let me choose the wine, “as long as it’s red,” he said. I went for the 2004 Hendry Block 28 Zinfandel. Fort nodded. He was casually dressed, lean and maybe sixty. Only one table remained open at the Cochinelle that night.
Fort served as CEO for Tyco from 1982 to 1992. He brought in Dennis Kozlowski to fill his shoes. In ten years, Kozlowski added hundreds of companies to the TYCO banner and billions to its sales but calls of impropriety from shareholders, about the time that ENRON and WORLDCOM came down, instigated an internal investigation.
“They had quite a lifestyle,” Fort said, referring to Kozlowski, the CFO and the general counsel for Tyco.
Kozlowski bought an 18.5 million dollar penthouse on Fifth Ave., then stocked it with art. To avoid New York sales tax he showed an out of state address.
“He was shipping empty boxes to New Hampshire,” Fort said.
Tax evasion brought on the heat, but the company’s internal investigation showed many other problems too. After negotiating with Kozlowski to step down voluntarily, which saved Tyco 120 million dollars in potential severance fees, Fort returned to Tyco to serve as interim CEO in the summer of 2002. Criminal charges were brought against Kozlowski and three other Tyco associates. Two trials later, Kozlowski and one other former employee are now serving time in a New York State penitentiary.
And Fort is glad to spend his time in Texas.
“I love the mountains out here,” he said.
He visited west Texas a little over ten years ago after getting a tip from his friend Tim Crowley.
“I grew up in the northeast and hiked a lot in New Hampshire and Vermont. But big open spaces are shrinking. And that’s why I’m out here,” Fort said.
Fort has put all 90 sections of the Pinto Canyon Ranch under a conservation easement.
“A conservation easement is a permanent burden to title,” John Karges of the Nature Conservancy, in Alpine, Texas, said. “The landowner agrees to a certain amount of conservation. No sub-division is allowed and coordination with certain agencies like U.S.Fish and Wildlife to monitor the health of the land is suggested. Conservation easements are helping to protect American wilderness.”
“I’m sensitive to the environment. I’ve seen what development can do, if capitalism runs unfettered.” Fort leaned back and swirled the Zin in his glass.
When asked about America’s version of democratic capitalism, he stared for a moment, then said, “I’m a big fan of capitalism. I think it’s the only way to go. The trick is, regulation and how to craft it.”
The waiter served a green salad and before lifting his fork, Fort said, “Innovation. Capitalism. You never know where it’s going to pop-out. It’s always moving. Business tries to find ways around regulation, which is neat and good because the government is not very good at crafting good regulation.”
I mentioned that I lean left, politically.
“Did communism work in Russia?” he asked, like a father, like a wise man.
I shakes me head.
“And now they are run by thugs, nothing subtle about it,” Fort said. “The big difference between Russia and us, is our legal system. Our law has teeth.”
I thought about Kozlowski in the pen and his art and the gray and red walls of the restaurant.
“In Russia they’re buying up art,” Fort said. “Sotheby’s, Christies. They buy it to be ‘Big Guys’.”
There was half a bottle of wine left and he poured us each another glass. The ring on his finger was some type of yellow stone, flat, aged and rectangular.
“I like my wine red, thick and rich,” Fort said.
Fort is a big supporter of The Center for Big Bend Studies.
“I love what they’re doing.” His eyebrow quirked. “They taught me how to find the sites.”
The center has documented over 450 archeological sites on the Pinto Canyon Ranch including wikiups from the ancient Cielo Complex people.
“The vibes you get from an 8000 year old spear head,” Fort said. He shakes his head.
“Awesome.”
Fort’s wife, Marion Barthelme, is a free lance writer and a Time Magazine correspondent. She is also the former wife of short story meta-fictionalist Donald Barthelme, who died in the late 1980’s at 58.
Somehow, I recalled an opening to one of his stories: “The death of God left the angels in a strange position.”
“Does she find it scary?” I asked.
“To come out here?” He asked.
I nod.
“It is scary. But after a while you get over it.”
Marion spends most of her time in Houston.
The waiter came by with the check and I asked Mr Fort if we can split it, hoping that he’d say “of course not.”
“No way,” Fort said. He put his glasses on, examined the bill, then laid his credit card on the table.
Tiny rocks crunched under our feet as we walked out through the dim lit courtyard. The Marfa wind howled. We reached the curb and Fort’s hot rod Jeep.
“Can I call you if I’m fuzzy on the facts?” I asked.
“Sure, call me any time.”
Alan Tennant: Natural History Writer
“I’m a writer. I write on a variety of natural history subjects. Writing is a craft like any other you’ve learned,” Alan Tennant explains. He sits back in the out door chair under the awning of his porch at his house in Marathon, Texas near Big Bend National Park. “Making jewelry, pottery, rugs, you’re stitching words together.”
Tennant’s On the Wing was on the New York Time’s Best Seller List for several weeks and was rated as high as No.4 on the Amazon Book List. National Geographic owns the option to make a movie out of it.
“It’s a picaresque,” Tenant said. “An adventure story that started in Padre Island, went on to Central America and then up to the artic. George Vose, the pilot, and I followed falcons in our small Cessna across the American continent. We experienced what they experienced; head winds, lightening, vicious vortexs, thermals, hunger. These were young birds too, who without their parents, left their place of birth - many times solo and flew thousands of miles, all by instinct.”
“It’s a journey that allowed me to study the relationships of people, countries, birds. Its about getting arrested, landing in uncharted terrain, crossing borders at night,” Tennant said. “And the path of these birds afforded me the opportunity to journal the environmental degradation across the continent.”
Tennant, who taught writing and literature at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 60’s said, “People don’t realize how much chaff you have to throw out. I wrote probably twenty thousand pages to get three hundred good ones.”
“UT was a hot bed for protesters back then. Viet Nam - I’m anti-military. Some of us professors had to keep the students cool. It was the time of Kent State. I didn’t want to see any more kids get killed,” Tennant said.
“I was one of four people that founded Wildlife Rescue. We took care of injured animals, many times we’d get them from the Humane Society. Back then if nobody claimed them they were destroyed,” Tennant said. “I don’t have pets now because I travel so much, but back then I’d have as many as seventy animals in my Austin house. Dogs, cats, possums, foxes, golden eagles, fawns walking around my living room. People shouldn’t pick up fawns. The doe leaves them but comes back twice a day to feed them. People pick them up thinking they’re abandoned, then they forget where they got’em.”
Tennant enjoys fruit and vegetable smoothies and rides his bike 30 to 40 miles a day when he’s home in Marathon, but much of the time he’s traveling. “But I like Marathon,” he said. I like it because there’s a lack of people, pollution and cars. It’s the darkest place on the satellite map and usually warm. People are real nice.”
Tennant writes every day when he has a project, “Sun up to sundown.” One of his present projects can be seen at his website www.alantenant.com where he explores the life of grizzly bears in the wilds of Alaska.
“If you’ve seen Werner Herzog’s film “Grizzly Man” you’ll know what I’m talking about. In fact I’ve probably been in the close proximity of those same bears,” Tennant said. “Timothy Treadwell, the Grizzly Man, and his girlfriend Amy Hugenard were eaten by bears there in October of 05. We went back to the same place exactly a year later.”
Tennant and Treadwell’s best friend Marc Gaede, who wanted to experience, “up to the point of being eaten,” his dead friend’s love of the place called “The Green,” flew in by float plane illegally and spent several days recording the life of pre-hibernating bears.
“We used the red plastic flare pistol more than once. It was our first line of defense,” Tennant said.
Tennant grew up in Ft Worth and got a Masters in English from UT Austin. He presented his doctorate dissertation but never finished the PHD program. He also earned a bachelors in herpetology. He has written ten other books, nine of them about snakes and several of them on their third publication. “I had a rancher come by last week and tell me that he had finally learned that snakes, mountain lions, eagles had as much right to be here as we do. Now that’s a widening of perspective. People used to kill them at the drop of a hat. Hell, they named the Alpine airport after an eagle killer,” Tennant said. “But little by little that point of view is changing and I think it’s beautiful.”
Tennant’s On the Wing was on the New York Time’s Best Seller List for several weeks and was rated as high as No.4 on the Amazon Book List. National Geographic owns the option to make a movie out of it.
“It’s a picaresque,” Tenant said. “An adventure story that started in Padre Island, went on to Central America and then up to the artic. George Vose, the pilot, and I followed falcons in our small Cessna across the American continent. We experienced what they experienced; head winds, lightening, vicious vortexs, thermals, hunger. These were young birds too, who without their parents, left their place of birth - many times solo and flew thousands of miles, all by instinct.”
“It’s a journey that allowed me to study the relationships of people, countries, birds. Its about getting arrested, landing in uncharted terrain, crossing borders at night,” Tennant said. “And the path of these birds afforded me the opportunity to journal the environmental degradation across the continent.”
Tennant, who taught writing and literature at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 60’s said, “People don’t realize how much chaff you have to throw out. I wrote probably twenty thousand pages to get three hundred good ones.”
“UT was a hot bed for protesters back then. Viet Nam - I’m anti-military. Some of us professors had to keep the students cool. It was the time of Kent State. I didn’t want to see any more kids get killed,” Tennant said.
“I was one of four people that founded Wildlife Rescue. We took care of injured animals, many times we’d get them from the Humane Society. Back then if nobody claimed them they were destroyed,” Tennant said. “I don’t have pets now because I travel so much, but back then I’d have as many as seventy animals in my Austin house. Dogs, cats, possums, foxes, golden eagles, fawns walking around my living room. People shouldn’t pick up fawns. The doe leaves them but comes back twice a day to feed them. People pick them up thinking they’re abandoned, then they forget where they got’em.”
Tennant enjoys fruit and vegetable smoothies and rides his bike 30 to 40 miles a day when he’s home in Marathon, but much of the time he’s traveling. “But I like Marathon,” he said. I like it because there’s a lack of people, pollution and cars. It’s the darkest place on the satellite map and usually warm. People are real nice.”
Tennant writes every day when he has a project, “Sun up to sundown.” One of his present projects can be seen at his website www.alantenant.com where he explores the life of grizzly bears in the wilds of Alaska.
“If you’ve seen Werner Herzog’s film “Grizzly Man” you’ll know what I’m talking about. In fact I’ve probably been in the close proximity of those same bears,” Tennant said. “Timothy Treadwell, the Grizzly Man, and his girlfriend Amy Hugenard were eaten by bears there in October of 05. We went back to the same place exactly a year later.”
Tennant and Treadwell’s best friend Marc Gaede, who wanted to experience, “up to the point of being eaten,” his dead friend’s love of the place called “The Green,” flew in by float plane illegally and spent several days recording the life of pre-hibernating bears.
“We used the red plastic flare pistol more than once. It was our first line of defense,” Tennant said.
Tennant grew up in Ft Worth and got a Masters in English from UT Austin. He presented his doctorate dissertation but never finished the PHD program. He also earned a bachelors in herpetology. He has written ten other books, nine of them about snakes and several of them on their third publication. “I had a rancher come by last week and tell me that he had finally learned that snakes, mountain lions, eagles had as much right to be here as we do. Now that’s a widening of perspective. People used to kill them at the drop of a hat. Hell, they named the Alpine airport after an eagle killer,” Tennant said. “But little by little that point of view is changing and I think it’s beautiful.”
Sperm and Dr Ronald Ericcson
For the most part wintertime Big Bend resident Ronald Ericsson looks like your everyday joe. He wears blue jeans and cowboy boots and can spin tales ‘til the cows come home. But this family man who holds a PHD in genetics from the University of Kentucky is not your average rancher. He is a scientist, entrepreneur, author of over seventy publications and books in the field of male reproduction. He sat down for an interview with R. M. Glover last month in the mountains of Brewster County near the Big Bend National Park inTexas.
Glover: Dr Ericsson, you hold ten patents in the field of semen analysis, sex selection, male contraception and rodent sterilization and have been studying sperm for forty-seven years? Why sperm?
Ericsson: Population.
Glover: You were the first person to separate the X and Y chromosome in human sperm. How do you do that?
Ericsson: There is a differential ability of X and Y sperm to swim downward in a test tube. The head of X bearing sperm is larger and the tail longer. This allows the Y sperm to swim faster in a viscous albumin medium and reach the bottom of the tube quicker. This fraction of sperm is then isolated and used for artificial insemination. The chances for the selected sex improve from around 50% to 78-85%. In our labs the entire process is completed in three to four hours.
Glover: Today, your Gametrics Ltd Sperm Centers are on five continents. In three of the five, parents prefer males. In America the preference is female.
Ericsson; Yes, women are generally the ones that decide to have artificial insemination and in America today, mothers see daughters having a bright future.
Glover: You’ve had 13 Sperm Centers closed worldwide including China, Turkey, Hong Kong and India. Why?
Ericsson; In the case of India, solicitors fitted with portable ultra-sound instruments provided door to door sex-scanning services for the pregnant. The also provided quick abortions. My process fell victim to the laws designed to stop these questionable practices. In fact our technology would have increased the preferred sex wanted by parents reducing the number of abortions.
Glover: Your son Dr. Scott Ericsson teaches statistics and genetics at Sul Ross State University, and is a co-inventor on some of the patents with you. What’s the probability of both father and son being scientists with PhDs in the same field and both being left-handed?
Ericsson: Scott calculated the odds to be 13 in ten million.
Glover; You live here in the border country of west Texas in the winter time, but your main residence is your ranch in Wyoming, where the Marlboro commercials are shot. What’s the main difference between ranching in west Texas and ranching in Wyoming?
Ericsson: We spend all summer putting up hay.
Glover: Your grandson and my step-daughter are both juniors at Alpine High. What makes a good school?
Ericsson; I can tell you what makes a bad school: when no competition exists. They say ‘No kid left behind.’ Well, what about those who are ahead? They’re ignored in a system that doesn’t teach for knowledge or how to reason but teaches primarily to pass tests. When I look at resumes for my companies and see the 4.0 grad from Harvard, I think ‘test taker’ and throw it away. I want those who are willing to take risks, the ones that sit in the back of the class and ask why. Encourage creativity – that’s what makes a good school. And failure? Schools don’t recognize the power of failure – schools are programmed to prevent failure – if one does not try then one can not fail. Growing up on a ranch in South Dakota, my Swedish father expected hard work from my five siblings and I. And when we failed he would say ‘Try again.’ He never put us down for failure. And fail we did. But we never quit because in the real world there’s no back-up.
Glover: The real world provides a sex ratio of slightly over 50% males at birth. With the higher mortality rate for males, there seems to be a mechanism to produce more males at conception. How does nature get so smart?
Ericsson: Evolution. Species evolve to survive to sexual maturity and then reproduce to perpetuate their genes.
Glover: All that from the carbon atom?
Ericsson: Don’t forget hydrogen and oxygen.
Glover: What about global warming?
Ericsson: The question is whether it’s a variation in the Earth’s long-term processes or the effect of humans. There is no control group to compare it with and therefore no valid answer. There’s a positive side to global warning that nobody talks about, like increased crop production.
Glover: It took you seven and a half years to re-register your rodenticide product EPIBLOC ® with the Environmental Protection Agency. Why so long?
Ericsson: Have you ever attempted to deal with a federal regulatory agency in Washington D.C.?
Glover: The product works like a chemical vasectomy. Is there any secondary poisoning?
Ericsson: No, EPIBLOC is a sterilant only for rats and there is no secondary poisoning.
Glover; Your home use medical device to test male fertility sells for about thirty dollars in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Why isn’t available here?
Ericsson: We need a US company willing to market it before going through the regulatory process. The arduous task of going through a regulatory process to register a pesticide, a new pharmaceutical product or a medical device is time consuming and costly. Small companies have the creativity but large companies have the organization and financial wherewithal to obtain registration.
Glover; Today in this country, more than twenty per cent of our manufactured goods are made overseas. Most of your manufacturing is done in Europe. What do you think of import penetration?
Ericsson: The USA is going through an economic adjustment. Isolation never works.
Glover: You mentioned your granddaughter was told that she had your personality and wasn’t sure if that was a compliment.
Ericsson; Take no prisoners! I developed and marketed three products, a lot for one lifetime; sex selection, male fertility tests and a rat sterilization product. You can’t be Mr. Milquetoast and do that! I’m pleased she has this ‘get out of the way I can do it,’ personality.
Glover; One more question Dr Ericsson. What was it like being interviewed by Oprah?
Ericsson: I liked her, as I did most of the other celebrities that interviewed me over the years. My fifteen minutes of fame is going on 35 years.
Glover: Dr Ericsson, you hold ten patents in the field of semen analysis, sex selection, male contraception and rodent sterilization and have been studying sperm for forty-seven years? Why sperm?
Ericsson: Population.
Glover: You were the first person to separate the X and Y chromosome in human sperm. How do you do that?
Ericsson: There is a differential ability of X and Y sperm to swim downward in a test tube. The head of X bearing sperm is larger and the tail longer. This allows the Y sperm to swim faster in a viscous albumin medium and reach the bottom of the tube quicker. This fraction of sperm is then isolated and used for artificial insemination. The chances for the selected sex improve from around 50% to 78-85%. In our labs the entire process is completed in three to four hours.
Glover: Today, your Gametrics Ltd Sperm Centers are on five continents. In three of the five, parents prefer males. In America the preference is female.
Ericsson; Yes, women are generally the ones that decide to have artificial insemination and in America today, mothers see daughters having a bright future.
Glover: You’ve had 13 Sperm Centers closed worldwide including China, Turkey, Hong Kong and India. Why?
Ericsson; In the case of India, solicitors fitted with portable ultra-sound instruments provided door to door sex-scanning services for the pregnant. The also provided quick abortions. My process fell victim to the laws designed to stop these questionable practices. In fact our technology would have increased the preferred sex wanted by parents reducing the number of abortions.
Glover: Your son Dr. Scott Ericsson teaches statistics and genetics at Sul Ross State University, and is a co-inventor on some of the patents with you. What’s the probability of both father and son being scientists with PhDs in the same field and both being left-handed?
Ericsson: Scott calculated the odds to be 13 in ten million.
Glover; You live here in the border country of west Texas in the winter time, but your main residence is your ranch in Wyoming, where the Marlboro commercials are shot. What’s the main difference between ranching in west Texas and ranching in Wyoming?
Ericsson: We spend all summer putting up hay.
Glover: Your grandson and my step-daughter are both juniors at Alpine High. What makes a good school?
Ericsson; I can tell you what makes a bad school: when no competition exists. They say ‘No kid left behind.’ Well, what about those who are ahead? They’re ignored in a system that doesn’t teach for knowledge or how to reason but teaches primarily to pass tests. When I look at resumes for my companies and see the 4.0 grad from Harvard, I think ‘test taker’ and throw it away. I want those who are willing to take risks, the ones that sit in the back of the class and ask why. Encourage creativity – that’s what makes a good school. And failure? Schools don’t recognize the power of failure – schools are programmed to prevent failure – if one does not try then one can not fail. Growing up on a ranch in South Dakota, my Swedish father expected hard work from my five siblings and I. And when we failed he would say ‘Try again.’ He never put us down for failure. And fail we did. But we never quit because in the real world there’s no back-up.
Glover: The real world provides a sex ratio of slightly over 50% males at birth. With the higher mortality rate for males, there seems to be a mechanism to produce more males at conception. How does nature get so smart?
Ericsson: Evolution. Species evolve to survive to sexual maturity and then reproduce to perpetuate their genes.
Glover: All that from the carbon atom?
Ericsson: Don’t forget hydrogen and oxygen.
Glover: What about global warming?
Ericsson: The question is whether it’s a variation in the Earth’s long-term processes or the effect of humans. There is no control group to compare it with and therefore no valid answer. There’s a positive side to global warning that nobody talks about, like increased crop production.
Glover: It took you seven and a half years to re-register your rodenticide product EPIBLOC ® with the Environmental Protection Agency. Why so long?
Ericsson: Have you ever attempted to deal with a federal regulatory agency in Washington D.C.?
Glover: The product works like a chemical vasectomy. Is there any secondary poisoning?
Ericsson: No, EPIBLOC is a sterilant only for rats and there is no secondary poisoning.
Glover; Your home use medical device to test male fertility sells for about thirty dollars in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Why isn’t available here?
Ericsson: We need a US company willing to market it before going through the regulatory process. The arduous task of going through a regulatory process to register a pesticide, a new pharmaceutical product or a medical device is time consuming and costly. Small companies have the creativity but large companies have the organization and financial wherewithal to obtain registration.
Glover; Today in this country, more than twenty per cent of our manufactured goods are made overseas. Most of your manufacturing is done in Europe. What do you think of import penetration?
Ericsson: The USA is going through an economic adjustment. Isolation never works.
Glover: You mentioned your granddaughter was told that she had your personality and wasn’t sure if that was a compliment.
Ericsson; Take no prisoners! I developed and marketed three products, a lot for one lifetime; sex selection, male fertility tests and a rat sterilization product. You can’t be Mr. Milquetoast and do that! I’m pleased she has this ‘get out of the way I can do it,’ personality.
Glover; One more question Dr Ericsson. What was it like being interviewed by Oprah?
Ericsson: I liked her, as I did most of the other celebrities that interviewed me over the years. My fifteen minutes of fame is going on 35 years.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
