Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
Wow, it’s been a minute.
Since we last, erm, wrote a Nuts, the University of Texas Board of Regents approved a plan to demolish the Erwin Center, home of the Texas Longhorns for both their 1978 and 2019 NIT Championship seasons and host to a combined five games across those two tournaments. One of the most storied arenas in college basketball (because of those five games and the championships they unleashed), the Erwin Center will soon be no more, resigned to the ash heap and then to become a ghost haunting the new medical school buildings built on its former site. I hope they tell the public when the demolition’s going to happen. That feels like something the Nuts should attend.
We aren’t mad about all this. Demolishing the Erwin Center might be history erasure, but we appreciate Texas for putting the line in our back pocket that they tried to erase their NIT history. That’s going to come in handy. Also? I bet we can get a plaque somewhere in the med school commemorating the NIT. We need more NIT plaques.
If we do want to go with the anti-history erasure angle—if the tide starts to swing that way and we see an opportunity to criticize Texas for demolishing this outdated arena in the name of bettering the field of medicine—we have a case. Frank Erwin, the guy the Erwin Center was named after, is ripe to be lionized anew as an anti-free speech warrior, arguably one of the forefathers of crushing disagreement on American college campuses. On multiple occasions in the 60s and 70s, Erwin—the head of the Board of Regents at the time—personally oversaw the arrest of protesting students, and he’s said to have worked diligently behind the scenes to get professors ousted if they disagreed with him politically. There was more than this—in a move that would make his good friend LBJ blush, Erwin once fired the university comptroller in a move some said allowed the regents to award building contracts based on politics rather than finances—but generally, Erwin was all about crushing free speech. He tried to cut the Daily Texan’s funding. That’s when you know.
If I understand the current campus free speech debate, everyone is against free speech right now, too. The libs want to expel the conservatives for espousing conservative beliefs. The anti-libs want to fire all the libs for being libs. The anti-libs want the libs to get arrested. The libs want to get arrested so that they can protest more when the police inevitably get carried away and start kicking ass. There are two sides to campus free speech, and each is crafted in the image of the man who went before them, the man for whom the great drum in the skyline is named.
We’re down with demolishing the Erwin Center.
But if you want to fight it, we’ve got an angle.
