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IN MEMORIAM
STANLEY R. ROSS
It would be difficult to overstate
the impact of Stanley Robert Ross on the academic life of The
University of Texas at Austin. In an all-too-brief career on
this campus, he soared to the upper echelons of the administrative
hierarchy, bringing to each post he held both a singular boldness
of vision and an unswerving determination to see projects through
to successful implementation. The same intuitive understanding
of the dynamics of power that made his work on the unfolding
of the Mexican political system so compelling enabled him to
serve the University community effectively in a time of widespread
contention and uncertainty. When he came to Austin, the varied
tensions of the 1960s were very much in the air, as they were
on most major campuses, and they were not to dissipate substantially
during the early years of his work in Austin.
There were, first of all, the controversies and stresses that
colored life in academia generally: to wit, the militancy of
students in an age when
the indignation industry, in its myriad forms, was a growth sector, and
the restiveness of faculty as politicization spread and activism became
almost a norm. But at the University these pervasive influences were seasoned
with a number of issues that concerned governance on the Austin campus
in particular. Issues both intellectual and administrative, to say nothing
of the ideological, were thus up in the air — sometimes simmering,
sometimes breaking out into the open to rattle the lives of faculty and
students as well as the routines of those in the academic demimonde of
administration.
Through it all, Stanley Ross remained unflappable and saw to it that the
programs in which he believed were immeasurably strengthened and that the
campus community moved toward the academic values he upheld, in Austin
as in the wider community of Latin Americanist historians and Mexicanist
scholars. Faced with the unrest of the Zeitgeist, Ross maintained
an equanimity that was truly impressive, and which enabled him to juggle
a portfolio of commitments that was extraordinary: to his students, to
his colleagues, to his profession, and to the academic purposes that informed
the programs over which he presided. He had, after all, seen revolutions
wane and die before — his book Is the Mexican Revolution Dead? (1965)
still provokes lively discussion in Mexico. He knew almost instinctively
that after the turmoil of events both general to the United States of the
Vietnam era and particular to the Austin campus, the academic enterprise
would be shaped by those whose vision was not clouded by this or that cause
beyond the life of the intellect, even when colleagues with whom he always
dealt respectfully were proposing courses of action more immediately reflective
of the passions of the time.
The sagacity of Ross earned him the respect of many, while his tenacity
may have annoyed more than a few. But the academic stature that earned
for him the award of the Order of the Aztec Eagle medallion, the highest
honor the government of Mexico bestows on a foreign national, served him,
and the campus, in good stead throughout all the ups and downs of a period
that left little unchallenged in any quarter. To this recognition, shared
in Austin only by Dr. Nettie Lee Benson, the distinguished builder of the
world-renowned library collection of Latin Americana that bears her name,
the University added, posthumously, the Pro Bene Meritis Award.
A Life of the Mind, Leading to Unexpected Places
Born in New York City in 1921, Ross completed the first stage of his academic
preparation with distinction, receiving in 1942 his bachelor's degree summa
cum laude from Queen's College in the exceptionally competitive and intellectually
lively academic environment of New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. While
serving as an assistant in the Queen's College Department of History in
1942-43, he completed a master's degree in history at Columbia University.
After a period of service in the army, which took him to Fairbanks, Alaska,
and Edmonton, Canada, Ross returned to New York City to marry Lee Jacobson,
whom he had known since high school, and to reenter the graduate history
program at Columbia. There he spent 1946-49 in his course work, being especially
encouraged to focus on Mexico by the celebrated Frank Tannenbaum, Columbia's
leading specialist on Mexico, and by Columbia's equally-noted Latin American
literature scholar, Andres Iduarte. During the summers of 1947 and 1948
he traveled to Mexico on a grant from the U.S. State Department and, with
encouragement from his mentor, Tannenbaum, he took a job during 1948-51
as instructor in history at the University of Nebraska. (Like most New
Yorkers, Ross had thought of himself as teaching in one of the many schools
in the metropolitan area, so it took a bit of supportive guidance to convince
him to range as far afield as the Midwest, a terra even more incognita
than Mexico to those born east of the Hudson.) With a Dougherty Foundation
Fellowship and diligent research assistance from his wife, Ross completed
his dissertation research in Mexico and received his PhD from Columbia
in 1951.
How, one might ask, did a boy from New York become such an outstanding
scholar on distant Mexico? For one thing, his parents put great store by
education and encouraged Stanley and his brother, Lawrence, to invest heavily
of their energy and talent in what is today called human capital. (Lawrence
subsequently became a professor of English, specializing on Shakespeare,
at Washington University in St. Louis.) While at high school in Queens,
Stanley Ross began to develop his linguistic skills, taking four years
of Latin and three years of Spanish. He further honed these skills in long
conversations with a close friend (and the friend's family) who hailed
from Puerto Rico — the Puerto Ricans already constituting a growing
ethnic enclave in New York as Leonard Bernstein was to remind us all some
years later. In graduate school, Ross polished his Spanish to near-native
fluency by studying Latin American literature and through long conversations
with Roberto Esquenazi-Mayo, a fellow graduate student, and Esquenazi's
wife, who hailed from Cuba and who became lifelong friends. (Esquenazi,
whom Ross later helped bring to Nebraska after finishing his doctoral studies,
served as the head of the literature section of the cultural division of
the Pan American Union and also became a founding editor of Life en
Espafiol.)
What is more, issues of political, ideological, and economic change were
everywhere in the air in the New York of the 1930s and 1940s, and Mexico
was, despite its geographical remoteness, very much visible to the intellectual
and cultural communities of the city, thanks in part to extensive coverage
of the ferment in Mexico in the New York Times. Not only was this
the case because of the work Mexican artists such as Covarrubias and Orozco
were then doing in the city and elsewhere in the States, but this was also
the age of the Good Neighbor Policy — and such dramatic events as
Mexico's expropriation of the oil industry and railways, its extensive,
and controversial, land redistribution program, and the assassination in
Mexico City of Leon Trotsky. All this together put Latin America as a whole,
and Mexico in particular, on the screen of journalists and internationally-minded
New York cosmopolites.
Stanley Ross's adolescence, we should also recall, coincided
with the early years of the MoMA, and that pioneering institution,
driven especially by
the interests and knowledge of René d'Harnoncout, played a major
role in bringing Mexico, through its art, to the attention of New Yorkers — while
the noisy Rockefeller dispute with Diego Rivera over the portrait of Lenin
Rivera, then a dedicated Communist, included as a focal point in the mural
he painted in Rockefeller Center (along with an unflattering representation
of John D. himself) served notice to the local public that Mexican art
was not just picturesque and exotic. It was, rather, art with a decided
cultural and social bite.
There were other formative influences, too. The Mexican Revolution had
long attracted a procession of writers, artists, journalists, and sundry
revolutionary aficionados from the East Coast as well as from Europe to
witness a new society in the making, one much closer at hand than the Soviet
Union. Among the politically charged intelligentsia of the day, Mexico's
seizure of the oil industry in 1938, coming as it did on the heels of the
highly-publicized land reform, sent a frisson of expectations of what the
future might hold. Additionally, the work of venturesome photographers
like Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, and Anita Brenner put Mexico graphically
before the eyes of the American public, or at least that portion of it
inclined to follow events and trends beyond the national borders. During
Ross's adolescence, the New Deal government had even, inspired by Mexico's
patronage of its muralists, launched its own version of a federal arts
program.
Almost on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War II, the New
York International Exposition served to sum up the scientific
and cultural achievements of
countries around the world. Mexico's artistic heritage constituted one
of the featured attractions at an exposition that was unusually rich in
art works. Throngs of people poured through the fairgrounds and related
exhibitions to obtain a sneak preview, as it were, of a hopeful future
as well as a better grasp of what lay beyond the country's borders. The
environment, then, reinforced the attraction that Tannenbaum held for Ross
and the other graduate students at Columbia — and added to the intellectual
legacy that Tannenbaum was to share with his bright doctoral student. It
was through this scholarly mentoring and in this eventful context that
Ross defined what was to become his lifelong professional interest.
An Academic Record of Note
Stanley Ross's research took him through the full sweep of Mexico's modern
history, from that nation's late nineteenth century search for modernization
and nationhood through the Revolution of 1910 to the consolidation of the
revolution by the one-party state. Perhaps Ross's greatest contribution
to Mexican historiography is his political biography entitled Francisco
I. Madero, Apostle of Mexican Democracy (Columbia University Press,
1955, and reissued in 1975). In this book, Ross drew a sympathetic portrait
of the man who began the Revolution of 1910 by successfully challenging
the power of the longtime president, Porfirio Dêaz. More than any historian
who had studied Madero up to that point, Ross benefited by researching
among the papers in Madero's archive in Mexico and also in the State Department
records of Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson's reports. He also interviewed
the Mexican revolutionists still living, including the widow of Madero,
to supplement his extensive study of the papers in Madero's archives. He
viewed Madero as an American-style democrat who advocated electoral reforms
and constitutional practices. In these ideals, Madero contrasted greatly
with his immediate predecessor, Dêaz, who had maintained himself in power
for 35 years through political intimidation and extra-constitutional maneuvering.
However, Ross acknowledged that, as a Mexican, Madero was sympathetic toward
the land reforms advocated by Emiliano Zapata and other caudillos, whose
force of arms had brought down the aged dictator, Dêaz, and had allowed
Madero to win the presidential election of 1911.
Nevertheless, Madero turned out to be a poor and inexperienced
administrator. As President, he could not control the Porfirian
bureaucracy or the Porfirian
army that he had inherited; nor could Madero manage the free-lance caudillos
like Zapata and Pascual Orozco who had helped him achieve power. According
to Ross, U.S. Ambassador Wilson and his meddling in Mexican political affairs
bore much responsibility for fostering the military conspiracy that ended
Madero's government in February of 1913 and brought about his martyrdom
shortly thereafter. Madero's assassination provoked the massive uprisings
of Zapata, Pancho Villa, and Alvaro Obregón for which the Mexican
Revolution is well known. Ross's basic interpretations of Madero, while
not altogether new at the time of the book's publication, have endured
intact in the subsequent, voluminous historiography of the Mexican Revolution.
Since Ross wrote his political biography of Madero, historians have deepened
our knowledge of the Mexican Revolution with detailed studies of the peasant
rebellions and of the roles of secondary political leaders — but without
changing López very much Ross's basic interpretation of Madero's
revolutionary role.
Following the publication of the book on Madero, Stanley Ross focused his
scholarship on collective historiography. That is, he utilized his extraordinarily
close association with Mexican universities to engineer collaborative projects
between Mexican and American scholars. Ross's most influential collaboration
across borders has to be his edited volume called Is the Mexican Revolution
Dead? (first published in 1966 by Alfred A. Knopf). This book ultimately
was published in two English language editions, two Spanish editions, and
in a Japanese translation. It became one of the best-selling "Borzoi
Books on Latin America" issued by Knopf. Ross's edited volume achieved
widespread readership as an assigned text in many undergraduate courses
on Mexican history and politics, and the United States Information Service
distributed many copies of the Spanish version of the book from U.S. embassies
throughout Latin America. [One of the authors of this memoriam picked up
his copy at the U.S. Embassy in Santiago de Chile in 1969.] The book is
remarkable for bringing together the opinions of some of the most successful
politicians and intellectuals of contemporary Mexico. Among the politicians
were ex-presidents Miguel Alemán, Adolfo López Mateos, Gustavo
Díaz Ordaz, and Luis Echeverría; party leader Jesús
Reyes Heroles; revolutionary intellectuals Luis Cabrera, Jesús Silva
Herzog, Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, and Heriberto Jara; and labor
leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano. Some of Mexico's greatest scholars also
participated. They include Daniel Cosío Villegas, Leopoldo Zea,
Moisés González Navarro, and Pablo González Casanova.
North American scholarship was represented by such pioneer "Mexicanists" as
Frank Brandenberg, Frank Tannenbaum, and Howard F. Cline.
Some reviewers scoffed at this edited volume for serving as the
official party's view of the Mexican Revolution, which held that
the Partido Revolución
Institucionalista (PRI) had properly carried out the revolutionary ideals
of social reforms and national economic development. However, even Ross
himself demurred from this view, offering in his introduction his own viewpoint
that the PRI-dominated government of the 1960s had ended the reforms in
the interests of political control and the national bourgeoisie. Whatever
the shortcomings of this influential volume, it did collect the varying
and competing opinions of prominent Mexicans and North Americans into one
volume. Ross had accomplished a major feat of cross-border collaboration,
from which a whole generation of students and scholars benefited. It would
not be going too far afield to assert that this was one of the seminal
volumes in precipitating what would eventually become a high tide of revisionist
critique, in which the PRI, for all its undoubted accomplishments, would
be exposed increasingly for its strong-arm political tactics, its pervasive
venality, and its artistry in constructing a self-serving version of Mexican
history.
Ross's second most influential project was one that explored the emerging
problems of growth, development, and exchange along and across the U.S.-Mexican
border. He organized a conference and edited a volume on U.S.-Mexican border
relations entitled Views Across the Border: The United States and Mexico (University
of New Mexico Press, 1978). In it, Ross edited a series of seventeen chapters
written by Mexican and other North American scholars who had met in a 1975
conference on border issues. To his credit, Ross had enlisted the participation
of some of the most preeminent scholars of his generation: Joe B. Frantz,
Jorge Bustamante, Ray Marshall, and Americo Paredes. Ross, as editor, chose
to allow his conferees to present conflicting arguments in an effort to
elicit the full range of frank opinion on border matters. Said one reviewer
in the Hispanic American Historical Review: ". . . the book
is a solid contribution to a woefully inadequate literature on an important
area that may be finally eliciting the attention it deserves."
Among his other contributions to scholarship, one should count the work
that Stanley Ross published on original sources of Mexican revolutionary
history. Ross published two volumes of newspaper clippings entitled Fuentes
de la historia contemporáneo de México (El Colegio de
México), in 1965 and 1967. These two books collected newspaper accounts
of the Mexican Revolution that Ross and three Mexican associates had culled
from some quarter million issues of newspapers and magazines from 1908
to 1940. The two volumes reproduce 27,719 articles, each with a line or
two summarizing the contents. Historians recognized immediately the importance
of this collection. At the time of publication, the State Department records
were not yet available to researchers; nor were most private and government
archives in Mexico. However flawed newspapers may be as a historical source,
they nonetheless offer a window into the evolution of the Mexico that might
not otherwise have been open at the time. Historian Robert Quirk of Indiana
University acknowledged in his review that "[i]t is difficult to imagine
a more welcome publication on Mexico's Revolution than this monumental
project." Along the way, Ross also found time to contribute an update
of Mexican history to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Any evaluation of Stanley Ross's contribution to scholarship
would be remiss not to mention the long and productive friendship
that Ross had with Mexico's
illustrious historian, Daniel Cosío Villegas, for whom a seminar
room has been named in the Institute of Latin American Studies. Together,
these two men forged an intellectual linkage between The University of
Texas at Austin and El Colegio de México that exists today in many
collaborative projects and conferences. Moreover, Ross and Cosío
Villegas also formed the essential linkages between the wider community
of historians in the United States and Mexico. Ross became an unabashed
admirer of Cosío Villegas's work, especially of the eight-volume
collaborative project published as Historia moderna de México (El
Colegio de México, 1955-65). This series serves as a compendium
of Mexican history from the "Restored Republic" of Benito Juárez
in 1867 to the end of the presidential reign of Porfirio Dêaz in 1911.
It covers politics, social developments, economic change, cultural affairs,
and international relations; each of the dozen collaborating Mexican historians
based their analysis on original documents and newspaper accounts of the
period. Ross praised his Mexican colleague's project generously, echoing
the view of one Mexican reviewer that Daniel Cosío Villegas should
be regarded at home and abroad as the "gran señor de la historia
mexicana."
Together, Ross and Cosío Villegas organized the first Conference
of Mexicanists, a meeting held in Mexico between U.S. historians of Mexico
and Mexican historians. The time of this first conference could not have
been more dramatic. The conferees were to meet in the great hall of Chapultepec
Castle, the venerable viceregal and presidential residence standing atop
Chapultepec Hill in the center of the park of the same name. But the time
of the meeting fell during one of Mexico's greatest political crises of
the twentieth century, the month following the student strike and army
repression of 1968 and prior to the opening Olympic Games in Mexico City.
The presidency of Dêaz Ordaz seemed to hang in the balance. Just before
the conference, Ross and Cosío Villegas exchanged correspondence
about whether to continue with this first conference, which they decided
in the affirmative. Then, the conferees who showed up for the first sessions
at Chapultepec Castle found themselves barred from entry by a cordon of
nervous Mexican policemen. Apparently, someone in the government feared
that the forum would promote criticism of the recent slaughter of hundreds
of striking students in the Plaza de Tres Culturas. Ross and Cosío
Villegas conferred again and moved the entire proceedings of the conference
to the Colegio de México.
This association of Mexicanists has flourished ever since that
first, dramatic conference in 1968. Every fourth year since then,
U.S. historians gather
to exchange papers with their Mexican colleagues. They change the venues
for the conference between the United States and Mexico. And today, in
the spirit of the North American Free Trade Agreement, this association
has been expanded and renamed in order to accommodate the Canadian historians
of Mexico. The Mexican, United States, and Canadian Historians of Mexico
completed its twelfth conference in 1998 in San Diego. The proceedings
of these conferences have been collected in several volumes over the years
and are cited frequently in the historical literature. In other words,
the farsighted collaboration of two late historians, Stanley R. Ross and
Daniel Cosío Villegas, continues to enrich scholarship even beyond
their deaths.
An Administrative Career of Distinction
For the first decade and more of his academic career, Stanley
Ross demonstrated little interest in administration. But once
he received promotion to professor
of history at the University of Nebraska in 1960, he began to broaden his
interest beyond research, publication, and teaching. In 1961 he established
an informal program of Latin American studies at Nebraska — which
was in some ways an improbable location in the quintessential American
heartland for such an interest to take root. While in Lincoln, Ross helped
to recruit Roberto Esquenazi-Mayo, his friend and erstwhile fellow graduate
student at Columbia, to the faculty. Esquenazi-Mayo was, in turn, able
to build on the groundwork Ross had laid by establishing an Institute for
International Studies that acquired, along with the University of Nebraska
Press, a solid reputation in Latin American studies. The following year
Ross moved back East (with a sigh of relief, we might imagine) to the State
University of New York at Stony Brook as chairman of the history department,
and the following semester (February 1963) he became acting dean of the
College of Arts and Science at Stony Brook, a rapid ascent from the ranks
of the professoriate by any reckoning. He held this position until 1966
when he was confirmed as dean. He remained in that post until 1968 when
he accepted an offer from The University of Texas at Austin, an institution
with one of the leading programs in Latin American studies, the primary
focus, of course, of Ross's academic interest.
At Texas Ross moved rapidly up the administrative ladder. Arriving in Austin
in the fall of 1968 as director of the Institute of Latin American Studies,
he held this position until January of 1971. Short though his tenure as
director of UT's famed ILAS was, Ross had an enormous impact, for the program
had slipped behind, relatively speaking, as other major centers surged
ahead during the 1960s, among them Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, UCLA,
Berkeley, Stanford, Florida, New Mexico, Tulane, and a host of others in
the second tier, some of which were even to make it into the first tier.
For reasons not altogether clear at this time, the Texas program garnered
none of the USAID contracts that poured resources for expansion and deepening
into competing area studies programs, and UT lost out on the important
two rounds of major Ford Foundation grants that did so much to build Latin
American and other international expertise elsewhere. Research moneys had
come in, but they were not very widely distributed over the UT campus;
one department had, in fact, harvested over 40% of the key research resources
that were available.
Ross changed all this immediately, and brought to ILAS the new Latin
American Research Review, the key multidisciplinary publication of
the Latin American Studies Association. In office, he moved effectively
to open the doors of the institute to all on campus who had an interest
in Latin America, encouraging many departments at UT to hire more specialists
in this field. In both disciplinary and thematic terms, Ross took a welcoming,
inclusive stance that, in time, again brought increasing luster to the
Texas effort. For instance, Ross lent his support to Donald Goodall, then
the risk-taking director of the Huntington (art) Museum on campus, in his
spectacularly successful efforts to make the UT art museum a focus for
Latin American art — a field then dismissed by much of the Eurocentric
art history profession as ethnic art or art of lesser quality, despite
what MoMA had been doing for some years.
In 1971, Ross became involved in the breakup of the College of Arts and
Sciences. In the previous year the regents of the University had determined
to divide the college into four parts because the rapid growth of the institution
had made the college unwieldy in size. When the dean of the college, John
Silber, vehemently fought the change, he was fired. An acting dean was
appointed for summer 1970, and Stanley Ross was appointed chairman of an
executive committee to assist the acting dean, in part because his role
as director of ILAS had given him a broad view into the workings of a great
many departments in the college. The College Coordinating Board gave final
approval for the breakup of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Ross
was named the last acting dean of the college and provost-designate, a
position he held from January through April 1971. In May, he took up his
duties as provost for the Colleges of Natural Sciences, Behavioral Sciences,
and Humanities, as well as for the Division of General and Comparative
Studies. Under President Steven Spurr's reorganization, Ross became vice
president and provost of the University. He held that position from 1973
to 1976. President Spurr's policy delegating authority to his subordinates
gave Ross substantial power within the University. Although Spurr had his
deans report directly to him, he later said that he always consulted Ross
and took his recommendations seriously. In effect, said Spurr, Ross was
his chief academic officer on promotions and budgetary matters. These are,
of course, the two most important areas of decision making in the University.
It should be noted that while serving as provost under Spurr, Ross was
broadly supportive of academic improvements across the campus. Yet he always
made time to work with his own graduate students, encouraging them to dig
into new themes, or older themes in new ways, so that his legacy continues
indirectly to this day, when some of his students are themselves beginning
to approach retirement. As his involvement in graduate work might suggest,
he continued to hold a special affection for his own region of concern,
and lent consistent encouragement to ILAS under his successor in its efforts
to broaden the intellectual engagement of the campus in Latin American
studies. A major conference on economic policy, one organized in collaboration
with the Graduate School of Business and the American Enterprise Institute,
was given his enthusiastic backing. Subsequently, Ross lent his endorsement
to a still wider interdisciplinary project to enlist the expertise of the
natural sciences, education, and engineering colleges in a major and innovative
undertaking. Carried out with collaboration from the United Nations and
the Organization of American States, this ambitious project set out to
explore collaboration among industry, government, and academia in devising
and implementing science and technology policies in Latin America.
Ross also consistently helped the new ILAS outreach programs, which, in
tandem with the other initiatives, brought UT back into the forefront of
Latin American programs nationwide. And even after he left the Institute
of Latin America Studies, Ross worked closely with the institute in designing
and carrying out a substantial project, the Encuesta Polêtica, which
comprised a multi-part exploration of the Mexican political system. It
is noteworthy and illustrative of Ross's grasp of Mexico's political dynamics
that one of the invited speakers in this series went on to become the Minister
of Labor, then an ambassador to France, and ultimately a leader of the
leftist breakaway opposition party, the PRD. An especially memorable moment
in this ambitious project came when Ross's longtime Mexican colleague,
Cosío Villegas, conducted a searching but diplomatic interview with
Miguel Alemán, the former president of Mexico, who was also, as
it happens, a former student of Cosío's. The episode resonated with
history both national and personal.
When Steven Spurr was fired as president by the regents in September 1974,
Lorene Rogers entered the office with a different governing philosophy.
Contrary to Spurr, she preferred less delegation of authority and a more
hands-on approach. She introduced no formal changes in the administration,
but she began to decrease the role of the vice president and provost, taking
routine matters under her own supervision. Ross, for example, was largely
cut out of budgetary decisions.
No public conflict ever evolved, but Ross became progressively
unhappy with his position and finally resigned in 1976. He never
again held a major
administrative position in the University. Because he loved to organize
and run things, Ross then played a major role in establishing the Mexican-U.S.
Border Research Program in September 1976 and the Office of Mexican Studies
within the Institute of Latin American Studies in September 1980. In both
these organizations he served as coordinator and published newsletters
until his death in 1985. The erstwhile Office of Mexican Studies continues,
as the Mexican Center, to encourage and promote an interest in Mexico on
the UT campus and beyond. In addition, Ross worked closely with the ILAS
director and a later University president to build close institutional
ties with the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the chief institution
of higher learning in Mexico, and to strengthen the collaborative relations
between UT and the Colegio de México, in library science as well
as in history. On his death, his widow, Gerry Gagliano Ross, graciously
contributed his extensive library of Mexicana to the Benson Latin American
Library Collection of UT.
Amidst his singularly eventful career, Ross also served as managing editor
of the Hispanic American Historical Review, the premier journal
for Latin American history in the United States, from 1970 to 1975. Over
the years he also served on many committees, often as chairman, within
the Conference on Latin American History, the American Historical Association,
the Latin American Studies Association, and the American Council of Learned
Societies, among others.
Stanley Ross was an able administrator with many skills. He became director
of the Institute of Latin American Studies at a time when interest in foreign
studies, particularly Latin America, was beginning to wane. The Alliance
for Progress, disappointing in results, was being displaced in public interest
by the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, Ross increased its funding both within
the University and from outside sources. He also, as noted earlier, attempted
to achieve wider participation of faculty into the work of the institute
by appointing an interdisciplinary advisory board with which he met regularly.
He introduced new programs and through his staff initiated a series of
social functions through the academic year. Finally, he oversaw the physical
move of the institute from the rambling but charming old quarters at 214
Archway to the new modern office space in Sid Richardson Hall.
How successful was the new director in his two-and-a-half years
in office? The results were mixed. The increased resources, including
for the first
time an automobile to transport distinguished guests, were met with much
appreciation by faculty, staff, and students. The staff, enlarged and engaged,
enjoyed the freedom of appreciation that Ross gave them through his administrative
assistant, Gerry Gagliano, whom he had brought from Stony Brook. The staff
operated as a happy family, and Ross would personally acknowledge good
work on the part of individual members. Unfortunately, his relations with
the faculty did not always match his relations with staff. Ross had firm,
if not fixed, ideas on how institute programs should be implemented, especially
in budgetary matters. He ran a tight ship, and in the eyes of some proved
uncompromising and inflexible. He alienated a number of faculty with this
approach, but in fairness it should be said that he gained the allegiance
of others in the generosity of his vision for the institute and its program.
As noted above, he loved to run things, and even after his promotion to
provost in 1971, he often offered unsolicited, though not necessarily unwelcome,
advice to the new director, who counted him as an important, albeit occasionally
problematic, asset, and a source of sage counsel, in the continuing evolution
of the institute. Whether separated on campus by their different administrative
concerns or, during Ross's final illness, in hospital, the two remained
in touch — as, in a sense, they, along with so many others, do today
through the lasting bonds of memory.
As provost of the components of the College of Arts and Sciences,
and later as vice president and provost of the University, Stanley
Ross proved his
worth as an excellent administrator, providing invaluable assistance to
one of the most distinguished presidents the University has ever had, the
late Stephen Spurr, and helping Spurr avoid the myriad shoals that were
strewn about a campus beset almost chronically by intramural politics and,
it is sometimes charged, cronyism. Ross, being relatively new to the campus
and not, therefore, enmeshed in its sundry cliques and factions, did not
need to mollify a wide range of faculty with conflicting agendas; he needed
only to follow the general outline of presidential policy. That he performed
well in this role is attested by the confidence and trust placed in him
by Spurr; but he could not function as a figurehead or dissembler. Strong-minded,
he always made clear where he stood on issues. Thus, when President Lorene
Rogers began to reduce his voice in administration and intramural factions
welled to the surface again, he resigned. Those were, to quote someone
who knew Ross's views and reactions intimately, "turbulent days filled
with frustration, anxiety, and bitterness."
One last word about Stanley Ross as an administrator. He was constantly
contemplating and planning new programs. At the same time, he was often
on the road meeting new people, exchanging ideas, reading widely, and pulling
prominent people in academic and political life into his projects.
Perhaps from his New York upbringing, Ross had something of the Irish politician
about him. Giving prominence to Mexican studies at Texas, he produced an
agreement, a Convenio, with the National University of Mexico (UNAM).
After he resigned as vice president in 1976, he threw himself back into
academic affairs and became a corresponding member of important institutes
and academies in the United States and Mexico as well as a member of the
Governor's (of Texas) Task Force on Immigration. He held numerous consultantships
and editorial positions throughout his career. And, finally, in his Mexican-U.S.
Border Research Project, one of his last efforts, he pulled in an astonishing
number of distinguished scholars and political leaders to serve as advisory
board members, official liaison representatives and observers, or coordinating
committee members. Stanley Ross seemed to know everybody.
This larger-than-life figure on the UT stage is survived by his wife, Gerry
Gagliano Ross, now of New Hampshire, and three children by his previous
marriage to Lee, who also survives: a son, Steven Ross, and two daughters,
Janet Cain and Alicia Gulley, and their respective families.
Stanley Ross was born August 8, 1921, in New York City. He died February
10, 1985.
<signed>
Larry R. Faulkner,
President
The University of Texas at Austin
<signed>
John R. Durbin, Secretary
The General Faculty
This memorial resolution was prepared by a special committee consisting
of Professors William Glade (chair), Karl Schmitt, and Jonathan Brown.
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