Dean Holland, a doggin’ steer, and Russian hogs

by Frank DuBois

In a post yesterday, Woods Houghton mentioned associate dean Lewis Holland. Dr. Holland did me a big favor once, and here is how it went down.

It was a Thursday night performance of the NMSU spring rodeo. I was entered in the steer wrestling, but as soon as I got down on my steer I knew something was wrong. There was a sharp pain in my right foot. I limped out of the arena and figured I could just walk it off.

The next morning, though, it was swollen and discolored, so I headed off to the infirmary to have it checked out. They told me to get it x-rayed and then come back. They gave me some crutches  and off I went. Problem is, I was supposed to give my Animal Science seminar that day, and it was the last day of the semester. I called Dr. McFadden from the x-ray lab and told him what had happened. He told me that was just too bad, because he was going to give me either an incomplete or an F.

On Monday I headed to the Dean’s office, and that’s where I met Dr. Holland. I explained what had happened, and that it occurred at a school function and I was following the orders of the school’s doctor, and thought I should be able to make up the work. He asked if I had finished the paper. I said yes and showed it to him. He said hang on a second, went in his office, had a rather lengthy phone conversation, came back out and told me to take the paper to Dr. McFadden.

I’m not sure what Holland told McFadden, but I shortly found out that, whatever it was, it did not make him happy. McFadden’s office was in Neale Hall. I knocked on his office door, he opened it, grabbed the paper out of my hands, went back into his office and slammed the door. Not a word was spoken.

I left there thinking that Dean Holland may have forced him to accept the paper, but I expected the grade to be as low as you can go but still, hopefully, pass. When the grades came out several weeks later, I got an A- for the seminar!

The only thing I can figure is that McFadden was a Conservative. You see, my paper was on hog production in the Soviet Union, and I had shown that more hogs were produced on the small, private plots owned by individual farmers, than were produced on the entire soviet farm system. Or, as I put it, “the capitalist pigs out produced the socialist hogs.”

Many years later I got to visit with Dean Holland, reminded him of this incident and thanked him again for his help. For if he hadn’t intervened on my behalf, or if McFadden had been a liberal professor, I probably still wouldn’t have a diploma from good ol’ NMSU.