Academe in Texas is pinched in-between, too old to be designated as promising, but still too young to have arrived. The problems are manifold. For one thing, academics everywhere are generally as rigid as rednecks, as conservative as successful farmers, and as irrational as religious zealots. In their opinions most learning clings to the two coastlines as surely as do Australian cities. Despite an occasional deferring to the Big Ten, academics maintain that any significantly positive developments have to take place within the Ivy or the Stanford-Berkeley orbits. When a school in the South or in the ordinary West (as against the Pacific Coast) makes strides, it is accused of being pretentious, and laughed at for trying to be better than God or Harvard intended. Quality is rightly reserved for quality folks, and quality just cannot exist in Detroit or Dallas. In the second place, Texas endures largely as a caricature that won't go away. It's a matter of deservedly solemn pride that Harvard has the highest endowment in the United States, carefully accreted and invested over the past 350 years. But Rice University in Houston has the largest endowment per student! Ridiculous. Rice isn't even a century old. And the University of Texas's billion-dollar endowment is second only to Harvard's, happily ahead of every other Ivy school from Pennsylvania to Connecticut. What a waste of money! Why, that's tantamount to throwing away welfare money on the poor! Finally, there exists the Texas psyche itself. Oh, it prevails in other interior states Nebraska, Utah, Missouri but not with the virulence encountered in Texas, not in the twentieth century. Once the United States suffered from an antecedent of this colonial mentality, and the post-Confederate South has undergone its cry-baby period of feeling sorry for itself alternating with vainglorious boasting. Charles Dickens and Frances Trollope and Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States, admired our strengths, and warned of our boorishness and parochialism and impending doom; and we became as defensive as New World Creoles used to be toward Spain and France. As recently as the 1930's Joseph Benton, a singer of Metropolitan Opera quality, had to start his career in Europe as Giuseppe Bentonelli before anyone would take him seriously even in his native Oklahoma; and ]OE B. FRANTZ is Walter Prescott Webb Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.