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Class warfare: last winter Sul Ross State professor Larry Sechrest publicly blasted his students and neighbors in Alpine as "just plain stupid." The town's reaction hasn't exactly changed his mind.

Article Excerpt
In 1888 the voters of Murphyville, in an early display of Texans' tendency to exaggerate the size of their natural endowments, changed the name of their town, which sat at 4,481 feet above sea level, to Alpine. Now in Switzerland, home of the Alps, 4,481 feet is a mere hillock, but this was Texas, and this was the middle of the Trans-Pecos desert. Alpine was positively Himalayan, and with its gorgeous mountain vistas and mild climate, it was something of a West Texas anomaly. It later became home to Sul Ross State Normal College, the only four-year university in the region, and later still to scores of federal agents from the DEA and the Border Patrol. Then came artists and writers, some all the way from New York. [paragraph] In other words, Alpine is a strange little town, and I mean that in a good way. Unlike most West Texas communities, it's thriving. The normal college is now Sul Ross State University, a full-scale yet still small (enrollment: 2,100) redbrick campus that sits on a slope overlooking the town. There's a new hospital, the Big Bend Regional Medical Center, and a new federal building is being raised, which will hold a courthouse. There are about a dozen art galleries downtown. You can take a creative-writing class at Front Street Books or surf the Web all night long at the 6th Street Coffeeshop. Alpine is full of cowboy conservatives but also desert-rat liberals; a group of left-wing curmudgeons holds court every Friday afternoon at the popular local bar Railroad Blues, drinking beer and talking loud, while just down the street, a sign at Alpine Auto Parts reads "We are Bush supporters." It is the kind of town where, if you stop in at the small city hall to pay a visit to the mayor without an appointment, as I did, you just might wind up talking with the receptionist when the mayor phones in and then have the receptionist hand you the phone to talk with Her Honor.

Gossip and bad news travel fast here. In January bad news became big news after Sul Ross economics professor Larry Sechrest wrote an article for Liberty, a 10,000-subscriber libertarian magazine based in Washington state, called "A Strange Little Town in Texas." For most of the first half, Sechrest wrote of Alpine's pleasant climate, low crime rate, beautiful scenery, and friendly residents. But something was rotten in paradise. "The secret problem," wrote Sechrest, "is that the students of Sul Ross,...

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