Homer Price Rainey (January 19, 1896 – December 19, 1985) was an American college professor, administrator, minister, and politician. He served as the president of several universities, most notably the University of Texas at Austin from 1939 to 1944. Early life Rainey was born in Clarksville, Texas. Although raised by a poor farming family, he graduated at valedictorian of Lovelady High School in 1913. He previously attended high school at Ferris and grade school in Eliasville. He was ordained as a Baptist minister at 19, and shortly thereafter enlisted in the Army during World War I. After receiving his bachelor's degree at Austin College, he pitched for various teams in the Texas League. Early academic career Rainey began his career in higher education by teaching education at Austin College for three years before receiving his masters and doctorate at the University of Chicago. After receiving his doctorate, he taught for three years at the University of Oregon, then became the president of Franklin College in Indiana from 1927-1931 before becoming the director of the American Youth Commission of the American Council on Education. From 1931 to 1935, he was the president of Bucknell University. Subsequently, he served as director of the American Youth Commission of the American Council on Education for four years. Presidency and controversy at University of Texas In 1939, Rainey was named President of University of Texas at Austin, at the time the largest university not only in Texas but also in the entire southern half of the United States. The makeup of the board, however, soon changed due to appointments over the next several years by governors W. Lee O'Daniel and Coke R. Stevenson. Clashes started in 1941, when several members of the Board pressured Rainey to fire four full professors of economics who espoused New Deal views. In 1942 the regents fired three untenured economics instructors and a fourth who had only a one-year appointment for having attempted to defend federal labor laws at an antiunion meeting in Dallas. Rainey protested their dismissals, and he also protested the fact that tenure was weakened and funding for social science was cut completely. The most spectacular single issue dividing Rainey from the regents was the board's repression of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy and its efforts to fire the professor who placed the third volume of the trilogy, The Big Money (1936), on the English department's sophomore