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.

All this, along with the fact that he tried to move the Medical Branch from Galveston to Austin a couple years earlier, caused the board to fire him on November 1, 1944, without citing any reason.

[3] The censure by the American Association of University Professors lasted nine years, until the organization was convinced that the regents changed their policies.

After his defeat, he left Texas entirely and became president of Stephens College in Missouri, then a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.