Seventy-Seven Years of Editorial Freedom
EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD IN CONTROL OF STUDENT PUBLICATIONS
The
Week Revisited:
It Could Be Worse
Where Opinions Are Free, 420 MAYNARD ST., ANN ARBOR, MICH.
Truth Will Prevail
NEWS PHONE: 764-0552
Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers
or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints.
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1968
NIGHT EDITOR: WALLACE IMMEN
The Grad School's
Draft Arithmetic
GEN. LEWIS HERSHEY'S directive to
local draft boards ending graduate
deferments and continuing the policy of
inducting the oldest eligible men first has
sent graduate deans throughout the
country scurrying around redoing enroll-
ment projections and reshuffling cost
estimates.
Graduate school officials here have
devised an involved rationale for con-4
cluding that next year at this time the
University will be educating the same
number of graduate students, even if some
250,000 male graduate students across the
country have their educational plans cut
short.
According to Scientific Manpower
Commission, a private research agency,
the new Hershey ruling will make 433,000
graduate students under age 26 eligible
for the draft. This figure includes 187,000
graduating college seniors, 144,000 first
year graduate students, 74,000 students
who haven't started the second year of
graduate study and an additional 28,000
students who will receive their master's
degrees this year.
CURRENT DEFENSE Department esti-
mates also show that the draft call
for the year beginning next July will be
over 240,000. However, if the troop ceiling
for Vietnam is raised to 700,000 or above,
draft calls will probably have to be hiked
further.
According to graduate school officials,
only one-third of the current class of
graduate students would be eligible for
the draft under the new ruling. Of this
one-third, 40 per cent are actually ex-
pected to be inducted.
This assumes that the local draft
boards will not draft the one-third of the
graduates who are over 26 years of age.
According to Selective Service regula-
tions, graduate students who have taken
2-S deferments are draft eligible until
age 35. Past practice would indicate, how-
ever, that draft boards do not take eligi-
ble males past 26 because of the training
difficulties.
The other one-third of the graduate
school students are women.
PRIOR TO THE Hershey announcement,
the University was already projecting
an increase in the size of graduate en-
rollment in accord with the general rise
in the size of college enrollments across
the country.
Some departments have already been
asked to accept more students in their
programs, with a definite preference for
two-year master's candidates, so as to
assure spots for returning veterans. This
increase in the number of admissions will
hopefully compensate for the loss in in-
ductees.
ALL THIS RESHUFFLING is being done
to persuade a cynical state Legisla-
ture that the University will have enough
graduate students to meet the enrollment
projections they have submitted to the
state. Since appropriations are usually
computed roughly on a per student basis,
the Hershey ruling could hit the Univer-
sity hard in the pocketbook, besides caus-
ing the loss of many of its finest graduate
students.
-MARK LEVIN
Editor
President Fleming Mark Schreiber
-Axel Kappes
Sheriff Harvey Dean Spurr
Richard Tobin
Py the Editorial Directors
O F LATE, it's been getting
pretty hard to gather together
enough courage to face the morn-
ing's Daily.
With a steady progression of
uniformly bad news emanating
from Vietnam, Washington, and
the University's own Administra-
tion Building, the times have not
been conducive for happy news-
papers.
It's almost as if the University,
the country, and the world have
been having a kind of sack race
to see which can get to hell in a
handbasket faster.
With the news generally run-
ning along these lines, it's refresh-
ing to find a week in which
thinigs didn't get worse. Conse-
quently we'll ignore the big, bad
world outside of Ann Arbor and
parochially focus our attentions
on the week on campus. Especial-
ly since this week's campus in-
anity quotient was exceptionally
high.
IN TERMS of long range sig-
nificance this week's biggest
story is one which links the cam-
pus to the nation and the world
that we're messing up. And that
is the cresting of the reaction
to General Hershey's recent deci-
sion to revoke draft deferments
for almost all graduate students.
At a time when universities such
as Stanford are estimating that
the new draft policy could cost
them as many as 85 per cent of
their graduate students, the Uni-
versity has remained an isle of
relative tranquility.
For example, Byron Groesbeck,
associate dean of the graduate
school, confidently predicted that
at most only one-sixth of the
University's graduate students
would be eligible for the draft.
This buoyant optimism was
shared by Dean Stephen H. Spurr
of the graduate school, who also
contended that graduate enroll-
ment would be little affected by
the change in draft policy.
Using what appeared to be the
same figures cited by Groesbeck,
Spurr contended that out of 2100
students admitted last Septem-
ber, only 350 will be inducted this
year.
If these statistics are correct,
fine. But if any of the elements
Quotes of the Week
Negro History Hysteria
NOW THAT THE University is going to
offer a course in Negro history, it is
only reasonable to expect proponents of
the course to stop accusing the history
department of bigotry and obstructionism.
But it seems that those who would
make the offering of such a course a
political rather than an academic issue
are not content that the history professor
most qualified to teach it has offered to
do so.
In an article by Richard Ross submit-
ted for publication in Friday's Daily by
members of Negro fraternities and so-
rorities, the hitherto confused and un-
coordinated Negro history campaign sunk
to a level of pettiness unsurpassed by its
former efforts.
Showing an incredible lack of under-
standing of how the academic depart-
ments of the University function, the
article alternated between trying to ex-
plain why the course should be called
"History of the Negro American" (as op-
posed, for example, to "History of the
American Negro") and flinging insults
at department chairman W. B. Willcox.
BUT WHAT many people, including Ross,
do not know is that no department
ever offers a course-a professor does. No
departmental edict, the history professors
point out, will make a single one of them
teach a course he does not want to
teach.
Prof. William Freehling, long interested
in American race relations, proved happy
to offer a course in the subject when he
found that students were interested in
taking it.
But the major failing of the demands
advocates of a Negro history course make
lies in their basic understanding of what
history is all about.
THE UNIVERSITY does not need a
Negro history course to make sure
that the role of the Negro is "totally
integrated into American history text-
books."
The University needs a course in Negro
history because, as Prof. Sam Warner has
pointed out, studying the history of the
Negro race in America is important in
trying to achieve an understanding of
"how we got into the mess we're in today."
Above all, any other Negro history
course than the kind Dr. Freehling has
planned would be any inexcusable per-
version of history as an academic disci-
pline.
THERE IS NO reason for a vigorous his-
tory department like the University's
to have to submit to the demands of this
kind of militant ethno-centrism.
-JENNY STILLER
IT WAS A hard choice, but it
had to be made.
Although reaction to the recent
draft announcement dominated
the week's news, and offered some
superbly quotable lines, the quote
of the week award must go to
Washtenaw County Sheriff Doug-
las J. Harvey, whose penchant for
the mellifluous phrase never
served his better this week in a
comment on the county jail's in-
corrigible cell.'
In response to an order to close
the cell from state corrections
department head Gus Harrison,
Harvey said:
"As a police officer, I'm nat-
urally suspicious. I can't help
but wonder if Mr. Harrison isn't
suddenly starting to wilt from
a little heat applied by some of
the local subversive minorities."
Rev. Erwin Gaede, the Unitarian
minister whose campaign to close
the incorrigible cell prompted
Harvey's remark, must have been
mildly shocked. Not since Ralph
Waldo Emerson publicly applaud-
ed John Brown's Raid over a hun-
dred years ago had there been
inferences linking Unitarians and
subversives.
Meanwhile, Mr. Harrison. slow-
ly wilting away in Lansing, was
equally dumbfounded. Why had
Mr, Harrison ordered the cell
closed? "We don't think any hu-
man being should be put through
that (the conditions of the
"hole")." Why, since the cell has
existed for 40 years, hadn't he
issued the order sooner? Risking
accusations of incompetence, Har-
rison said, "I didn't know it
existed." Didn't his office inspect
the jail? "My inspector of course
knew it was there; but he didn't
have any reason to think it was
being used." No comment.
If Mr. Harrison's comments
seemed to demonstrate that the
line between incompetence and
"playing dumb" in self-defense
was hard to draw, other events of
the week confirmed that the ploy,
far from being exclusively Mr.
Harrison's, was a common admin-
istrative technique.
So that when Assistant Dean
Byron Groesbeck was asked to
calculate the effect drafting grad
students would' have on the Uni-
versity's graduate schools and
programs, G r o e s b e c k affected
composure. Although Harvard's
President Nathan M. Pusey has
been insisting that next year's
grad students would be "the blind,
the lame, the halt, and the fe-
male" Groesbeck, with an' eye to
the great pocketbook in Lansing,
insisted that only one-sixth of
the University's graduate students
would be affected.
But the ambivalent Mr. Groes-
beck wins not only cunning quote
of the week. For his keen insights
into international affairs, he
must also be awarded ingenuous
quote of the week. Witness:
"There musthbe sound rea-
sons for what the National Se-
curity Council did. It seems to
me they wouldn't have done
something so harsh to the grad-
uate schools unless the in-
ternational situation was very
serious."
Never fear, Dr. Groesbeck. That
eternal optimist, Robben W. Flem-
ing, also had his eye on the world
scene. In the fatherly, reassuring
tones to which students in Flem-
ing's short tenure as President
have already become accustomed,
Fleming thought out loud, "I won-
der whether Hershey really had
the blessings of the White House.
This may not be the final word."
In fact, for typical Fleming
quotes, it was a great week. For
several weeks, those who have fol-
lowed the new president's exploits
through the infancy of his ad-
ministration have noticed that
Fleming's public statements tend
toward the equivocal.
Only this week, however, did
they hear the archtypical Fleming
equivocation. It was almost as if
Fleming had coined the word. Pre-
viously, the mental image con-
jured up by the word "equivocal"
was the two-headed Russian dog
Walt Kelly drew in Pogo several
years ago-one head could only
say "da," the other "nyet." Then
there was Fleming. Asked what he
thought of .the faculty resolution
at the University of Chicago de-
manding that that school with-
draw from the Institute for De-
fense Analysis, Fleming said, "the
questions being raised by the Chi-
cago people are the same ones that
I am raising." Then for a chaser,
"though I have looked into this,
I have not yet found that there
is somehow an evil relationship"
between universities and IDA.
Inane hyperbole of the week
goes to SGC presidential candi-
date Mark Schreiber, who said of
the upcoming Day of Deliberation:
"This is the first time in the
history of the University that
students have been confronted
with a purely moral issue."
(This would have been awarded
inane hyperbole of all time ex-
cept that the Chicago Tribune,
which humbly calls itself "World's
Greatest Newspaper," pre-empted
that award several years ago.)
Saturday Review managing edi-
tor Richard Tobin, who spoke on
campus this week, wins two
awards: the Marshall McLuhan
quote of the year trophy for "I
have a feeling it may be fashion-
able to read again," and the De-
prived Childhood consolation prize
for "Movies were forbidden to me.
I never did see The Shiek."
Understatement of the week:
ex-Graduate Assembly President
Roy Ashmall. Referring to an-
other Hershey, draft announce-
ments-that local boards will es-
tablish their own occupational de-
ferments - and the University's
sanguine effort to put the whole
mess in a good light: "I don't give
that much credit for literacy to
the local boards."
K e n Barnhill,. manager of
Apartments Limited, had the most
hackneyed line. Confronting over
50 complaining student tenants in
the firm's office, Barnhill quipped
"This seems to be a failure to
communicate."
While the last quote didn't win
an award, it did raise some eye-
brows around the Board in Con-
trol of Student Publications. It
belongs to Bill Krauss, outgoing
Daily business manager. Asked in
a telephone interview from his
villa in Rio De Janiero to reflect
on his experiences as a senior
editor said Thursday that the
year had been "very rewarding"
for the senior business staff.
in the statistical balancing act go
awry, it could be a year of havoc
in the grad school.
HOWEVER, THE REACTION
of the Administration was dwarfed
by the student response.-
Reflecting the philosophy that
there is no problem which cannot
be forthrightly resolved by the
stalwarts of Graduate Assembly
and Student Government Council,
both groups called for a Day of
Deliberation March 19 and a boy-
cott of classes March 20 to pro-
test the war and the draft.
While the sponsors of these two
days of fun and games have taken
on a distinctly moralistic tone
about the purity of their inten-
tions, it does not take too much
perspicacity to see a germ of self-
interest underneath all this hue
and cry.
It is ironic that the concerned
students have waited until gen-
eral Hershey revoked their defer-
ments to start deliberating on the
merits of the draft. One seriously
wonders whether anyone would
be interested in draft teach-ins if
the Army was able to get its tra-
ditional quota of poor Southern
whites.
Far more relevant to the real
problem, would be a teach-in in-
vestigating whether there is any
way to alter governmental poli-
cies. For while a Day of Delibera-
tion may aid Mark Schreiber's
SGC campaign and make the
other organizers feel morally vir-
tuous, its impast on the world
will be no greater than the long
sequence of campus teach-ins and
protests.
However, any event which
brings the Reverend William
Sloane Coffin to Ann Arbor can't
be all bad.
THE FIRST INSTALLMENT of
what seems to be Michigan's an-
swer to disruptive demonstrations
against certain campus recruiters
was unveiled this week as a rep-
resentative of Dow Chemical Com-
pany defended the production of
napalm at an open forum.
The rationale for the stultifying
two-hour session in the eyes of the
local radicals was that these for-
ums could provide a mechanism to
initiate discussion of relevant is-
sues and provide an opportunity
to confront corporation and gov-
ernmental representatives as well.
The audience was never certain
what it wanted to do with the
rather ineffectual Dow represen-
tative it was confronting. After
trying for a half an hour to bait
him or catch him in a logical
contradiction by posing hypotheti-
cal queries, the 100 people gath-
ered there realized there was lit-
tle point to the entire charade.
Since they couldn't change his
mind and he represented little
corporate power, they tried ignor-
ing him and discussing America's
foreign policy.
The only problem was that
there weren't more than a dozen
people present who didn't share
the same anti-government foreign
policy orientation. So unless one
wanted to use the session to per-
feet the refinements of one's for-
eign policy schema, there was very
little point to the whole thing.
Judging from the Dow experi-
ence, open forums are not to be
highly recommended either for
the enlightenment they provide or
their entertainment value.
A CONFRONTATION which
made the Dow forum look ef-
fective by comparison was the one
between the valiant heroes who
comprise the Student Housing As-
sociation (SHA) and the evil men
rent from Apartments Limited.
Dauntlessly led by Mike Koen-
eke - another SGC Presidential
hopeful - 50 students poured into
the Apartments Limited office and
presented petitions signed by over
1,000 students who pledged not to
sign A 1968 lease with the rental
agency.
This sounds impressive until we
remember that over 35,000 stu-
dents are apparently willing to
rent from Apartments Lifited.
While the progress of the hous-
ing boycott is difficult to assess,
it just doesn't seem likely that
Apartments Limited will be so in-
timidated by a short disruption
of their office that they will wil-
lingly give up the financial bene-
fits of the 12-month lease.
THE PSYCHODRAMA-of-the-
week award has to go to the Fac-
ulty Assembly's resolute decision
not to hold an open meeting, but
honorable mention should be re-
served for the "Robben Head"
playlet presented by some of the
thespians in Voice.
While the only real effect of the
skit was to enliven the tradition-
ally bland fare of a President's
tea, the avowed purpose of the
presentation was to protest Uni-
versity classified research in gen-
eral and our membership in the
Institute for Defense Analysis
(IDA) in particular.
In regard to IDA, President
Robben W. Fleming forthrightly
spoke his mind on our participa-
tion in the 12-school research con-
sortium at a 25 cents a, plate
luncheon at the Guild House.
A close textual analysis of the
President's carefully - couched
words seems to indicate that he is
considering recommending that
the University follow the lead of
the University of Chicago and
withdraw from the group.
But like the ideal modern ad-
ministrator Fleming carefully
kept his options open.
Fleming can still recommend
our withdrawal from the service
center for the Defense Depart-
ment at the April 20 Regents
meeting. One wishes for confi-
dence that Fleming will.
But the real highpoint of the
week came when SGC postponed
the petitioning deadline for all
those vitally important posts
which are up for grabs. While
this may be just another example
of the fantastic enthusiasm which
our campus legislature generates,
perhaps the move reflects an in-
ability to face Johnson-Nixon
and Koeneke-Schreiber elections
in the same year.
wI
14
4
A
Second class postage paid at Ann Arbor, Michigan,
420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48104.
The Daily is a member of the Associated Press and
Collegiate Press Service.
Daily except Monday during regular academic school
year.
i
Newsweek's
'Megaversity': It Ain't Necessarily So .. .
By CAROLYN MIEGEL
Associate Editorial Director
rrIS WEEK, Newsweek pro-
moted the University of Mich-
igan, as well as the other Big
Ten schools, from the rank of
multiversity to a "megaversity,"
a distinction that seems to rank
with the conversion of a prison
into an insane asylum.
Bemoaning the demise of those
small cloistered havens of "qual-
ity education," the news magazine
characterizes the megaversity as
the education of the IBM card
and the closed circuit TV - an
educational machine that replaces
the humanity of Socrates with
electronics.
ling errors, the large dormitories
and the use of teaching fellows
- to see the value of the large
university and its real problems.
THE BIG TEN schools, as well
as Berkeley (not included except
superficially in Newsweek's sup-
perficial analysis of the megaver-
sity) loom as "post-sputnik con-
glomerates," the 1984 model of
higher education. However fright-
ening their image, these univer-
sities serve important functions
besides "big-time football, frater-
nity beerblasts and agricultural
extensions," even if those funct-
ions have become institutionaliz-
ed.
sciences, physical sciences, and
engineering; Michigan in human-
ities, social sciences, and biological
sciences, and Wisconsin in social
sciences and biological sciences.
But however statistically-sta-
tused, the megaversity still suf-
fers from "sheer size and dehum-
anization."
"The dehumanization effect" is
not always the fault of the meg-
aversity itself - but the state
legislatures, who grant the funds,
a act glazed over by Newsweek!
ACCORDING to Newsweek, "pri-
vate colleges have been caught in
the treadmill of soaring costs and
fund drives," but "the public uni-
sent-minded professor with wire-
rim glasses and socks that don't
match. A "kindly" man who "does
not take himself too seriously,"
Fleming is a friendly, ineffectual
sort of guy here at Michigan. What
Newsweek seem to forget, especial-
ly when they call the - University
of Wisconsin the "best-if not the
bigest of the Big Ten"-is that
Fleming was chancellor of the
Madison campus, Wisconsin's
largest branch, before he came to
Michigan.
It appears Newsweek reporters
interviewed maybe eight students
and then picked the most quotable
response as representative. At
Wisconsin a student "drives in"
t
t
4
_ 'SC4.f' _ r
_:
': _ '>