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IFRIDAY, SEPTEMBER I, 1967
NIGHT EDITOR: WALLACE IMMEN
Fleming Must Prepare
To Tackle U' Problems
ROBBEN FLEMING arrives on campus
next week to begin his four month ex-
posure to the University before officially
succeeding Harlan Hatcher in January.
The period was intended to provide Flem-
ing with time to acquaint himself with
and study the problems of the Univer-
sity.
It will be no easy task. The University
is presently caught in the tightening grip
of a fiscal squeeze resulting from legis-
lative frugality and exploding enrollment
demands. Construction of vital University
facilities is being crippled by legal argu-
ments and administrative stubbornness.
The construction crisis and appropria-
tions shortage threaten to doom such
well-conceived programs as the Residen-
tial College.
In fact, the sprawling giant of a uni-
versity which covers Ann Arbor needs
close examination if fresh solutions are
to be found to its mounting problems.
And it is certainly the hope of the stu-
dents, faculty, alumni and Regents who
chose Fleming that he may provide the
needed insight.
There are several very thorny issues
which a new administration will confront.
A continuation of certain present poli-
cies, which have slowed, not hastened the
University's progress, could prove disas-
terous.
*The University continues to oppose
Public Act 124, a legislative regulation
calling for a state auditor to choose the
architects of new state university build-
ings. The Hatcher administration has
argued that the act is unconstitutional
and an abridgement of the University's
autonomy. The University was the only
one of the 11 Michigan state schools to
resist the act last year.
Beside running the risk of denying the
University valuable funds for future con-
struction and planning, administrative
stubbornness breeds contempt in Lans-
ing, where legislators no longer apreci-
ate the University's disregard of state
law.
Perhaps the University is perfectly cor-
rect and PA 124 is unconstitutional. Yet
the law has yet to be officially chal-
lenged in court by University lawyers
and instead is stubbornly ignored. Mean-
while, essential funds for future construc-
tion- are either not requested (because
of anticipated rejection) or sharply cut
by a hostile Legislature.
The University was handed a sharp
setback in construction ("capital outlay")
funds by Lansing this summer when only
$7.4 million of a $24 million request was
granted. Not a penny was; appropriated
for projects to be planned and the Uni-
versity is facing the precarious prospect
of no funds for planned future building
an enrollment curves sharply, upward
through the 1970's.
The Hatcher administration seemed
quick to oblige draft boards with student
ranks last year-though students voted
against the action in an all-campus
referendum. The administration's argu-
ment was that though they feel laws may
be incorrect, they should be challenged in
court, not through resistance. Yet, as this
paper has so often whispered in our eld-
ers' ears, the contradiction in logic be-
tween draft ranking and Public Act 124
is appalling.
Challenge the law in court or abide by
legislative acts. But don't sit on your
thumbs while legislators scowl at the
University's intransigence.
* If the deteriorating relationship be-
tween the administration and the state
Legislature isn't serious enough, one need
only examine the credibility gulf between
administrators and students. The disturb-
ances on campus last winter were end-
ed by an administration-student compro-
mise and the establishment of a high-
powered Presidential Commission on De-
cision-Making. What the commission will
produce is still a question-mark, but an-
other display of administrative disregard
(as in the sit-in ban, the HUAC disclos-
ure, and the draft referendum) could
prove fatal to the hope of any student-
administration cooperation.
Student leaders, excepting the already
disenchanted fringes, are putting their
hopes behind the commission. If this
balloon bursts, as so many others have
done, the mistrust will be hard to re-
pair.
0 The Residential College is one of the
brightest projects to appear on the Uni-
versity landscape in many years. It of-
fers a personalized program in a rapidly
depersonalizing environment. It offers the
best that the University has to offer, and
limits much of the bad. It is a brave ef-
fort, launched in the confines of notor-
iously depressing East Quad with a staff
of dedicated teachers and administra-
tors. Yet plans for its own building near
North Campus are already a year be-
hind schedule, and funds expected
through the Sesquicentennial Fund Drive
have not materialized.
If there is a place in the multiversity
for an isolated citadel of study and close
relationship between teacher and student,
then the means should be found to sup-
port it. If funds can not be obtained in
the traditional manner, then a new source
of money must be provided to insure the
Residential College's existence.
THE CHALLENGE facing Fleming and
his administration will be to find new
solutions to old problems. They must re-
vamp the image of an uncooperative Uni-
versity leadership that has been instill-
ed in minds of Ann Arbor students and
Lansing legislators.
It is not historically irrelevant to look
back to 1871 to note what one of the Uni-
versity's greatest presidents, James B. An-
gell, obse'rved about progress:
"In this day of unparalleled activity in
college life, the institution which is not
steadily advancing is certainly falling
behind."
This is what Robben ,Fleming must
think about for the next four months.
-ROBERT KLIVANS
Editorial Director
THERE IS THIS KID whom I have known, pretty
casually, since we were orientationing together our
freshman year. For the sake of argument let's call him
John. For three years I've been seeing John on campus,
saying hello and making five minutes of small-talk.
John represents to me now the beginning not so much
of my last year at the University as the beginning
of what America is like now-a-days.
John is a Negro, one whose militancy has progressed
annually during our acquaintance. A long time ago he
was a self-proclaimed Maoist, I don't know what he's
calling himself these days.
He was collecting election cards in Waterman Gym
when I saw him in registration a couple of days ago.
I went over to say hello.
I'm hoping he didn't remember me but I doubt if
that was the case. He gave me a hard, unknowing look
and when I offered my right hand he mumbled something
about using his left hand to shake with whites. We ex-
changed limp, uncomfortable Feft hands, and then he
mumbled something about how his right hand was tired,
although that's unlikely.
And that's the way things are.
WELCOME BACK not only to the Big U, but to the
United States. For this is not the same country we left
last spring when men shook right hands with each
other. When the war didn't seem as hopelessly intermin-
able as it does now. When the leadership, even if not the
kind of a thing you were willing to march behind, didn't
seem as stale and tired and appalling as it does now.
Kennedy was fond of saying, or at least his bio-
graphers are fond of attributing him with saying,
that public affairs move in a flow of ebbs and tides. This
seems an appropriate metaphor for the moment, as we
seem as a nation to be mired in the deepest ebb I can
remember.
There are good things around, of course. The hippies
are a good thing, no matter what Harry Reasoner and
C.B.S. News think; the Conference on New Politics, going
on this week-end in Chicago, is a good thing if it can
succeed; Black Power, frightening though it may be, is
a good thing for it represents the start of the demise of
the old order; and pretty girls, as long as they remember
what beauty is all about, are of course good things.
But that's about the sum of it. At least for this last
week in August, 1967.
AND THE CRITICAL question, the one which has
started haunting those of us not yet professional revolu-
tionaries but steadily moving that way, is whether the
ebb is transient or fundamental to American character.
Is it the passing product of leadership unable to provide
a sense of national direction and purpose, or is this vio-
lent self-destruction we seem so bent upon as embedded
in America as the prognasticators of racial unrest want
us to believe?
I'm not sure whether Americans realize their in-
credible constructive potential, and the extent to which
it still goes unfullfilled.
The American influence abroad, or at least in West-
ern Europe, is absolutely domineering. One must go far
south, deep into Greece, Spain, or Italy, to realize that
he's not home. Our wealth and power, despite the legiti-
mate protestations of De Gaulle, have so engulfed much
of the world that it is difficult to make the impact felt.
This is the Coca-Colanization of the world-more om-
nipotent than Christianity, more omnipresent than God.
YET WITH OUR fantastic economic influence we
have not provided any correspondingly influential moral
leadership. We know how to fight and keep down. But
can we build anything greater than more sky-scrapered
New York Cities in Berlin and Athens? At the moment
I think not and yet hope so. Perhaps when hope dis-
appears the emergence of the professional revolutionary
is complete.
But as long as we are obsessed with the walking
Communist ghosts, as long as our wealth does not make
us free but keeps us enslaved to the fear of losing it,
as long as the ultimate American art form is advertising,
we are in trouble.
Vietnam is not the root-cause of anything. It is the
natural expression of a society so absolutely powerful
that it doesn't have any real understanding of what
power is and what are its natural limitations. We are
so rich that we have reached a point where we have
entered into a war that is not ours that we cannot finish
because there can be no finish to it. We are so rich that
we have created John, whose Detroit hometown was
bombed out this summer (perhaps he helped in it) and
who now shakes with his left hand.
THESE ARE THE THOUGHTS, meandering and
perhaps ill-defined, of a native son on his homecoming.
But there is another story that must be recounted before
ci g.
About a Negro businessman who was met one day
sitting on a bench in Copenhagen and after a lengthy
discussion he said, "America is your homeland and you
ean't desert it." And then there's The Fire Next Time's
James Baldwin writing to his nephew that "great men
have done great things in this country and they can
be done again."
As maybe they can. As they must. Soon.
:.:::.:.v: i::'::TODAY AND TOMORROW ... by WALTER LIPPMANN
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New Priorities for
American Society
HOWEVER MUCH the Negro
riots this summer have demon-
strated our failure to make our
racial policies work, the American
people are quite unable to turn
around and adopt a radically dif-
ferent policy.
The American predicament is
unique. All the known "solutions"
which have been applied elsewhere
to racial conflicts are foreclosed.
There is no alternative to con-
tinuing to work for as much peace
and harmony as possible on
American territory between the
Negroes and the whites.
The races cannot separate.
There can be no exodus of the
Negroes to a land oftheir own.
They cannot go elsewhere. They
cannot separate on American ter-
ritory by some form of apartheid
as in South Africa. The Negroes
will not tolerate and the whites
will not attempt to enforce the
brutality of a racial separation.
The Negroes cannot seize, let us
say, Mississippi, and secede from
the United States in order to es-
tablish a country of their own.
The suggestion is unthinkable.
There is nothing left for us all
but to go on living together; try-
ing to make the relationship as
decent and tolerable as possible.
THE AMERICAN belief in the
gradual harmonization of the
races is no doubt optimistic and
idealistic when it is seen in the
light of the ugly realities. But it
is the only general vision of the
future that, given American geog-
raphy and history, Americans can
allow themselves. Any ' other
course means incessant smolder-
ing violence and hatred.
The critical difficulty is that
all serious efforts to advance to-
ward racial harmony take a long
time to achieve results and they
are very costly, The grievances
and complaints of the young Ne-
groes are, however, immediate and
urgent. They will not wait for
their grandchildren to enjoy the
solutions of their problems.
This is the ominous gap ?n
which the riots are kindled. The
older generation of Negro and
white leaders have learned to ac-
cept the gap. They have learned
to live on promises, on small
tokens and samples, of better
things to come. For the present
these older and more patient Ne-
groes are not listened to by the
new generation,
THE CORE OF the problem is
how to create a new generation of
Negro leaders whom the young
Negroes will follow and with whom
the white establishment in Ameri-
can society can live and work. For
the irreconcilables like Stokeley
Carmichael, who consider them-
selves at war with the white ma-
jority, there is no future except
in jail or in exile. For in any test
of strength and violence they
would certainly be crushed, and
if they insist on putting the mat-
ter to the test, they havetno pros-
pect whatsoever of prevailing. The
power of the white community is
so overwhelmingly superior that
the security of the blacks lies, in
the last analysis, in the determi-
nation of the whites not to let the
conflict go to extreme limits. The
disparity in strength is such that
it is absurd for Stokeley Carmi-
chael to think of a race war..
The question is whether and
how the white community can be
induced to pay the costs, financial
as well as human, of the reform,
and reconstruction which might
at last assuage the grievances of
the Negroes. My own view is a
tough-minded one.As long as the
advance of the Negro is presented
as a form of white philanthrooy-
the white majority making sacri-
fices to uplift the Negro minority
-nothing on the scale needed gill
be practical politics. The uplift-
ing of the Negro cannot be ac-
complished as a pro-Negro enter-
prise. Large communities of men
are not that generous mnd un-
selfish.
THE ADVANCE of the Negro
must be part of a much greater
and more general effort to uplift
the whole community, arrying
the Negro minority with it in the
enterprise. In the current jargon
we can uplift the Negro only in
the process of creating the Great
Society.
We can do little for the Negro
if we do not absorb his grievances
in the greater needs of the whole
community. Unless the whites
have a vital interest in their own
advancement, in making the cities
livable, they will respond reluc-
tantly to the costs of helping the
Negro minority.
This comes down to saying that
the racial problem is manageable,
I do not say soluble, in situations
which come about only now and
then, not often, in the life of a
nation.
There must be an overwhelming
desire and intention among the
active people to reform and re-
construct their own social order.
The hope of the Negro people is
to participate in such a general
movement., There is, in. my view.
no hope for them as members of
a separate minority who are to be
accorded separate and special
measures of relief and uplift.
A GENERAL movement of re-
form and reconstruction can exist
only if its objectives are the main
preoccupation of the great masses
of the nation. In 1964 it was con-
ceivable, indeed possible, that the
Great Society would become the
main American preoccupation for
a generation to come. It has not
been the American preoccupation
ever since President Johnson, de-
cided that he had to wage war in
Asia. For it is impossible to expect
a people to be preoccupied at one
and the same time with two dia-
metrically opposite and contra-
dicting commitments: with a war
on the other side of the world and
with thetrebuilding of their own
society at home.
Once the President chose to be-
lieve that he had to prevail in .a
war of attrition on the Asianr
mainland, the Great Society lost
its momentum and its soul, and
became nothing more than a com-
plex series of political handouts
to the poor. The hope of Negro
participation in the creation of a
new American social order was
lost.
President Johnson keeps c n
saying that the United States is
big enough and rich enough to
pay for the war in Vietnam and
at the same time for the Great
Society at home. More than any-
thing else this reveals Lyndon
Johnson's lack of knowledge of
war and his lack of wisdom in
dealing with it. His willingness to
believe that a democracy can have
two overwhelming preoccupations
at the same time is the mark of
Surfer
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an amateur. It is the view of a
man who does not realize, because
he has never himself felt it, the
absorbing preoccupation of war.
He does not understand that when
the issues are life and death, vi-
tory and defeat, everything else
becomes pale and irrelevant and
unimportant. Some of the meas-
ures for the Great Society are
still ,on the White House list of
desirable legislation. But with half
a million men fighting in Asia
nobody really cares, or can care
about what life is like in a Detroit
slum.
MOREOVER, THE people wno
do not feel the need for reform,
or do not believe that there is
justice and reason in the claims
of the Great Society, now have a
legitimate reason for stopping the
reforms and even of reversing
them. President Johnson is much
mistaken if he thinks that be-
cause he has adopted the Gold-
water war policy, the Goldwater
faction will support the Great
Society. Nor can he convince the
predominant and bewildered ma-
jority of our people that the 90th
Congress is wicked because it puts
the war ahead of everything else:
In a word, therefore, the Negro
grievances cannot be assuaged by
a policy of white philanthropy, of
white sacrifices to uplift the Ne-
gro. The only way forward is to
make the advance of the Negro a
part of the general effort to solve
the problems and deal with the
needs of our great urban centers.
But this undertaking, though it is
a noble and inspiring one, is pos-
sible only if it becomes the main
preoccupation of the whole nation.
And that is impossible while the
nation is distracted and preoccu-
pied by a foreign war it does not
understand and does not believe
in.
(c), 196', The Washington Post Co.
A
q
Insuring Social Awareness
-1
THE SOCIALLY-AWARE businessman
has a new friend: the Kemper Insur-
ance Group of Chicago.
Kemper has put out a new pamphlet,
"Riot and Your Business," prepared with
the help of the Chicago Police Depart-
The Daily is a member of the Associated Press and
Collegiate Press service.
Summer subscription rate: $2.00 per term by carrier
'($2.50 by mail); $4.00 for entire summer ($4.50 by
mal).
Daily except Monday during regular academic school
year.
Daily except Sunday and Monday during regular
summer session,
Second class postage paid at Ann Arbor, Michigan.
420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor.. Michigan, 48104.
Editorial Staff
ROGER RAPOPORT, Editor
MEREDITH MXEER, Managing Editor
MICHAEL HEP'ER ROBERT KLIVANS
City Editor Editorial Director
SUSAN ELAN.............Associate Managing Editor
LAURENCE MEDOW ...... Associate Managing Editor
STEPHEN FIRRSHEIN ....Associate Editorial Director
RONALD KLEMPNER ..:. Associate Editorial Director
ment. It's must reading for any business-
man troubled by recent riots.
Kemper urges the enlightened ghetto
merchant to "be aware of the social cli-
mate in'your area." But responsible com-
pany officials should do more than just
that, Kemper says. As part of a "long
range protection program" they should
work with authorities in "securing and
safeguarding" any company stocks of
"firearms, ammunition or explosives" and
"plan possible exit routes from the build-
ing, and by auto from the area."
"If a riot is imminent," the booklet ad-
vises, businessmen should remove cash
register contents, leaving the cash reg-
ister open to "reduce the possibility of
destruction," and "leave in a group .,.
by private passenger car with windows
rolled up and doors locked."
AS THE PAMPHLET points out, rioting
"could even happen in your town-to
your business!" On July 24, the second
day of rioting in Detroit, Kemper had
to close its office there; a Detroit spokes-
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