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October 14, 1967 - Image 4

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The Michigan Daily, 1967-10-14

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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

Retlecting on

Two Revolutions

ms's

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.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14, 1967

NIGHT EDITOR: NEAL BRUSS

On Freshmen Hours:
Let the Women Decide

FRESHMEN WOMEN should take Stu-
dent Government Council at its word
and begin immediately to decide for
themselves on the house level what their
late shall be.
SGC resolved Thursday "that Council
recognizes the right of freshman women
in individual residences to make their
own hours, to do away with them, or to
delegate that right to whomever they
may deem fit. Parental consent for fresh-
man women under 21 who will not have
hours will remain in effect, as for other
women, on condition of study." In effect,
this asks freshmen women in each dor-
mitory house to make their own hours or
decide who will.
The rationale for such a move is abun-
dantly clear. Decisions should be made
by the people whom the decisions affect.
In the case of women's hours, the women
themselves are the only people affected.
That their hours affects the University's
"image" and hence the entire University,
as some faculty members have argued,
is absurd. In the first place, the principle
is too easily abused and should not be
invoked except in matters of utmost
gravity. In the second, many freshmen
women decide for themselves what their
hours should be at home. How could their
exercising' the same rights at school that
they do at home possibly tarnish the
University's image?
What will happen to freshmen women
if they make their own hours rules and
follow them? The administration, of
course, does not recognize SGC's "usur-
pation" of the authority to make individ-
ual rules, or actions like the one SGC
took on freshmen hours which follow
from it. The University continues to con-
sider the "University Regulations" which
SGC pronounced null and void to be in
effect. Furthermore, the University has
never indicated that it would not enforce
those rules if the established judiciary
system in the house refused to enforce
them.
BUT THE STAFF of the residence halls
is instructed not to enforce rules
which house judiciaries are enforcing.
And in a recent memorandum, Univer-
sity Director of Housing John Feldkamp
directed staffers not to punish students
who violated rules. Instead of punish-
ment, staffers are to "enforce positively"
by "individual counseling." If after sev-
eral infractions of "University Regula-
tions" and subsequent counseling ses-
sions the individual persists in her con-
duct, the Office of University Housing
will request the student's college or
school to take disciplinary action.
But is rather unlikely that the colleges
will take up that request. James Shaw,
associate dean of the literary college has
said "traditionally the literary college
has never had first jurisdiction over non-
academic disciplinary actions. It has
served as an appeal for suspensions is-
sued from other judiciary areas."
All this last sentence means is that
the literary college, because the admin-
istration gives it some say over who will
be enrolled and who won't, is consulted
when some judiciary (like Joint Judiciary
Council) recommends that a student be
suspended from school.
So that if freshmen women decide
their own hours and their house councils
and judiciaries agree to enforce them
there is little chance that punitive mea-
sures will be taken against girls who
abide by the student-made rules.
HOW SHOULD the women go about de-
termining their own hours rules?

The wording was carefuly considered and
is important. "Freshmen women in in-
dividual residences" means that fresh-
men in each women's dormitory house
(except in cases where the house and
the residence hall are identical, e.g., Mos-
her-Jordan, where freshmen women in
&11g £* i
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collegiate Press Service.
Fall and winter subscription rate: $4.50 per term by
carrier ($5 by mal); $8.00 for regular academic school
year ($9 by mail).

the entire residence hall would decide as
a whole) should make the decision. They
have a choice of means. They can have
a poll, or they can agree to let the house
council represent them, or choose
another mechanism so long as freshmen
decide.
"Recognizes the right" rather than
"delegates the power" means that all the
options are open. Freshmen women can
through their own means make the de-
cision on hours as a unit, they can hope
to leave the decision up to the individual,
or they can delegate the decision to some
other group: the faculty, the adminis-
tration, SGC, Inter-House Assembly.
However they decide to do it, it is im--
portant that their approach be direct.
The oblique tactics of Blagdon, Elliott
and Fisher houses, while commendable
in their intent, may leave the women in
these houses wide open to legal retribu-
tion.
Blagdon house, on Tuesday night, de-
cided not to enforce late minutes as a
means of punishing curfew violators. Be-
cause Feldkamp's announced staff policy
is that staff members shall not punish
students under any circumstances (they
may only "positively enforce" by "in-
dividual counseling" the effect of this
seems to be to abolish hours, as long as
the girls don't mind being counseled to
death.
BUT, IN FACT, it may not. For anyone
with "an interest" in a case - ad-
ministrators and residence hall staffers
included - may appeal to JJC for a rul-
ing. Now, the present SGC rule implies
that existing hours rules remain in effect
until that time when freshmen in the
houses themselves decide what the new
rules will be. So JJC would probably be
bound by its policy of enforcing student-
made rules (which SGC's clearly is) to
rule against a girl with a Blagdon-like
code. But if the women pass their own
rules, JJC would - if the girl has obeyed
them - be able to rule for her.
The refusal of the Board of Gover-
nors, who alone under the Regents By-
laws have the technical authority to dele-
gate the power to make conduct rules
for residents of University housing, is
not only unfortunate, contrary to the
spirit if not the letter of the Knauss re-
port, but based on shaky facts as well.
For Board of Governor member Prof.
Donald Eschman's argument that the
concern of the Board is to "create an
academic atmosphere" in the residence
halls does not square with the Board's
past record. For example, the Board has
been very concerned over the issue of
visitation by the opposite sex. Yet if
creating an "academic atmosphere" is
the goal, the Board's concern should be
with "visitation" of the same sex, as any
freshmen who has almost flunked out
because he couldn't get the bridge games
and his buddies out of his room will tes-
tify. Has the Board done empirical
studies which indicate that students do
not study as well in the presence of the
opposite sex?
FRESHMEN WOMEN should not allow
the intransigeance of an out-of-date
Board of Governors to discourage them
from exercising the "primary" control
over conduct rules recommended by the
Knauss Report. This is especially true
considering that it seems apparent from
Vice President Cutler's letter to SGC and
Feldkamp's policy memorandum that the
administration agrees with at least the
substance of what SGC is doing, if not the
procedure.

It is up to freshmen women to act
and act now. Every reason argues in
favor of them so doing. Every opportun-
ity to act wth impunity now exists. The
decision is now theirs to make.
-URBAN LEHNER
Editorial Staff
ROGER RAPOPORT, Editor
MEREDITH EIKER, Managing Editor
MICHAEL HEFFER ROBERT KLIVANS
City Editor Editorial Director
SUSAN ELAN ............ Associate Managing Editor
STEPHEN FIRSHEIN ...... Associate Managing Editor
LAURENCE MEDOW ......Associate Managing Editor

By ARTHUR P. MENDEL
Tihe Author is Associate Professor
ofTHistory at tie University and
specializes in Russian History.
HERE ARE TWO social revolu-
tions occurring. Unfortunate-
ly for both, they are getting badly
mixed up.
One involves the affluent youth
who are rebelling against the so-
cial and psychological sources of
affluence. They want nothing to
do with what they consider the
overdeveloped, ponderously imper-
sonal institutions that define our
society or with what for them are
the neuroses that built and con-
tinue to sustain those institutions
-the obsessions with time, work,
achievement, efficiency, prudence,
frugalityandthe rest of the code.
For them it is one great hoax,
a grotesque deception that has
compressed their elders into de-
humanized parcels of roles,tfunc-
tions and skills, which, sociologists
notwithstanding, they refuse to
accept as man's fate. They want
here and now to make that leap
into the realm of freedom, to ex-
perience now the wide range of
pleasures that life offers.
They feel that for them the era
of alienation and false conscious-
ness is over. Theywant to deter-
mine their existence according to
human needs and desires, not the
prerequisites of this or that in-
stitution or of society as a whole.
And so they drop out-the well
publicized Hippies and the count-
less unsung heroes of this move-
ment who have secretly withdrawn
to attend quietly their gardens and
their souls-wasting time as ruth-
lessly as time had wasted them.
LET US WISH them success. In-
deed, the persistent and over-
whelmingly sympathetic attention

rage against these archaic values,
the values have already done their
work too well.
The young middle-class rebels
find themselves caught in a path-
etic contradiction: they want only
the pleasure principle for their
guide, but their backgrounds being
what they are, these young men
and women soon learn that their
greatest pleasure is in effort and
achievement, in mastery rather
than passive receptivity and com-
munion, in work rather than play.

"What attracts such intellectuals as Oglesby and Gerassi to the move-
ment is not the prospect of gains for the poor, but the.prospect of de-
stroying the middle-class world they hate and, even more, the exhila-
ration of the revolutionary process itself."
.............«............:."."::".:vi:v.".",M . . ^r:x.:. ":v^."".:«"r:V:vL M ;.,.... .......... . ... °.... .,.. ,...... .... .....,.,.........

They must get out of the univer-
sity first of all, then avoid like
the plague those split-level houses
and $20,000 a year jobs. This is
well and good for Mr. Oglesby who
could probably get both and more
anytime he so chooses. If he wants
to abstain, that is his affair.
BUT WHAT COULD be more ir-
relevant to the poor in this country
than such scorn of higher educa-
tion, good salaries and fine houses?
Here, as so often before, those

stroying the "structure," then all
those engaging in these flights of
fervent rhetoric are mere char-
latans.
IN A WAY it is sad. These are
gifted and dedicated men and
those who are still moved by the
songs of the Fifth Brigade, the
Warsaw ghetto, and the partisans
cannot but feel a kinship and an
admiration for them in spite of
everything. But their maximalist
ends and means have no useful

Drugs confess the failure. The
society that promotes such dilem-
mas and such tragic escapes can-
not be a good society. But it is the
one that has nurtured the "cop
outs," and it is through such de-
vices that it draws them again into
the fold. First for pleasure's sake,
then for their own sake, action and
achievement are again honored.
The prodigal sons and daughters
return, to prepare for and enter
the traditional style. There are any
number of facile rationalizations.
Some, however, attempt parricide.
If they must act, then they will act
againstthe soceitythat has crip-
pled them, that has made them
unable not to act. And with this
they enter the second social rev-
olution of our time.
THE SECOND revolution is the
familiar one. It is the revolution

who attack bourgeois society from
above, the elite who have gone
beyond it, are using as weapons
in their private war the poor whose
only complaint against bourgeois
society is that they have been left
out of it.
What attracts such intellectuals
as Oglesby and Gerassi to the
movement is not the prospect of
gains for the poor, but the prospect
of destroying the middle-class
world they hate and,deven more,
the exhilaration of the revolution-
ary process itself.
No one who has witnessed Mr.
Gerassi's poetic evocation of rev-
olutionary v i o 1 e n c e, guerrilla
struggle, and clashes with the
police could doubt this. The poor
and their needs are ofsecondary
importance; what is vital is the
shared danger, the virile intensity,
and the passionate commitment
that the banal, humdrum, routine,
petty middle-class life excludes.
It is all of a piece: the anti-in-
tellectualism that frankly disdains
theory lest it impede direct'and
violent action; the call for pan-
destruction of the entire "struc-
ture" now, with absolutely nothing
to say about how this might be
doen and only th evaguest musings
about some idyllic brotherhood
that. would blossom from the ruins.
AND HOW THE Oglesbys and
Gerassis of the past were shocked
when, having won power, they
discovered that the poor really
did, after all, only want all that
bourgeois nonsense, that the mass-
es had fought to win what the
leaders had joined the revolution
to oppose.
What did the maximalists of the
past do in this situation? Resign?
Hardly.,
They found ample justifications
for withholding middle-class ma-
terial benefits from the masses,
for guarding them against such
curruption, and for maintaining
as well the oppressive state-of-
seige conditions in which they
themselves rose to power.
If violent revolutions teach any-
thing it is that individuals who
thrive in such desperate situations
and who rise to leadership in them
do not change after victory: they
perpetuate their paranoiac world.
HAPPILY, THERE is little dan-
ger of this happening. There is no
force for the kind of revolution
against the "structure" that the
maximalists proclaim.
The poor white and the poor
black, even assuming their seduc-
tion by these romantic rebels, can-
not carry out a total revolution, if
by revolution one means the defeat
of the defending army, the seizure
of Washington and the control of
the other administrative, com-
munications and financial centers.
And if this is not the revolution
implied by all the talk about de-

part in the struggle for freedom
and justice in this country.
At several points in their talks,
both Oglesby and Gerassi spoke
about joining the revolutionary
struggle abroad, in Latin America
for example. One can argue this
way or the other about it, but, as
Castro has shown, it is reasonable.
The potential strength of the
opressed masses and the weak-
nesses of the State do provide
scope there for such extremists,
aparently willing to struggle to
the death for the overthrow of the
government and the raconstruction
of society.
BUT WHAT MAY be suitable
in Bolivia is irrelevant here. More
than irrelevant, this maximalism
is positively and seriously harm-
ful to the cause of social justice
in our country, for it threatens
to discourage and deflect the hope-
ful and constructive radicalism
that is working out an entirely dif-
ferent relationship to the poor and
new and promising solutions to
perennial issues of political ends
and means.
These are the hundreds of young
people engaged in one or more of
a variety of community projects

tradiction that spawns the extre-
mists lies also at the center of the
moderate movement. This is the
danger mentioned above. It is the
die-hard populist hope that the
poor do not want to be middle-
class. that the community work,
the "participatory democracy," is
indeed creating the model of a
new socialist man and society.
The Russian populist revolution-
ary Zheliabov asked one of his
socialist peasant followers what he
would do if he had 500 rubles.
'Well. I would open a saloon."
How will the young idealists
respond as they see this sort of
thingl emerging ever more clearly
amiong the poor as they move,
partly thanks to the activists, up
the ladder toward middle-class
life?
They might quit and, after a
time, take their place in the Es-
tablishment, perhaps as more com-
passionate members than their
parents as a result of their experi-
ence in the movement.
Or they might run off to join
the guerrillas in Latin America or
Southeast Asia.
Some, no doubt, wil be wooed
by the extremists and lose them-
selves in desperate little circles
obsessed with futile nihilist fan-
tasies.
rV7HERE is, however, another path
open to them, one that would
be by far the best for those they
wish to serve.
They could realize at last that
there are two revolutions, that
the revolution of the poor is still
what it was for many of the activ-
ists' parents or grandparents, a
struggle for good jobs, decent
wages, satisfactory schools, safe
neighborhoods and for the dignity
that all this bestows.
The yearning for a "meaningful"
and rich life that concentrates
on non-material concerns comes
later, after the people have gone
through the "bourgeois stage."
In short, if the activists seek
to solve part of their own per-
sonal existential problems by self-

0'
V

Revolution Number 1

they have received suggests that
there is widespread hope that, per-
haps, they do represent a van-
guard,albeit defective and unsure,
of unalienated man and the truly
free society.
It is time. Nature has long since
been conquered, and the industrial
economies have long since been
capable of fulfilling the dream of
material abundance.
It is a cruel and primitive ata-
vism to go on crippling human
minds and spirits by forcing them
into cramped and rigid molds, in-
sensitive to the fullness, richness
and diversity of life, and all for
some meaningless routine or ab-
surd product.
BUT IT IS doubtful that they
are succeeding. It seems that by
the time they are old enough and
educated enough to rise in out-

of the poor who crave the material
comforts, the security and the
approbation that the children of
affluence now disdain.
What have these two revolutions
to do with each other? What is
the common ground beneath those
demanding all the good things of
middle-class life and those who
bitterly attack everything about it?
The divergence in essential con-
cerns between these two revolu-
tions was glaringly evident dur-
ing this month's teach-in per-
formance in which Carl Oglesby,
John Gerassi and John Williams
played the leads. As always, Mr.
Oglesby was brilliantly eloquent in
his denunciation of the bourgeois
society, the "structure," the "wel-
fare-warfare" system,' and he
urged students to do what they
could to bring it down straight
away.

Revolution Number 2

Letters to the Editor

Academic?
To The Editor:
GEOLOGY Prof. Eschmann of
the Board of Governors of
Residence Halls, wrote yesterday
of the faculty need for "power to
make rules." This way they can
create an "academic atmosphere"
-the students can't, because they
don't know what it means to be
academic.
What is academic about the

standard residence hall? Does
Prof. Eschmann mean the faculty
should have the right to decide on
such "academic" matters as cur-
fews, signing in and out, fire
drills, quiet hours, open-opens and
when you can use the piano? The
"academic growth" appears to be
used here as some sort of ex-
cuse to hold onto rule making
powers. It is entirely unrelated
to the way of life in the standard
mammoth dormitory.

The dorm is a horribly imper-
sonal way to live, by its very na-
ture cutting the student off
from the "academic growth" Prof.
Eschmann insists is there. Stu-
dents, not faculty, need the powe
to make rules - because they are
the people who have to live there.
-Ellen Frank, '69
War Research
To The Editor:
,0F late there has been con-
siderable debate relating to the
conduct of classified research
programs at the University of
Michigan. This is a question de-
serving of the most searching and
reasoned discussion. I sincerely
regret, therefore, that during the
recnt visit of a most distinguish-
ed senior Naval Officer to this
campus; a group of students saw
fit to present their views on clas-
sified research by employing
boorish discourtesy as a substi-
tute for more enlightened and ob-
jective forms of discourse.
-Clinton W. Kelly, III
Pavlovian?
To the Editor:
CHARLES BUTLER (Letters.
Oct. 10) feels that the audi-

among the poor in an effort to
instruct and mobilize them into
pressure groups able to win im-
provements in housing, schools,
neighborhood maintenance, urban
renewal, employment opportunities
and the like.
Many of these selfless young
men and women are just as un-
compromising as the extremists
in their opposition to bureaucrat-
ized, materialistic, competative so-
ciety.
They, too, aim at renewing the
"structure," and they believe that
rather than adding new members
to the middle-class, they are build-
ing among the poor the cells of a
new society, one in which all those
involved in issues will participate
democratically in making and im-
plementng the relevant decisions.
Mutual aid and cooperation at
the grass roots, it is hoped, will
spread upwards, providing parallel
institutions that are in form and
content the exast opposite of the
impersonal organizations.
THIS MAY WELL BE a naively
apocalyptic vision and it holds real
dangers. But for these activists, in
sharp contrast to the romantic
maximalists at least, the means
and ends are the same.
Not onlyrare the poor and the
powerless improving their condi-
tions materially and spiritually
now, rather than in some future
utopia, but the goal of a humane
society based on cooperation and
love instead of conflict and vio-
lence is being pursued precisely by
means of cooperation and love.
In other words, there is no di-
alectic of violence here. The way
to the good society is by com-
parably good actions. Good is
born of good, not evil. Things are
not to get worse before they get
better. The way down is not the
way up.
BUT THE WORK is slow, tedi-

less service to the poor, they should
not expeet from the poor any such
noble sentiments. Such ideals as
participatory democracy reflect
the activists' needs and values,
not those of the poor.
I BELIEVE that the activists are
right in much that they say about
our society and about the trans-
formation of values that will occur.
But to avoid frustration and the
dangers such frustration holds for
themselves and their cause, they
should realize that this transfor-
mation is an epochal process.
Perhaps it will not take as long
to temper and finally throw off
the obsolete drives and attitudes
as it took our civilization to en-
gender and instill them, but it will
certainly be very long.
Meanwhile the activists should
keep the two revolutions they are
personally involved in separate:
the revolution of their own class
that liberates mankind from the
compulsions and rperessions that
went to make the industrial so-
ciety and the revolution of the
poor both in this country and in
the economically underdeveloped
regions of the world which leads,
whether the activists like it or not,
directly into the world of bourg-
eois achievement, competition and
materialism.
THIS IS THE history of Soviet
Russian society. It may be sad,
but we are witnessing in China
the far more depressing conse-
quences of efforts to impede or
obviate this evolution.
The activists could do no more
harm to the poor of the world
than to confuse these two stages,
for example the passivity of the
poor, their lack of ambition, and
their reluctance to compete,. to
strive and to achieve.
Such attributes in them are not
the result of higher insight but
of brutalization and despair.
The superificial similarity be-

Al

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