i'' IYYYYY I IIYM1I Y YID I -- PI I YMI Y IYI Y IYYYY 11n * I1er Sfrlhjan Dai Seventy-nine years of editorial freedom Edited and rnanaged by students of the University of Michigan Maynard St., Ann Arbor, Mich. 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 oil reprints. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Reactions to recruiter lock-ins and trashing )AY, FEBRUARY 22, 1970 NIGHT EDITOR: STEVE KOPPMAN Recruiting and the'U' HE RECENT confrontations over the issue of the right of various corpora- ris and government institutions to re- it students on campus demand that University re-examine its recruiting idies. . recruiting is literally an institution at St universities. Every year, thousands graduating students are recruited by resentatives of business and govern- :t who seek to hire these students for time careers. At this University, a 1-time placement service coordinates rui ing by arranging a time and a ce where students, can meet and be erviewed by these representatives on npus. V, r years, recruiting has been regarded a service which the University pro- es for its students - and for recruit- - a service. which students desire I which benefits all concerned. OWEVER, A number of people at the University - most notably SDS - ve challenged the right of certain or- lizations to recruit on campus. They ;ue that the University, through its tction of recruiting on campus, lends legitimacy to these corporations and blic institutions -- and consequently es at least tacit consent to their poli- s. ince many of the policies and prac-' es of certain corporations are morally )ugnant to SDS, its members feel com- led to not only protest but to prevent 'ir appearance on campus in any capa- y& which is directly associable with the kversity. - 'hus, in the case of General Electric, a rtificant number of people feel that ause GE is a major supplier of mater- 5 for the Vietnam War and because has sharply reactionary labor pol- s, it should not be permitted to recruit campus. RESPONSE to the lock-in, a large segment of the University community, luding President Fleming, object to S's actions on civil-libertarian grounds. :ming argues that while.SDS has the ht to protest GE's policies, they do not re the right to deprive any student of opportunity to meet with the GE ruiter. leming believes that no interest group campus has the right to force its *s on the rest of the University. In- ci this belief forms the basis of Flem- s moral objections to SDS's tactics. )f course the GE protesters were moti- ed by their own moral criteria. They intain that recruiting is not a right, rather a privilege - which does not I xessarily have to be extended to all side organizations. Furthermore, they L morally justified in depriving groups, people of their civil liberties w h e n - to so serves the greater interest of more ple, when taken outside of the Uni- sity context. 'inally, SDS asserts that when, as in case of GE, a corporation causes so ch harm and is so destructive, a per- would be morally guilty if he did not in some fashion -- try to destroy the lity of that corporation to function. QWEVER, AFTER last weel's con- frontation, it is clear that the recruit- issue is past the point of debate. Each lfrontaton further polarizes the cam- into two opposing and uncompromis- camps, and unless the issue is some- how resolved this campus will beso torn apart that the sense of a University community will be shattered and the via- bility of this instiution will cease. This week a Dow Chemical Co. recruit- er will be on campus. Presumably SDS will try to lock him in - thereby causing another confrontation. Moreover, GE and Dow are certainly not the only corpora- tions which SDS will condemn. A situation like this, in which police are constantly, being called on campus is intolerable. To exist from crisis to -crisis is not to exist at all. If the Univer- sity is to manage its own affairs without resorting to brute force, then a construe- tive alternative to the present recruiting policy must be formulated. WHAT THEN should be done? An ef- fecive solution which can be power- fully argued is to abolish all campus recruiting. The role of the University can easily be defined in a way which would exclude job recruiting as one of its obli- gations. It is not necessarily vital or ap- propriate that the University operate an employment agency for the benefit of some of its students. Recruiting could be carried on just as easily - and at no great expense - from a hotel suite. Recruiters would publically inform the campus of their arrival and students interested in aspecific organiza- tion could visit the recruiter at their con- venience. And, while certain corporations will still be just as morally repugnant to some individuals, the University's hand would be clean. Recruiting - and recruit- ing protests - would become a private affait, outside of the realm of the Univer- sity. If, on the other hand, there is wide- spread sentiment on campus to maintain recruiting as a University institution, then specific actions can be taken to in- sure that the University does not inad- vertantly participate in or passively con- done the policies of certain organizations which have been freely permitted to re- cruit on campus. AT PRESENT, SDS is attempting to as- sert its moral criteria as to who may recruit on campus. Whether these cri- teria are objectively valid and whether they are acceptable to the rest of the University remains to be seen. In any event, no one has the right to summarily reject S's position on recruiting as Pre- sident Fleming, and the University ad- ministration have so arrogantly done. Last Friday, the Student Relations Committee took the first positive action since Wednesday's confrontation in call- ing for a University-wide forum to dis- cuss on-campus job recruiting and to recommend possible alternatives to exist- ing University policies. The committee has urged an immediate suspension of re- cruiting and a one day moratorium on classes to permit widespread involvement and a proper atmosphere for these dis- cussions. The University should accept the com- mittees' proposals and subject any tenta- tive -policies which is formulated to a campus-wide referendum. Actions such as these would not only defuse potential confrontations over recruiting policies, but also insure that the administration will not forcefully assert the status-quo over the heads of the University Com- munity. -STUART GANNES Editorial Director To the Editor: I NOTED with interest y o ur lead editorial of Feb. 19, which I think was fairly representative of student opinion concerning t h e events of the past week, and in- deed, events of a political nature in general. It was confused. First, you mentioned the unbe- lievable injustice being perpetrat- ed by Judge Hoffman and the U.S. judicial system in the Chi- cage 8 affair, and I believe that you did a good job in evaluating this horrendous miscarriage of jus- tice. But then, out of nowhere, came a paragraph about the SDS lock-in and police repression in' Ann Arbor, which I suppose you must have felt was somehow re- lated to the events in Chicago. It is at this point that your xnes- sage became muddled. I see no correlation between these t w o subjects. I think it is clear that what took place in Chicago was a farce. The law was unfair, the judge was un- fair, the trial was unfair. It is frightening and protest is in or- der. But a demonstrator must real- ize that if he breaks the laws of the establishment during the course of a protest, the establish- ment will attempt to punish him. Now emphatically, I am not con- doning or condemning the estab- lishment in this case. I am merely stating a truth, something which must be accepted whether one is for the establishment or against it. So my point is, why is the fact that the police intervened to stop an unlawful lock-in of a recruiter so frighteningre I AM NOT MAKING any value judgment on the police activities. The fact that they have so much control over us may appear as being quite wrong and unfair to many. But frightening? Come on, now! What is scary is mobs of people roving the streets, many not knowing what they are there for, many there for the w ron g reasons, and many destroying pri- vate property. In this respect, the "hope of America" is just as guilty as Judge Hoffman. In summation, let me just say that what went on in Chicago was a matter of the establishment breaking its own laws, which is frightening. What went on in Ann Arbor was a matter of the people breaking the laws of the establishment, which is not fright- ening. As for what is to be done? Per-; haps what is needed is a little more objective thinking, unmarred by hate feelings for "the pigs" and other meaningless generalizations. -Steve Keller, '73 Feb. 20 Vandalism To the Editor: SDS's VANDALISM last night was in direct opposition to a vote that the marchers had taken be- fore they left the Diag. A near unanimous vote stipulated a non- violent march. Unfortunately, the SDS'ers had already stepped off after having attempted to shout down those who had tried to raise the issue and bring it to a vote. As far as I'm concerned, last night SDS reneged as a legitimate political organization by showing themselves to be nothing better than mindless vandals. When a group refuses to debate, much less vote upon, an important issue and then refuses to abide by a vote that was taken, there is no legiti- macy in their calling themselves Students for a Democratic So- ciety nor in their claiming to be waging the people's struggle. -David L. DeMarkey, 72E Feb. 19 Support Fleming To the Editor: PRESIDENT FLEMING is to be lauded for his quick action Wed- nesday, Feb. 18, in calling in the police to quell SDS oppression on campus. For much too long, our campus Che's have been allowed free reign to interfere with indi- vidual rights of students, faculty, and University guests such as re- cruiters. In protesting GE recruiting, these self-appointed world saviors succeeded in physically assaulting a professor, breaking a number of windows, fighting with some stu- dents, a n d denying freedom of movement to a number of mem- bers of the University community. One can only imagine the feel- ings of outrage they must have felt on discovering that President Fleming had had the effrontery to summon police. FOR MUCH TOO LONG, our local revolutionaries have been al- lowed to take great liberties with the rights' of others. It was about time that they were awakened to the harsh fact that they were no longer dealing with their permis- sive, Spockian, upper middle-class parents. No society can remain free and stable allowing self- righteous vigilantes carte blanche. We hope all future acts of SDS brutality and violence will be dealt with just as forthrightly. -Michael J. Modelski, Chmn., Young Americans for Freedom -Glenn Gilbert, Chmn., College Republicans Feb. 19 Trashing To the Editor: RETURNING FROM the firstr half of the Chicago 8 march, I am angry and sad. The trashing which accompanied the march has made it impossible for me to express my feelings about the conviction. By perverting this action, a minority of the marchers have dis- torted expression of any radical political attitude except their own. If demonstrations in support of ti -Daily-Richard Le+ the Chicago 8 (8-1+2+1-2) or any other radical cause are doom- ed to the accompaniment of trash- ing and undirected violence, then I and many others have been den- ied (by political manipulation) our, freedom of expression. To those who trashed tonight, I say, "The revolution against the pig mentality will not be w o n through imitation." Our "revolutionary vanguard" displays a politics and attitude of belligerence and destruction rath- er than love of the human values of revolution. -Terry Patten Feb. 18 Dr. Zhivago To the Editor: OF LATE it seems that some old feelings of horror are revived in me-the feelings I experienced while watching the Tsar's regi- ments storm, trample and murder the people in the streets in t h e film, Dr. Zhivego. -Phyllis McClure, '72 Feb. 18 Violence To the Editor:, WE, THE UNDERSIGNED, sup- port President Fleming in his stand against violence on the Uni- versity campus, and we also sup- port him in his stand against in- terference with therecruitment of students by the General Electric Corporation. We deplore violence on this campus, on the part of civil au- thorities and students alike. WE BELIEVE that it is the right of every student to. freely determine his own actions in pur- suit of his career anq his des- tiny, free from the influencedof pressure groups, whatever t he i r nature. --Thomas Kuznik -James Strichartz -Kenneth R. Bershad -Richard A. Booth and 16 other Resi- dential College Students Feb. 19 Achieving peace To the Editor: IT IS A SAD THING to hear people lie, distort, and caricature to win supporters for a political position. And it is irony - not justices -when the - slandered party is SDS. Many think that SDS's actions against the GE recruiters was im- moral because they denied certain freedoms to students who wanted to be interviewed. Those people forget that freedom and war con- not coexist. In time of war, nations on 1 y allow freedom to the warmakers - not to the peace-mongers and especially not to the foreign en- emy. Our government is concerned with protecting .GE's freedom to recruit, not the student's freedom to be recruited. Accordingly, blocking a recruiter is intended to hurt GE - not the student. T HE RIGHT TO LIVE is more fu damental than any other right. Given that. the recruiting of cor- porations like GE. advances the war effort and results in death and oppression, more people had more rights, and more fundament- al rights, abridged by GE's actions this morning than by the actions of SDS. If one believes this argu- ment and does not support SDS, he is a coward. The argument ought not to be taken lightly by those who truly oppose the war. As freedom can- not exist without peace, neither can war exist without hate a n d violence. The movement should notj seek to end the war so much as to end war. The latter goal, if it can be achieved at all, can only be achieved when people learn to disdain hate and violence. It cannot be achieved by trashing and rock-throwing and fighting a war of your own against the pigs. To win that war, one has to hate harder than they do - and if that happens, what will have been won? -Paul R. Milgrom '70 3 Feb. 18 Repression To the Editor: THE ONLY NAME I can think of for "locking up" a recruiter, and preventing other students f r o m talking to him, is repression. -M. K. Murray '68 Feb. 19 I Faculty views on SDS' tactics and civil-disobedience To the Editor:, (EDITOR'S NOTE: The following Is an open letter to President Flem- ing.) WHAT MOTIVATES faculty to defend SDS? A member of the Senate Assembly asked this ques- tion at a special Assembly meet- ing Wednesday night, referring to an earlier letter in The Daily sign- ed by some "radical" professors. Behind this question there is an- other, one which you raised at that same meeting: What right do these students have to break the law,nobstruct the rights of others, and in similar ways place their personal, moral judgment above laws and established proce- dures? These are not difficult questions to answer, although the conse- quences in action implied by the answer are exceedingly so. In form, the mass sit-in to block recruiting is old-fashioned civil disobedience. The Marcusean refinements do not make that much difference nor does the fact that what is at- tacked is not a law but a custom- ti ary process. All those who oppose such obstruction could list many situations which, in their mind, would justify setting conscience above law or established procedure, even though that would require (as it usually does) interference with the right of those who bene- fit from and favor the laws or customs under attack. # What is so bizarre and virtually incomprehensible to them is the, specific targets of these attacks. One might easily enough under- stand and approve of civil disobe- dience against racist laws and. condone the illegal, sit-down strikes of earlier times, but why these kind of actions against Dow Chemical, General Electric, and the ROTC? THE QUESTION, I think, sug- gests the answer. Each age defines its own outrage and obligation. The actions of the U.S. armed forces in Vietnam, Latin America and elsewhere in the world, the impact of the military establish- ment on American life, and the involvement of the great corpora- tions in these and other evils of our society are for today's students as outrageous and intolerable as racist, religious, and political in- Justice are for the more familiar civil libertarians. Many of the old battles are, sadly, still with us, and the time may not be far off when liberals face again the choice between conscience and law. Shall we deny to our young the same choice in pursuit of what are for them the ultimate concerns? Each generation has its own characteristic moral task. What else is significant progress? Cer- tainly not better toasters and fast- er jets! And the choice between, conscience and law imposes on every generation the same an- guished dilemma. Outrage is bal- ance by multiple fears-the fear of social exclusion, the fear of pain- ful reprisals, the fear of weakening the laws which might one day be needed for one's own defense, the fear of galvanizing rightist senti- ments. But there comes that point when outrage surpasses fear. It has done so for the student mili- tants, and civil disobedience is the consequence) It is now beginning to do so for many of the faculty, at least to the point of allowing them to bear the opprobrium of friends and colleagues, to accept 'frankly the "radical' label (which, for many is no small thing), and to agree to meet, plan, and act. AT UNIVERSITIES such as ours it is always unreasonable and sometimes dishonest to claim neu- trality, to argue that our campus must not get involved in such things, that it must not be a polit- ical arena. The extent of Univer- sity investments in war-affiliated enterprises, the character of much of its research and training, and the multiple associations it has with governmental, economic and military agencies have long since undermined the legitimacy of any c YC , s.gtiy ~m 4'Rt nr~nta, r mw.,4',,- sncy and the familiar and career dependencies that await them afterwards. They have in this brief period capacities for freedom and enthusiasm that, for the most part, they will never have again. Our traditional educational sys- tem quite ruthlessly crushes this freedom and enthusiasm. Rather than nurture free and self-confi- dent citizens, we manufacture do- cile functionaries. Is there any wonder that our democracy died long ago, that our population has rejected the continual political advocation that any, authentic democracy requires of its citizens? To revive our democracy, if it is not already too late, we must do all in our power to promote among our youth self-confident activism, a sense of moral purpose, and a concern for theI quality of 'being. Towards theseends we must do now what has to be done to re- structure the government of the University, the character of its in- struction, and its relationships with the neighboring community, and the larger society. SUCH ARE THE goals that motivate at least this one "rad- ical" professor. In all this I share the revulsion felt against the kind of personal assault that Prof. John Young suffered, and in this open letter to you 'I urge SDS and other militant student groups to d- nounce publicly such acts. Neither personal assault nor, for that mat- ter, property destruction has any place in the }kind of civil disobe-# dience I have been writing about here. While sharing the sentiments. that lead to these acts of civil dis- obedience on this new level of moral engagement (where the wrongs done by our military and our corporations are as intolerable as those committted by racist and political despots), I would un- hesitatingly oppose any group for which physical violence was a n'hraeterkt nnlc4liev nr . le.'F'or University to lead to anything even remotely- similar to Hayakawan repression. In closing, therefore, I urge you to endorse, both as President of the University and as an individ- ual the recommendations sent to you by various groups calling for a University-wide forum to discuss all aspects f on-campus recruit- ing and of the University's rela- tions with the military and with war-affiliated corporations. -Arthur Mendel Prof. History Radical College Member Feb. 19' Shocoed To the Editor: , THE DAILY OF FEB. 17 con- tained a letter expressing concern over the possibility of "expulsion from the University of SDS," among other matters, and signed by a number of faculty, staff, and students. In the letter one finds the sen- tence, "Regardless of the particu- lars of the case, we consider any move against SDS as itself a po- litically repressive act, incompat- ible with basic values on which the University should stand." I was shocked to see such a state- ment signed by men who, by ev- ery other indication, are responsi- ble scholars. When men who are profession- ally dedicated to the use of reason avowedly ignore the facts of the matter in deciding questions of pdlicy, one wonders about the fu- ture of democracy. Surely to make the judgment quoted. above, "re- gardless of the particulars of the case," is no more justifiable, or worthy of rational men, than it would be to decide that the Dow Chemical Company has every right to recruit employees on the University campus, without look- ing into such relevant facts as the role of that company and other ftMCAF"WK.t PIALPA{~ ASK NOEVF(: qM E MME.. ,I LZ)4A 20? DIAITEFAVO.t 4). I ASK7]11 1 r'5cesort £OVC M6. SAY7 'fe RMY~ CCIW7 HTO A HER D ME0 t'JE FAVOR, tlU (5 MY AIJSLeR- 13USY IWJG SR~C AS5K lK /OMH6 : FNOV~~Q Pi NCR FAU)LT WHAT .. WH~fAT To HE b INtCY AJW~ t