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RIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1970 NIGHT EDITOR: JIM BEATTIE
Faculty promotions:
Revolt in the ranks
FOR AS LONG as anyone can remember
students have been excluded f r o m
faculty promotions procedures through-
out the University. While a small group of
professors has met behind closed doors,
students have been compelled to wait
outside until the faculty has made a final
decision before learning the outcome.
Normally, students' opinions are either
not obtained or are ignored when pro-
motions are made.
Last December the school's executive
'committee established criteria for faculty
promotions. They are teaching effective-
ness, research and scholarly writing, pub-
lic service, and service to the education
school and the University.
When specific promotions were made
last week, a group of education s e h o o 1
students charged the committee had ig-
nored its own criteria and demanded both
an external review of the promotions and
that the names of those recommended for
promotion not be sent to the administra-
tion until after the review is completed.
PROFESSORS SUCH as Byron G. Mas-
sialas and Donald Barr, who haRve
received strong student support, were
denied promotions by the executive com-
mittee.
Of the nine faculty members the group
promoted, seven came from the curricu-
lum and instrpction department.
Today behavioral sciences department
chairman Loren Barritt and the members
of the department's committee will at-
tend a special neeting of the executive
committee to learn why their nominees
were not promoted.
A NY OF THE faculty members rejected
for promotion who wish to appeal
the executive committee's decision must
act quickly and with limited knowledge
of why they wererejected.
Anothe
for aborti4
THE MICHIGAN Legislature is taking
up the abortion issue, hopefully in-
tent 'on giving pregnant women the de-
cision as to whether or not they shall bear
children.
There was a time when the bearing of
children was so important to sparsely
populated areas that whether they were
born was a matter of great social concern.
As a result, some of Michigan's laws
against abortion date back to the middle
1 11f the last century.
Our problem is now overpopulation
rather than too few youngsters. Socially,
only a part of the overall problem is that
of unwanted babies, many of them born
to unwed mothers. The entire ecology is
involved, from malnutrition to pollution
control. The more people, the more pol-
lution, desite strenuous pollution control
measures.
E RECOGNIZE that abortion is a real
concern to people with religious ob-,
jections. The bills which the Legislature
is considering, however, do not infringe
on the rights of these people to govern;
themselves according to their consci-
ences. But they would allow others who
do not share their views to make their
own decisions.
Tough as they are, the laws on abortion
A candidate has no opportunity to de-
fend himself against charges that are
brought against him before the decisions
are made. Instead he must patiently wait
until the committee makes its recom-
mendations.
Theihe may appeal to a SACUA griev-.
ance committee. Established recently, this
group has never been used. In addition,
there is a time limitation. The executive
committee was supposed to turn in its
promotions recommendations to the cen-
tral administration Feb. 15. The deadline
has now been extended to March 1. This
leaves almost 'no time for an appeal to
the SACUA committee.
Faculty members denied promotions
must take the initiative both to find out
reasons for the executive committee's de-
cision and to challenge this judgment.
THE OBVIOUS danger of this situation
is that faculty members may become
discouraged and move to other univer-
sities. Already rumors are circulating in
the education school that several profes-
sors denied promotion have begun search-
ing for jobs at other universities.
Next week for example, three national
educational conventions will be held.
There has been a recent spurt of interest
in them among non-promoted faculty.
IT IS IMPERATIVE that the eecutive
committee move today to regain the
confidence of both students and faculty.
This can only be done by supporting
an outside review of all of this year's
promotions decisions. While this review
continues, the committee must send no
recommendations to the central admin-
istration.
-PAT MAHONEY
r voice
an reform
have been little deterrent to desperate
women. The head of Planned Parenthood,
Dr. Alan Guttmacher, estimates there are
somewhere between 200,000 and one mil-
lion illegal abortions performed annually.
What is a simple operation under proper
circumstances is dangerous on the kitch-
en table. The death rate is about 100
women per 100,000 illegal abortions, Dr.
Guttmacher says.
ABOUT 300,000 illegitimate children are
born yearly in the United States. At
least one of six brides is pregnant when
married. About 750,000 children are born
each year who are unwanted and will be
"unloved, neglected and abandoned."
The chances of these unwanted child-
ren growing up to be useful citizens are
small. Many will be supported on relief
of one kind or another, receive minimal
education, never know a warm home life
and will be bitter, resentful adults.
THE NECESSITY to remedy this situa-
tion is working strongly in many
states. Hawaii is the most recent to pass
an act giving women the right to decide
what they shall do with their own bodies.
It is time for Michigan to do the same.
-DETROIT FREE PRESS
Feb. 26
By BRUCE LEVINE
(First of two parts)
LONDON
It is the purpose of the British Labour
Party "to secure for the workers by
hand or by brain the full fruits of
their industry and the most equit-
able distribution thereof that may be
possible, upon the basis of the com-
mon ownership of the means of pro-
duction, distribution, and exchange
and the best obtainable system of
popular administration and control
of each industry and service."
Clause Four,
BLP Constitution
AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL teachers
tell their students that Great Britain
is a socialist society. Evidence? First, a
party committed in its constitution to
socialism has run the government on and
off for the last fifty years. Second,
the state in fact controls some sectors of
British industry (notably coal, utilities,
and steel).
For high school teachers, even more im-
portant than the fact of British social-
ism is the fact that it had arrived clean
of the original Marxist sin - i.e., its
birth was parliamentary, not revolution-
ary. No strikes, no barricades, no strug-
gles of any kind were involved. Just a
slow, plodding, ever-accumulating process
of piecemeal reform. (This is the way it
'sposed to be done, we learn.)
In answer to British revolutionaries
(who have argued that both the structure
of the capitalist state and the tremendous
non-electorial power of the capitalist class
made parliamentary, evolutionary social-
xism an impossibility), Labour leaders have
explained their fundamental philosophy.
Ramsay MacDonald put it clearly some
sixty-five years ago:
. . . THE MODERN STATE in most
civilized communities is democratic, and
in spite of remaining anomalies and im-
perfections, if the mass of the ordinary
people are agreed upon any policy, neith-
er electors, privileged peers, nor reign-
ing houses could stand in their way."
On this faith the BLP has staked its
political fortunes. Between MacDonald's
declaration and the present day, Labour
has had four turns at the wheel.
In 1915 the BLP joined as a junior
partner in Asquith's war-time coalition
government. This participation was bought
at a high price - the promise by Labour
leaders that they would enforce a truce
in the factories, a moratorium on strike
activity.
Almost immediately, however, the in-
dustrial truce began to collapse. A wave
of unofficial strikes swept Britain, event-
ually spawning a national organization of
rank-and-file militants, the Shop Stewards
and Workers Committee Movement.
LABOUR "SHARED" in government
power at the sufferance of the dominant
Conservative Party. Their Tory benefac-
tors shrewdly reasoned that as a junior
partner, Labour would have little power
over policy formulation but full respon-
sibility both for the policies and their ex-
ecution.
With the war's end, and the end of the
Tories' need for war-time "national unity",
(and the clear inability of the Labour
leadership to make good on its no-strike
pledge), the Conservative Party tossed
Labour aside like a worn-out rag.
To pave the way for a comeback, the
BLP resolved to become even more respon-
sibly moderate in Tory eyes than ever
before. Beatrice Webb set the tone for the
period as she "groomed" the wives of
Labour MPs on how to hold their own
in polite society.
More prosaically, Beatrice's husband
emphasized the need for respectability
at the BLP's 1923' Party Conference:
Even when it assumed total govern-
ment control, he intoned, Labour would
naturally not wish "to do everything at
once . . . once we face the necessity of
putting our principles first into bills to
be fought through Committee, clause by
clause; and then into the appropriate ad-
ministrative machinery for carrying them
into execution ... the inevitability of grad-
ualness cannot fail to be appreciated."
THE PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS of
such an outlook was not lost on the
bourgeois politicians, Liberal or Conserva-
tive. If Labour saw its road to power pav-
ed with compromise and conciliation, cap-
italists had little to fear.
Through their control over the econ-
omy, they would set the limits on what
any Government could hope to do. Any
clash between legislation and economy
would bring on a class war anathema to
Labour. And as long as Labour would
back off from such a showdown, it would
have to bank on its enemies' goodwill for
whatever power it would achieve.
Yes, the capitalists understood all this.
Neville Chamberlain ,wrote that Labour
in office "would be too weak to do much
harm, but not too weak to get discredited."
And Asquith: "Whoever may be for the
time being the incumbents of office, it
is we, if we understand our business,
who really control the situation . . . if
a Labour Government is ever to be tried
in this country, as it will be sooner or
later, it could hardly be tried under safer
conditions."
Th 1923 election gave no party a parlia-
mentary majority. Neither the Liberals
nor the Conservativeswished to form a
minority cabinet; Labor jumped at the
chance.
AS IS TRADITIONAL, the King then
called MacDonald (head of the BLP)
into chambers and formally requested him
to form a government. In the course of
that interview, the King referred to "the
unfortunate incident at the recent meet-
ing at the Albert Hall, presided over by
Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, at which the
'Marseillaise' and the 'Red Flag' were
sung."
MacDonald replied. He "spoke v e r y
openly and said he was sure the King
would be generous to him and understand
the very difficult position he was in
vis-a-vis his own extremists; and he could
assure His Majesty that, had he attempt-
ed to prevent the 'Red Flag' being sung
on that occasion, a riot would inevitably
have ensued. Moreover, there was a very
serious possibility on Monday night of
ahe 'Red Flag' being sung in the House
of Commons and it had required all his
influence and that of his moderate and
immediate friends to prevent this tak-
ing place; they had got into the way of
singing this song and it will be by de-
grees that he hopes to break down this
habit."
IN 1923-24, IN THE FACE of mass un-
employment and mass deprivation, Brit-
ain's first "socialist" government intro-
duced such staggering innovations as a
barely perceptible increase in municipal
housing, unemployment compensation,
roadbuilding, and some, liberalization of
old-age pensions.
Having achieved its status through pro-
clamations of timidity, the minority La-
bour government discovered (surprise!)
that it could pass only timid measures.
At the, same time Labour made clear
who was to finance even such Liliputian
measures when it abolished the special
tax on corporate profits.
It is understandable, therefore, why the
Minister (Snowden) who introduced Brit-
ain's first Labour budget met with so uni-
formly warm a reception in Commons. De-
claring that his budget was "vindictive
against no class and no interest," Snowden
later expanded on the secret of the bud-
get's success: "It relieves the feelings of,
the rich, who had feared that there might
be drastic impositions upon their class."
Labour's dogged campaign to prove it-
self fit to govern did not limit itself to
sins of inaction. On safe issues, Labour
Ministers showed remarkable vigor.
HEADING THE LIST of such safe is-,
sues were strikes affecting "essential
services." Previous Liberal and Tory re-
gimes had predictably come down hard
on workers' use of the strike weapon
to improve their condition. What these
workers found somewhat disconcerting was
that the Labour government had the same
attitude..
The new government in fact was mak-
ing it as clear as possible that it would
not hesitate one minute to bring in troops
to break such a strike. One Labour lead-
e' told Sidney Webb that working-class
militancy in Great Britain during La-
bour's tenure "reminds him . . . of what
was happening in Russia in 1917 against
the Kerensky Government."
Proud of the calm acceptance of a
Labour government by industrialists and
political opponents, Labour Ministers re-
solved to pursue unswervingly the course
which had made this acceptance possible.
In one area after another, Labour-in-Of-
fice ignored the very changes which had
been demanded by Labour-in-Opposition :
on militarism, colofialism, and G r e a t
Power diplomacy.
* NONE OF THIS WAS ENOUGH, how-
ever, to win for Labour a solid majority
in the election of December 1924. They
had groveled until their knees were raw,
but the British conservatives still knew
that their best bet remained the Tories.
In addition, of course, Labour's need to
engage in working-class-oriented rhetoric
to maintain their primary electoral con-
stituency sometimes "unfairly" made them
appear more adventurous than their per-
formance record indicated. This, too, lost
them wavering voters.
Seeing the problem, Labour leaders at-
tacked it at its roots. In the next few
years, declarations of Labour's goals grew
milder and milder. By 1928, only coal,
land, communications and life insurance
were to be nationalized - and these
"without haste." The great bulk of the
economy was practically ignored.
AS FOR BANKING, the next Labour
government would institute "such chang-
es in banking and financial systems as
will secure that the available supply of
credits and savings shall be used for enter-
prises of national advantage as distinct
from those that are useless or socially
injurious."
(Sounds serious . . . what will the bank-
ers and their friends in business think? Be
calm, Labour whispered, and read on.)
Concretely, Labour will hold "an in-
quiry into the best method of achieving
this purpose."
On the other hand, Labour did promise
to its working-class voters that if elected
as a majority government, it would enact
a number of attractive measures which
its minority status had prevented prev-
iously. So Labour offered something to
everyone.
IN 1929, its majority aspirations not-
withstanding, the BLP was back as a mi-
nority cabinet. Politically, its performance
was an encore. Resolutely fighting the at-
tempts by its own left wing to pull it into
radical transformation of society, the La-
bour leadership pointed to the palpable
necessity of winning non-Labour support in
Commons for whatever it wished to see
implemented.
Labour, furthermore, had opted for gov-
ernment in the middle of the depression.
There were two million unemployed in
mid-1930. A year later, three million. And
Labour did just about nothing to al-
leviate the condition.
It couldn't. Those with whom they were
pledged to "cooperate" refused to sup-
port to any! "social tinkering." So, instead
of attempting a solution.at the expense
of its "allies" Labour attempted a re-
actionary solution.
It sought to demonstrate to British
and foreign capital that Great Britain
was a sound place for investment. The
best way to do that, the BLP decided, was
to cut back on welfare, balance the bud-
get, and a general retrenchment. T h e
epitome of this approach was the "Anomal-
ies" Bill.
THE BILL WAS DESIGNED to tight-
en the terms of unemployment insur-
ance - and the bill's wording directed the
brunt against those most vulnerable: un-
employed married women.
The attitude of the British capitalists
and their political allies? Succinct. Said
one: ". . , in view of the fact that the
necessary economies would prove most
unpalatable to the working classes, it
would be to the general interest if they
could be imposed by a Labour Govern-
ment."
IN 1931, ITS JOB DONE, the Labour
government fell. The BLP would not, as a
party, control the government again until
1945.
(TOMORROW: The Age of Austerity
and Harold Wilson)
t
Ari
I.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
To the Editor:
I FOUND Andrew Hoffman's
editorial on the Radical College
so timely that I must 'reply and
add to it. If the Radical College
is to be an effective organization
-as I believe it can be-then
clearly the problem of student
and/or faculty membership is, as
Hoffman points out, a crucial is-
sue. The exclusion of students
College:- Assets and- liab~lities.
from this coalition would be as
grievous an error as would be their
inclusion on those occasions when
the faculty feels compelled to
exercise its leverage and legiti-
macy to mediate possible conflicts,
or to implement needed reforms.
The object of the exercise is not
to engage in hit-and-run attacks
on a kaleidoscopic array of issues,
merely to call attention to the fact
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that changes are needed-but to
follow through, and make the dif-
ference that will bring these
changes about. Disruptions and
trashings do no more in identify-
ing a radical, than working within
the system does in identifying a
reactionary. Both may use iden-
tical means to achieve diametric-
ally opposed ends. Many of our
present views and existing insti-
tutions do need to be altered or
replaced, and the senseless costs
of undue haste and untoward de-
lay are both high.
THE ACTIVISTS and militants
should be recognized for their
gad-fly role in having raised a
number of festering issues which
would otherwise have remained
hidden and dormant. A society
which does not continuously re-
examine its structures and goals,
eventually atrophies and dies.
However, a society which suc-
cumbs to a nihilistic onslaught,
has been found wanting in its
justification for existence. For the
nihilist admits no assumptions as
self-evident, no presuppositions as
sacrosanct; every fiber in society's
fabric becomes the legitimate ob-
ject of devastating inquiry. The
impact and persistence of recent
acts of violence and disruption are
not as indicative of their perpe-
*,n.nrc." ttf' e tra sfh acth' + 1,a r ovA.
most 'appropriate response to
sudceeded in insulating them-
selves against the very acknowl-
edgement of the profound prob-
lems which are symptomatized by
violence, militancy, and repression.
WHATEVER THE outcome and
consequences of the students' and
the administration's actions, these
spectators bear the full brunt of
their share of the responsibility
for that outcome-either by de-
fault, or by commitment. The lux-
ury of apathy and inertia can no
longer be indulged in-for the fac-
ulty's pronouncements 'have ac-
quired an inescapable eloquence.
It is now up to the faculty to
choose its mode of expression-it
must choose between continued
silence or open participation.
There are no other alternatives.
It is in response to these issues
that the Radical College was
formed. This unique student-fac-
ulty forum clearly fills a need; it
must now set itself the task of
enhancing its assets and shedding
its liabilities (which may well in-
clude the very name itself). To-
ward this end the faculty of the
Radical College, and all other in-
terested faculty, plan to meet (on
Sunday, March 1 at 8:00 p.m. in
the East Quad Assembly Room)
to discuss the formation of a fac-
University affairs from which it
has hitherto been excluded, and
which are of vital concern to the
community of scholars that it
represents, and the society in
which it lives.
-to initiate, rather than mere-
ly respond with, viable alternatives
to many of the problems that
plague this, as well as other uni-
versities.
-to develop a capability to
make rapid responses and/or take
imediate action to assuage the
conflicts that are certain to take
place in the months ahead.
THE NEED and opportunity for
the 'exercise of reason appear to
have converged. We would be re-
miss in our obligation if we ig-
nored such a moment.
-Sylvan Kornblum
Feb. 26
Well done
To the Editor:
I WAS AT the UGLI Thursday
night while the Black Student
Union was playing havoc with the
Dewey Decimals. It was a bril-
liantly conceived action for two
reasons. First, it was directly re-
lated to its political objective.
Since the University refused to
serve the needs of black people
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