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Seventy-nine years of editorial freedom
Edited and managed by students of the University of Michigan
the unreformed source
Notes on a southern journey: Part II
by jim nenbacher
420 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 all reprints.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 1970
NIGHT EDITOR: ROBERT KRAFTOWITZ
The Huber Report:
Much ado about nothing
THE REPORT of the Special State Sen-
ate Committee on Campus Disorder
is no cause for unbounded joy. The re-
port - really no more than a handbook
for administrators on how to undercut
student unrest - solves no problems and
supplies very few answers.
The report was prepared by a second-
rate academic consulting firm, Higher
Education Executive Associates, and it
does have one virtue. It did moderate the
views of the arch-conservative state sen-
wator from Troy, Robert Huber, a man
whose first faith was in the existence of
a conspiracy of outside agitators as the
root cause of all the problems of Mich-
igan's campuses.
UNFORTUNATELY, that it convinced
Huber is more a measure of the sena-
tor's own dull intelligence than the re-
port's strength, for in fact the report is
a shoddy, sloppy academic fraud. It is
a bad attempt to sell the State Senate
and the public a small amount of decent
reporting in lieu of $50,000 worth of aca-
demic study.
"RUT UNCONVINCING Huber is only half
the problem.
That the report is so bad is unbear-
able. It is an unseemly combination of
half-nonsense charts, silly conclusions
that only loosely derive from the charts'
data and recommendations that weret
more the work of the researchers' imagi-
nation than any careful thought.
One illustration should suffice to show
how untenable the entire report is. Part
One of the report, the major part, has
three sections--analysis of questionaire
data, analysis of on-campus interviews,
and recommendations to the Legislature
and the academic community.
The second section, the on-campus in-
terviews, describes at great length the
underlying causes of student unrest-
black student complaints, dorm regula-
tions, bad food, bad teaching and all the
other usual campus issues - and says
these are the real causes of student pro-
test, even if students don't protest about
them.
And yet the first section of the report
had gone to great lengths to pinpoint the
top ten student protest issues, seven of
which were on-campus issues. But after
so ascertaining, the researchers plunge
into the second section and call them all
"underlying issues."
IS THIS type of logical confusion that
pervades the entire report. It is man-
ifest every step of the way, from the
confused use of "sociological" data to the
generally-innocuous - recommendations,
which one University researcher accur-
ately pegged "accepted academic f o 1 k-
lore."
What is most troubling is not the fact
that the state paid $50,000 for such un-
mitigated nonsense, although that f a c t
certainly isn't a source of uncontrolled
pleasure. What is so contemptible is the
attempt to fool the public and the press
with what appears to be "social science."
The people who parpared the report said
they wanted to balance social science and
informal reporting, which is a plausible
goal. But the balance they struck is dub-
ious.
A "balance" should convince the social
scientist that a solid, academic base rests
under the report while being readable to
the non-expert public.
But every expert who has read the re-
port or been checked with for specifics
has concluded that the report is a sham
--"ghastly," "atrocious," "shoddy," "slop-
py" are the words they've used. W h e n
they haven't been so critical, it's been
because of the mild, liberal tone rather
than the strength of the report.
ON THE OTHER HAND, the reaction of
the press, the agent of the public in
this case, has generally been one of re-
spectful silence on the competence of
the report. One Detroit paper called ti
"well-documented", and other state pap-
ers were quietly, uncritically respectful.
This was due, it seems, to the "social
scientific" nature of the report, which the
amateurs chose not to challenge.
The "balance," then, accomplishes just
the reverse of what is should. Rather than
please both expert and non-expert, it does
the opposite, leaving the expert uncon-
vinced and the non-expert confused. That
there hasn't been more complaint is im-
possible to explain.
A few people have commented that this
report, in its mildness, deserves to be
left alone because of the beneficial effect
it may have on the University. Perhaps,
but to do so would involve allowing some
small-time academic frauds to get away
with deceiving the public and the gov-
ernment, a most unpleasant prospect.
WE PROBLEM BECOMES, for those
who might agree with the report but
are wary of its methods, whether to em-
brace the weak defenses it gives the
state's universities and colleges. To accept
such a report as this implicitly cuts one
off from more credible later research on
the same topic., It is a risky game to play.
-RON LANDSMAN
Managing Editor, 1969-70
Second of Two Parts
AFTER SPENDING three days at Tuske-
gee, I hitchhiked to Atlanta with the
lovely young woman I had gone down to
see. With her along, the rides were easier
to get.
From just outside Tuskegee all the way
to downtown Atlanta, we rode in the front
of a Chevy Pickup with a 30-year-old man
going in for a weekend in the Air Force
Reserve. He lived in Selma, and went to
school at Auburn University, an all white,
conservative state supported school in
Alabama. He talked about his flying, and
the countries he had visited-including
Vietnam.
Over lunch at a modest barbeque restaur-
ant in Georgia, he talked about Laos.
"Every month when I go in, they have to
give us a briefing before we go up. I navi-
gate big troop and supply transports, you
know, and they tell us about Vietnam and
Laos. They're supposed to be secret brief-
ings, but let me tell you this, they pull out
maps of Laos and if there was a red "X"
on the map for every bomb we've dropped
there, you couldn't see the country."
TALKING ABOUT LAOS, the controver-
sy developed while I was travelling. For
someone who lives day to day with the
news, being out of touch for a week is a
straige feeling. I resisted the urge to buy
newspapers, or, when I did, simply glanced
at the headlines instead of reading the
stories in depth.
The Laotian controversy, seen from the
headline point of view, went something like
this: Wednesday, senators call for honest
truth from the White House, which, in
turns, denies that there is anything in Laos
to discuss; Thursday, Nixon calls for help
and cooperation from the Soviets in main-
taining the neutrality of Laos; Friday, the
state department announces that casualties
in the non-existant Laotian War will be
announced separately from the Vietnam
casualties; Saturday, a chilling radio an-
nouncement says that "Enemy troops in
Laos have killed 27 Americans so far." Now
they're the enemy.
ATLANTA IS A NICE TOWN. Downtown
Atlanta has some of the finest modern
architecture in the United States, including
a hotel that looks like it came out of "2001:
A Space Odyssey." We went to the top of
everything, all the beautiful skyscrapers.
We looked down (from a 22-storey re-
volving restaurant) upon a modern baseball
stadium, an efficient bus line and ex-
pressway system, and a well styled "Cul-
tural Center."
But within the limits of the same city,
there are unpaved streets and poor sewers,
shacks and blight. The skyscrapers belong
to the bankers, the life insurance com-
panies, and the hotel chains. The unpaved
streets go to the black poor.
GO WALKING IN downtown Atlanta.
There is a de facto segregation that is
frighteningly efficient. Simply cross a
street and the faces are all black where
they were once all white. The shops are
Kresge chains and shabby stores where
they were previously boutiques and men's
shops' with fashionable clothing.
And while Atlanta is a "liberal" town
in comparison with the rest of the South
(for example, they recently, voluntarily
reassigned many of the city's teachers in
order to provide more racial balance) it is
still far from being a just and fair place
to live.
A black cab driver who was asked to
drive us to Atlanta University felt obliged
to ask "That's the colored university. You
sure you want to go to the colored uni-
versity?"
BACK TO TUSKEGEE, on a Sunday
evening. It is soft and warm, and smells
like Ann Arbor in May. It's hard to believe
that it's the first week in March. The stu-
dents are relaxed. They're getting out of
there soon, out of the South. I thought
back to a meeting the week before. Repre-
sentatives from federal, private, and local
community programs came to talk, to en-
list volunteer help from the students ;-
providing food, clothing, education and
pride to some of Macon County's many
poor. There was little interest.
After the meeting, however, the students
got somewhat execited about the prospect
of marching into town and offing the
statue of a confederate soldier in the square
in front of the county courthouse. Of
course, you don't need a lot of time to de-
face a symbol, and don't have to stay
around to follow up your actions. It doesn't
take any commitment to anything. Reg-
istering voters and educating them does,
however.
I LEFT AND HEADED HOME. I passed
a farmer plowing under his cotton field
with a plowshare drawn by a horse. Past
the fruitstands in Montgomery and the
rebel flags on the staffs in front of the
small town courthouse, up through the
ridgehills of Tennessee to Nashville.
In Nashville, I got a ride with Charlie,
an ex-Marine with a wooden right shin
and foot to replace the one he donated to
Uncle Sam. Charlie had a strange mixture
of politics, and we talked all the way to
Indianapolis, his home.
He was a former McCarthy staff man
in the Indiana primary, but wasn't entirely
against the Vietnam war. He was a com-
munity organizer on the South Side of
Indianapolis and worker for block power
tenants rights, and popular control over
building and remodeling programs. But he
was suspicious of the civil rights movement
and claimed that Martin Luther King was
a disgrace to the Nobel Peace Prize because
all he did was "stir up the niggers."
HE SAID HE "KNEW" from personal
experience that the blacks in the South
were satisfied, and didn't want to make
trouble. Just as surely, he knew that the
commies were responsible for the discon-
tent surfacing on the nation's campuses.
Most of the students are satisfied and
don't want to make trouble.
He asked what good it was to make
trouble on campus, when the end result
would be students getting thrown out of
school. "What if they wanted to suspend
one of your friends for trying to make a
radical speech?" he asked. "Then he's lost
his chance for an education and you
haven't accomplished anything."
I told him we wouldn't let that happen.
They couldn't suspend students like that.
He laughed, and said I was a foolish young
dreamer.
WHEN IT SNOWED three inches in one
hour in Ft. Wayne, Ind., I knew I was al-
most home. The smell of magnolias and
the blue sky was just a memory. Ann
Arbor was close, just around a corner and
down a ramp, at the end of the flashing
white line.
I walked back in, out of touch. "PAR-
SONS SUSPENDED" was the news. I re-
menibered Charlie, and two days later, I
smiled inside when Parsons was reinstated.
People are together in Ann Arbor. There
are faults, but there is a dialogue. People
are attacking things, and thinking, and
living instead of just existing. For all its
problems, life in Ann Arbor is pretty spe-
cial. It's another world out there with a
long way to go to catch up to this one.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
For an end to t he draft: Join us!
To the Editor:
THE PARAGRAPHS Bill Lave-
ly uses to explain why the anti-
war movement seeks to end the
draft make a lot more sense than
the rest of his March 3rd editor-
ial, which urges opposition to a
volunteer army.
Lavely claims that the end of
the draft would create an author-
itarian, militarist nightmare ar-
my. Impossible, B ill. We've al-
ready got onet.Billsays, "T h e
draftee keeps the Army healthy
with his basic revulsion against
the military authoritarianism."
Just such revolted GI's - anti-
war organizers and others we've
known - haven't noticed that the
Army is particularly "healthy." In
fact, they will tell you, the main
function of basic training is to
crush the healthy "revulsion" out
of a man. Physically and emo-
tionally exhausted, mind numbed
by stress to obedience, the veteran
of basic training is ready to be
used as the weapon of war.
The g e n o c i d a l destruction
wreaked upon Vietnam should
amply demonstrate that the brass'
attitude toward human life pre-
vails totally over the draftee's.
WE DON'T DENY the impact
the GI antiwar movement is hav-
ing on this whole process. But a
volunteer army wouldn't stop that
movement, both because opposi-
tion to the war is distributed gen-
erally throughout our society and
because opposition to the war in-
creases greatly with closeness to
it .Some of the "Fort Jackson 8"
were black enlistees.
Second, and most important, it's
not the movement's job to solve
the warmakers' problems f o r
them. The heart of Bill's argu-
ment is that ". . . t h e people
would be better off to preserve the
draft and resist it, than to elim-
inate it for its inconvenience and
live forever in blissful detachment
from the government's wars." In
other words, the movement should
preserve what it seeks to change,
in order to have something to or-
ganize people against!
The warmakers provide us with
plenty to fight against. Our task
is to organize to end evils. The
war machine's preferred method
of raising manpower is the draft.
They used it in both world wars
and in Korea. They retained it as
the best way to man the Cold War
military. They sped it up for use
against Vietnam.
WE DON'T HAVE TO HELP
our "leaders" come up with an
ideal replacement for the draft.
An article in this week's U.S. News
& World Report quotes numerous
Army generals to the effect that
nothing can replace the draft in
maintaining an Army of the size
they need. In short, we're n o t
playing games like "Preserve the
Draft And Resist It." We're ser-
iously organizing a movement that
will have the strength to end the
draft and force Nixon to bring all
the troops home.
Bill makes another point, that
"it is still the poor and the black
men who will fill the ranks of the-
'volunteer army'."
First, this very real evil would
not be a consequence of any
changeover, but is already there
in the draft. Second, naturally the
warmakers' new system will be
racist and exploit the poor. By op-
posing the draft we don't pledge
support to the replacement. We'll
fight whatever means the Admin-
istration devises to man and con-
tinue its war under "difficult cir-
cumstances."
Having won a victory, we'll go
on to force a further retreat by
making the circumstances more
difficult. And we won't stop until
all the troops are brought home
and the Vietnamese, have r e a l
self-determination!
JOIN US in marching to the
draft board, Thursday, March
19th. Free Speech f o r anti-war
GI's! End the Draft!
-Joint Anti-draft Committee
SMC-New Mobe
March 5
-w
I'
m
41
!s
4i
"Congratulations, Mr. President... it's
about time we did something about
land and air pollution!".
Students and
the
University in
the age of
conscience
(EDITOR'S NOTE: The author is a Pro-
fessor in the History Department.)
By ARTHUR MENDEL
First of Two Parts
WAVE OF innovations sweeping our
campuses reflects more than a passing
fever. Student activism responsible for .it
will neither end when we leave Vietnam
nor be cooled down by such remedies as
abolishing the draft or lowering the voting
age. For both the innovations and the ac-
tivism are symptoms of a dramatic social
transformation through which some of the
essential attributes of the "modern age"
are being challenged as vigorously as the
early moderns challenged t h e medieval
mind and mode.
Convention lists three great revolutions
as hallmarks of the modern age: scientific
discovery, economic progress, and the tri-
umph of the nation state. All three were
linked by a common ethos which valued
above all else growth, efficiency, and pow-
er. "Better" was synonymous with bigger,
faster, richer, stronger, more and more.
Both ends and means were severely eco-
nomic, obsessed, that is with maximization.
Reason itself acquired this meaning asX
did man, the rational being. Man was ho-
mo sapien, and knowledge meant power.
The portrait is tediously familiar, but,
cliches though they are, "economic man"
and "Protestant ethic" remain the most
tional performance of whatever tasks were
set before them.
Pressured by too many instructors im-
posing too-large assignments and by the
relentless lecture schedules, deadlines, ex-
aminations and grades, students had time
only for rapid storage of great quantities
of information and for mastering desig-
nated techniques. Tasks were ardently or
resentfully fulfilled, never questioned, and
whatever pleasure there was derived not.
from new insights gained or from a sense
of personal growth, but from the stamp of
official approval for jobs - any jobs --
well done.
Judgment was reduced to weighing al-
ternative strategies f o r achieving goals
that others set. Evaluating the goals them-
selves was regarded by students as well as
faculty as intolerable presumption a n d
seldom tried. Students worked hard, do-
cilely did their best to win the grades that
step by step secured their future, and cared
next to nothing about what it all meant.
AND THIS WAS just what the system
wanted: since students were destined only
for the world of efficient means, of fixed
technical roles, there was no need to foster
a critical judgment of ends and values. In
the event that subjective judgment did
somehow survive decades of primary, sec-
ondary, and undergraduate busy-work, it
was rooted out by the implacable "profes-
sionalism" of the graduate school, which
questions of goals, priorities, ends, and al-
ternatives to the experts and, authorities,
as they had so w e11 learned to do in
school.
Out of school as in school, they took
no real part in the decisions that deter-
mined their lives and, often, their deaths.
Out of school, as in school, they were good
material security. And they and the so-
ciety they built won the battle gloriously
on all fronts. Science conquered nature.
The economic miracle conquered want at
least for them. The state flourished.
WRITING OVER A DECADE AGO, as
insightful a social critic as Aldous.Huxley
sadly foresaw only more of the same, a
dreary advance of modern, post-industrial
society toward his Brave New World.
In the United States - and America
is' the prophetic image of the rest of
the urban-industrial world as it will
be a few years from now - recent
public opinion polls have revealed that
an actual majority of young people in
their teens, the voters of tomorrow,
have no faith in democratic institu-
tions, see no objection to censorship
of unpopular ideas, do not believe that
government of the people by the peo-
ple is possible and would be perfectly
content, if they can continue to live
in the style to which the boom has ac-
customed them, to be ruled f r o m
above, by an oligarchy of assorted ex-
grounded. (Brave New World Revisit-
ed).
We owe it to the youth of our country
that Huxley's depressing prophecy strikes
us today as groundless and even quaintly
old-fashioned. Surprisingly, considering all
that he had seen and described of the af-
fluent elite, lie overlooked t h e dialectic
that leads from satiety and boredom to
conscience and commitment, from, in fact,
his own Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, and
Those Barren Leaves to his later activism
as a social and political commentator. Ap-
parently he did not believe that our youth
would be able to see what h8 and so many
like him had seen long ago, that the wea-
pons of power and progress - science,
economic growth, and the nation state -
with which Western society won its se-
curity have become principal threats to
that security .
IT IS THIS AWARENESS and the so-
cially-conscious activism it inspires that
more than anything else distinguishes the
new students from their predecessors,
Science may remain for the new students
mankind's most prodigious benefactor and
they may continue to regard its sense of
demonstrable truth as one of mankind's
most cherished possessions. But they know
that scientists have stocked an arsenal of
nuclear, bacteriological a n d chemical
monstrocities and devised a battery of in-
genious devices to invade our privacy and
Similarly, our country's titanic economic
growth, notwithstanding its acknowledged
contribution to human welfare, outrages
the new students by its compulsive accum-
ulation of costly rubbish, its spoilation of
our natural environment, its close asso-
ciation with the preparation for and en-
gagement in war, its indifference to social
ills, and, underlying it all, i t s exclusive
promotion within culture and personality
of aggressive and materialistic drives to
the detriment of more humane potentials.
Finally the nation-state, often consider-
ed the final stage in the long progress of
communal security, appears to the new
students as perhaps the greatest threat of
all, not only to individual security (par-
ticularly of those forced to honor with
their lives the Leaders' paranoiac fantas-
ies) but to the continuation of humanity
itself.
IT'IS THIS INCISIVE and radical -crit-
ique of the cornerstones of our culture that
lies behind the current turmoil in educa-
tion, tle massive, chaotic, infuriating and
inspiring efforts toward its fundamental
reorientation.
As long as scientific discovery, economic
progress, and national power were accept-
ed in fact (if not always in theory) as our
principal goals, the purpose of education
was simply to train technicians for the ef-
ficient pursuit of these absolute ends, in
4-1.ma , n n.,nr .41,ohA an.nv
EDUCATION FOR T H E new student,
therefore, cannot be what it was for the
compliant a n d complaisant ,functionary.
For the functionary, concerned only with
meeting successfully the prescribed tasks,
education proceeds u n d e r the aegis of
economics, the realm of means, techniques,
and rationally ordered systems. For the
new students, committed to opposing the
customary ends and seeking 'alternatives,
education is primarily a political process
enacted in the realm of ends, v a 1 u e s,
judgment, and choice.
The functionary leaves higher education
as an obedient occupant of some specified
role, as homo economicus. The new stu-
dent leaves as a citizen, homo humanus.
The functionary asks no questions, since
the big ones have already been answered
for him. The citizen is above all concerned
with the big questions and insists on tak-
ing a persistent part in their resolution.
The fuctionary takes no part in the decis-
ions that affect his life either in school or
out. The new student insists on taking part
in the key decisions both before and after
graduation, realizing full well that they go
together, that there is no magic that trans-
mutes submissive students into self-confi-
dent, active citizens.
IN BOTH FORM AND CONTENT, edu-
cation for the new students is the opposite
of what it is for the functionaries. With
regard to content, the new students have
4
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