Seventy-eight years of editorial freedom
Edited and managed by students of the University of Michigan
under authority of Board in Control of Student Publications
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ATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1969
NIGHT EDITOR: MARCIA ABRAMSON
Safeguards needed
for polem s un11i
fo oieme' uio
DURING the last month policemen
from the nation's four major cities
have gathered in Cleveland to consider
formulating a, constitution for a'national
policemen's union.
While the idea is certainly palpable to
any who espouse the rights of employes
to collective bargaining, serious questions
are raised in this particular case because
of the atmosphere of the meetings held
so far.
The patrolmen have spent the greater
part of their time not discussing the
merits of wage guidelines or job benefits,
but rather the "undue public criticism"
of the forces in Chicago and New York.
It is obvious from- the tone of these
discussions that the policemen are not so
upset about the status of wages and
benefits as they are with the nation's
freedom to criticize horror. More than
several times patrolmen have inculcated
into their pre-constitutional mumblings,
that it is their right to decide how and
when a billy club should be used. And
not unpredictably, their dictim is ex-
ceptionally to the point: use it when you
feel like using it.
It is not difficult to foresee such an
organization taking a dangerous turn -~
it could become, in effect, an autonom-
ous military segment of society.
PERHAPS A point at which the union
could be limited is to specifically deny
it the right to bargain for its autonomy
and in this way keep its conduct always
subject to 'civilian orders (from the
prosecuting attorneys, etc.) It would have
legal collective bargaining rights f o r
wages, job benefits and supplements, but
at no time could the union negotiate
who has the authority over police con-
duct - it would always remain, and must
remain with the men who are directly
responsible to the public -the elected
and appointed civilian officials.
To insure that no under-the-table-
bargaining involving this authority comes
into negotiations, it would be necessary
to make all negotiations public.
Even now police by themselves deter-
mine to a large extent exactly what the
law is. They decide whether to enforce
certain laws, to restrict them, or to ne-
glect them. To give police complete au-
thority over their own conduct would
give them even greater opportunity to
force their mores upon the rest of so-
ciety.
IT IS CLEAR that the public is generally
discontented with the police forces in
many large cities, especially Chicago.,
This discontent manifested in congres-
sional concern as well as private com-
plaints is a force in suppressing unneed-
ed violence. To cut off public .influence
gives the already potentially dangerous
police far too much power.
-JIM HECK
(The Editorial Directors, realiz-
ing that not every student may
have the time or inclination to
stumble through their more
lengthy news analyses, have decid-
ed to devote this column to the
tidbits of news which have drift-
ed across the editorial desk dur-
ing the week).
By HOWARD KOHN
Associate Editorial Director
'THE PRIVATE sector" has been
the latest catch phrase mas-4
querading as a solution for our
domestic problems. No one ser-
iously expects private enterprise
to do everything.
But three large unidentified
insurance companies exceeded all
expectations this week by offering
to buy the entire 27 campuses of
the California state college sys-
tem.
Claiming they would be more
efficient at educating than the
present bureaucracy, the insur-
ance companies also noted they
would eliminate part of the heavy
tax burden on Californians who
also support the 11-campus Uni-
versity of California.
Governor Ronald Reagan can
see some other advantages to the
plan, since activists could be
sternly disciplined with greater
legal impunity.
And if shareholder earnings
ever decline, they can always raise
student tuition.
* * *
DEARBORN, MICH., this week
received a "Distinguished Achieve-
ment Award" for its 1968 anti-
litter program. The Dearborn
Press paid tribute to the city's
beautification plan in a page one
story. On the same front page ran
an article headlined "Integration
Won't Be Forced Here."
* * *
HERE AT THE University a
student movement is underway to
reform the language requirement.
Under-a new plan, each LSA fac-
ulty member would be required to
pass a proficiency test in a foreign
language every two years, or lose
tenure.
Advocates of the plan, many of
whom have been impressed with
their own language courses, point
out that the test would help pro-
the order, however, and the ships
and planes were called back.
THE FAILURE of the Navy's
vaunted communication s y s t e m
was another embarrassing point
in the testimony. The radio offi-
cer on the Pueblo needed 10 hours
to raise Japan after radio silence
was broken.
And persistent reports again say
that the Navy needed help from
Russian submarines to finally pin-
point the wreckage of the Scor-
pion, lost at sea for five months
before being located.
But the Navy refuses to give
up. It contracted this week with
Grumman Aircraft Engineering
Corp. to develop prototypes of the
F-14 fighter plane.
Estimated to cost $5 billion over
the next 10 years, the planes will
be the largest single defense ex-
penditure in U.S. history.
PROTEST OVER nudity at
Grinnell College in Grinnell,
Iowa, this week ,ceptered on Hugh
Hefner, the author of "playboy
philosophy." Six women and four
men took off all their clothes
while singing and holding up signs
which read "Liberated women are
even more fun."
The group decried "Playboy's
images of lapdog female play-
things with idealized proportions
and their junior-executive-on-the
-way-up possessors."
A spokesman for Hefner in
Chicago said he was "shaken up."
fessors improve their fluency
should they ever want to travel.
* * *
NON-VIOLENT sit-ins have al-
ways provoked some truly aca-
demic reactions from the great
minds in our universities. Latest
convert to the hysteria is Prof.
Bruno Bettelheim of the Univer-
sity of Chicago.
"I saw a small group of stu-
dents disrupt the universities in
pre-Hitler Germany," reflected
Bettelheim after a sit-in at Chi-
cago last week. "And I see the
same thing happening here from
the so-called left."
University of Chicago uber
alles?
* * *
AT SAN FRANCISCO State the
embattled American Federation of
Teachers has published a prose
epic called "Quotations from
Chairman S.I. Hayakawa."
There are extensive excerpts
from Hayakawa's 1939 classic
"Language in Thought and Ac-
tion." And no greater testimony to
Hayakawa stands than the relev-
ance of his words 30 years later.
"In early stages of culture," he
wrote, "the principal means of
imposing patterns of behavior was,
of course, physical coercion."
Hayakawa's contemporary quo-
tations also point to his percep-
tive grasp of a situation. "I will
not try to come to terms with
anarchists, hooligans or Yahoos,"
he is quoted. "I am not afraid of
these people, for God's sake."
His calm and easygoing manner
is also reflected: "I've sat here
and listened for more than 20
minutes while you've been report-
ing on your talks with my ene-
mies" and "I resent very much
this group of newsmen ganging up
on me this way."
* * *
U.S. NAVY traditionalists were
immediately incensed when Cap-
tain Lloyd Bucher, a non-Anna-
polis officer, surrendered t h e
Pueblo a year ago. But not until,
this week's closed-door hearings
did the intensity of the bitterness
surface.
Top-ranking Navy officers ad-
mitted that ships and planes were
set in motion to destroy the
Pueblo and its 84-member crew
hours after its capture last Jan-
uar. Navy brass said their plan
was to bomb the Pueblo before the
secret material aboard could be
taken ashore in the Wonsan har-
bor.
Lyndon Johnson refused to okay
the in formed source
--fl7tlJAMES WECHSLER 4AM1 5V
Bickering while the killing goes on
FOR MANY Americans the delays in
Paris-so grotesquely dramatized
for so long by the interminable, insuf-
ferable debate over the shape of a nego-
tiating table-have been an interval of
exasperation and almost an incitement
to riot.
But for some of our citizens these
slow-motion proceedings contain a spe-
cial agony. They are those whose hus-
hands or sons or other loved ones re-
main under fire at the front in a war
that rational men realize is all over
except for the diplomatic shouting and
the purposeless shooting. They are also
those whose young are facing imminent
induction and are grappling with crises
of conscience over whether to resist the
draft.1
Nothing that happens now can mat-
ter too much to those "next of kin"
who have already received their fateful
notices, or who have welcomed home the
maimed and the blind.
BUT FOR THOSE who still inhabit
the limbo of uncertainty and dread,.
these must be the worst days. They
have been told by President Nixon and
others that any step toward an im-
mediate ceasefire is impractical because
this is a "guerrilla war" in which no ef-
fective restraints can be imposed on the
NLF until broader agreements have been
reached.
Perhaps the point has some technical
validity, but it can hardly be meaningful
to the mother whose son is slain tonight
on some obscure patrol mission in some
clash of dubious significance..
And if that is the ordeal of those who
dwell in remote America, consider the
Vietnamese-after two decades of war-
whose homes and families are still
caught in the cross-fire of a conflict of
which most of them wearied long ago,
and for whom new bombardment and
strafing must evoke only the cry: "Will
they never leave us alone?"
IN PARIS the other day Vice Presi-
dent Nguyen Cao Ky gathered around
him an assemblage of journalists and
laid down new terms for negotiation
that, in the words of an Associated
Press dispatch, provided "little chance
for breaking the deadlock."
But there remains the uneasy sense
that he has just drafted some "captured
secret documents" for Joe Alsop and
others who will produce them as evi-
dence that the enemy is on the verge of
collapse and that one more manifesta-
tion of American military might will be
the knockout blow.
So far the Nixon Administration,
despite the heavy pressures of the Also-
pian battalions, in the Pentagon and
Saigon, has given no apparent encour-
agement to Ky's delusions.
But the critical hours are still ahead,
involving as they may the question of
whether any accord can be achieved
without an affront to the Ky-Thieu
regime and a release of those elements
in South Vietnam-Buddhist, progres-
sive Catholics, students-currently being
treated as enemies of the state.
MEANWHILE ONE GOES back to the
initial sadness. How much more ex-
penditure of American life is tolerable
in a time when escalation of the war is
unthinkable and when random military
action cruelly multiplies casualty lists
already too long?
I will be told that any sign of "soft-
ness" may jeopardize our bargaining
position, and that the other side shows
no disposition to ratify an informal
truce. The concept of "talk-and-fight"
is in effect embraced by both sides, each
attributing original sin to the other.
But who is kidding whom? Barring an
almost unforeseeable development, there
will be no return to the tragic miscon-
ceptions that 16d Lyhdon Johnson into
political disaster in this wasteland.
Neither is there serious indication that
Hanoi, having begun to dream of recon-
struction and shadowed by the Moscow-
Peking struggle, is plotting a massive
new intervention that could trigger de-
mands for resumption of the U.S. bomb-
ings.
Surely it is time to reduce military
action to a defensive minimal, to avoid
any stupid "charge of the light brigade,"
and to consider, as Sen. Mansfield has
proposed, the beginnings of an Amer-
ican withdrawal. Ky's latest unilateral'
declaration of his terms can only
strengthen the suspicion that no other
language will persuade him of our re-
solve to end this war, and our impati-
ence with obstructionism.
THE AMERICAN DEAD and wound-
ed, the dissenters languishing in jail and
others facing imprisonment are far too
many; Vietnam's victims will never be
fully counted. After all the Communist
and American praises of salvation for
the battered land, Thich Nhat Nanh, the
eloquent Buddhist monk, cried: "Who
will save us from salvation?"
In this final phase let there at last
be a moratorium on murder and let
death take a holiday, no matter how
many weeks or months are required to
end the stalemate.
(C) New York Post
THE UNIVERSITY has hooked two of the
biggest names in the academic world with
the funds garnered from last year's $55 million
drive. The new Bentley Chair in history has
been accepted by David Donald, one of America's
foremost Civil War historians. Donald, professor
of history at Johns Hopkins University, is au-
thor of the Pulitzer-winning "Charles Summer
and the Coming of the Civil War."
The Walgreen Chair in Human Understand-
ing has been offered to and is expected to be
accepted by Nathan Glazer, a leading American
sociologist. Glazer, who co-authored "Beyond
the Melting Pot" with Daniel P. Moynihan, is
presently teaching at the University of Cali-
fornia at Berkeley.,
Considerablefriction occurred In the history
department when the Bentley Chair was origin-
ally offered to Daniel J. Boorstin, the controver-
sial University of Chicago historian who wrote
"The American."
Prof. Arnold Kaufman of the philosophy de-
partment will leave the University to teach at
UCLA after this semester.
Kaufmah is a charter member on the national
steering committee of the New Democratic
Coalition which is trying to coalesce liberal fac-
tions within the party. Reports say Kaufman
is looking for a position with a Democratic
administration in 1972.
Although not under the pressure of "publish
or perish," Prof. Marvin Felheim of the English.
department helped write the lyrics to The
Supremes' latest hit, "Living in Shame."
Felheim met the lyricist for The Supremes on
a plane flying from Los Angeles and offered to
help. He didn't even ask for a percentage of
the record's receipts.
* * *
William Hays, dean of the literary college,
did not study a foreign language as an under-
graduate at North Texas State University.
* * *
The University Press has released a literary
map of Michigan writers' in residence, which
one source called the biggest put-on since the
Sesquicentennial. Just as the University's birth
date was backed from 1837 to 1817 to accom-
modate the $55 million program,.the map creates
Me
a mythical heritage of Michigan authors. James
Fenimore Cooper and Earnest Hemingway,
among others, are listed as having "significant
ties" with Michigan.
* * *
There may be as many as seven candidates
for SGC president in the March election. SGC
members Mark Rosenbaum and Bob Nelson have
all but announced that they will be running to-
gether for president and vice president.
SGC incumbent Roger Keats, Mike Farrell
and Howard Miller are also reportedly consider-
ing making the leap for the presidency. And
Peter Denton, organizer of the Rent Strike, is
being pushed into the race by campus radical
leaders. Meanwhile former IFC officer Bob Hir-
shon, who lost out in petitioning for a vacant
SGC seat, is piling up promised endorsements.
Lurking in the shadow is, former SGC mem-
ber E. O. Knowles., If Knowles should enter the
race, many of the other candidates' aspirations
will quickly evaporate, since he has been; re=
elected to council for three years. However,
Knowles is not enrolled this semester and may
have trouble meeting candidate requirements.
a
::
41
Letters: On
To the Editor:
IN ANSWER to Mark Rottsha-
fen's letter printed Feb. 6,
there are a few assumptions made
that are incorrect.
First, the Tenant's Union does
not claim, as I would, that "all
Ann Arbor landlords are b a d."
It claims, instead, t h a t several
landlords, acting' in collusion,
have found ways to increase rents,
decrease services, ignore building
code regulations, illegally with-
hold damage deposits, force ten-
ants to sign a 12-month lease or
pay ten months' rent for an eight-
month lease, require roughly
three- months' rent before occu-
pancy and exercise disproportion-
ate influence with the City Coun-
cil in questions of zoning law.
The Tenants Union is to be a
bargaining agent between the ten-
'ants and the landlords and seeks
to remedy these flagrant violations
of tenants' rights and state law.
THIS MEANS where landlords
are clearly exploiting the ghetto-
ized students who have no choice
but to live in the University ghet-
to, the Tenants Union, via the
Tenants Union, Mark could prob-
ably have avoided the legal has-
sle and expense. The union could
deal at once with the landlord,
using levers like the threat of bad
publicity, in the case Mark's land-
lord is to withhold his damage de-
posit. The money h e 1 d by the
landlord is not stolen, simply
"withheld." Let the distinction be
made.
WHY WOULD a landlord want
to withhold a damage deposit,
given that pressure from the ten-
ants usually forces him to cough
it up? Simply because that mon-
ey, withheld, represents interest-
free capital for further develop-
ment and growth.
Alternatively, the 1 a n d 1 o r d
could've invested the money in
bonds or perhaps is simply col-
lecting bank interest on it.
Even the pleasant-little-old-lady
who rents her upstairs is not iso-
lated from the trends of rent-in-
creases. Indeed, she generally sup-
ports rent hikes or attempts at
enforcement of the 12-month lease
because "everyone else is doing it."
She justifies a monthly charge
Remember, landlords,
due to
long-standing tradition establish-
ed by years of stomping on ten-
ants have come to count on mon-
ey gained by withholding damage
deposits.
Further, even t h e University
gets into the action. In the past,
dorm fee hikes often prompted
off-campus housing rental hikes.
The University is not uricon-
cerned with the housing situation.
Currently it has proposed t h e
building of low-cost housing for.
1000 students in 1972.
Sounds good at first glance, but
a thousand is not_ a significant
proportion of the student body.
Further, this proposal has a low-
priority in University building
plans.
IN UNDERDEVELOPED coun-
tries, peasants frequently resist
change that would benefit them
because they are content with ex-
isting conditions..
I first thought that you were
a landlord, Mark Rottshafer, but
you are probably one of the last
of the holdouts with a peasant
SGC-CNP
To the Editor:
I WISH TO criticise the action
taken last week by the SGC
when they allocated $100 to the
Citizens for. New Politics. SGC is
set up as a student governing
agency, and funds (which come
from a part of each student's tui-
tion) are allocated to it for that
purpose.
Since SGC is supposed to be
functioning in the interest of all
students, and since it is financed
equally by every student, I feel
that SGC has an obligation to re-
frain from contributing to parti-
san groups-be they the CNP or
the College Republicans.
If the CNP feels that Mr. McCoy
would be an interesting speaker,
they can provide for his speaking
fee themselves, like any ;other
club on campus, or they can try
to work through UAC.
They certainly shouldn't, how-
ever, try to obtain general student
funds to pay for their private club
activities. SGC should also realize
its responsibilities and refuse to
contribute these general student
the peasant mentality
.., .-,.
k l4'I td ,
I
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