4e ir4tigzn BadI Seventy-eight years of editorial f reedom Edited and managed by students of the University of Michigan just a song uin the wind To make sorghum syrup or build int( 1. 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. THURSDAY, MARCH 13, 1969 NIGHT EDITOR: MARTIN A. HIRSCHMAN r FBA policies: Apathy And negligence THE BOARD OF THE Fraternity Buyers Association appears to be drifting into the same apathy that affects its mem- bers. The board has been continually negli- gent. Recently, it was presented with ser- ious indications of malpractice in the Rio- pelle meat company but it refused to no- tify its members of the alleged malprac- tice. But worse, it refused 'to investigate the problems reported in m e a t quality and pricing byRiopelle. In January, C a r 1 Stevens, steward of Sigma Nu, complained that the Riopelle Packing Co. was shortweigl ing the fra- ternity in its meat deliveries. Unfortu- nately, the board felt there were enough positive reactions to balance the nega- tive reports, and did not investigate fur- ther. This forced Stevens to act independent- ly, calling in county and state officials to witness a meat delivery that was from one to 84 ounces short of the listed weights.! THE EVIDENCE of short-weighting has since been overwhelming and the practice of short-weighting seems wide- spread, but FBA manager Dave Moeller was "not overly concerned" and the ma- jority of board members agreed with him. Though Stevens informed FBA imme- diately of the shortweighting, Corwith Hanson, chairmani of the board, said members were not{ notified of the situa- tion because some board members were "afraid of a libel suit." Only after an article appeared in The Daily March 2 did Hanson send out an informational letter to FBA members. It is doubtful he would have assumed this responsibility if The paily article had not appeared. But t h e FBA's negligence transcends this individual problem. T h e board re- fuses to revieW companies' prices and quality throughout the year. As a result, Sigma Nu, for example, believes it may be losing $300 per year on meat deliver- ies. FBA's responsibility e x t e n d s beyond summer authorization and winter bil- ling. FBA has the ability to correlate facts on prices and quality that individual members do not have.. One possible rectification of the situa- tion could be through the reviewing of the 1967 report on FBA by Myron Hart- wig, t h e n FBA chairman, in which he strongly advocates the creation of a qual- ity control board. The board -would be a watchdog committee whose functions would include "updating stewards with changes in prices, new products, or other, information, discussing buying habits with cooks and stewards, and periodical- ly'checking the quality of food being sold individual houses by any supplier." A lot of responsibility for FBA inaction rests with stewards. Stewards have un- fortunately refused, to take the initiative in understanding good f o o d quality or fair prices. Peter Keith, FBA chairman for t h e International Council, has ar- ranged an educational meeting for stew- ards, which is a progressive step in eras- ing steward apathy. IT IS AN INTERESTING sidelight to-note that almost $3,000 in rebates to FBA members has been sitting in the FBA of- fice for more than two months. Stewards were notified of the money awaiting their houses; why haven't they picked it up? But for that matter, what is to stop the FBA office from sending the checks through the mail? FBA DOES PROVIDE low prices and good quality on staple items - can- ned goods, fruit, vegetables, frozen foods - giving its members savings of 13 to 15 per cent a year on bills. But FBA should not rest on those lau- rels. Thirty-five per cent of all house bills are meat bills. FBA must assume its re- sponsibility for quality control if it ex- pects to continue its function of increas- ing members' buying power. -LANIE LIPPINCOTT Sparks, Ga. -MANY OF US who are sensitive to the attrocities in our society find ourselves on the verge of predicting this nation won't last much longer. With the blacks, the poor, the unem- ployed, the diseased and disenfranchised, a heartening prognosis would be ridiculous. But terms such as "blacks" or "poor" are textbook words. And unfortunately, when we consider them we think in terms of Myrdal's numbers, statistics and graphs. They are impersonal socio-circumstances, not groups of people. Our feelings of doom are thus predicted on what we read, here- say and our limited experiences. AT 4 A.M. a week ago a past Daily editor and I traveled south. We spent almost 60 hours in travel and a good amount of time talking with people in the hinderlands of the south. These few hours of being where the problem is are certainly not sufficient for any descriptive analysis of the south's poor, nor can it bring into experience my cynical perspective on the nation's poverty problem. But nevertheless this brief inter- lude of depressing reality redefined my many blurred and ugly memories of the south. And it brought to disgusting Ii f e Myrdal's uphuman figures. ONE CAN GET INTO a $5,000 automo- bile and travel from Ann Arbor to t h e Florida keys seeing only burgeoning mod- ern cities, rampant industrialization, beau- tifully-trimmed oak trees and a comfort- ing bit of nostalgic heritage. One can tra- verse Georgia, Kentucky and Alabama re- ceiving the impression that poverty has been ierradicated and that freedom a n d equality arp distinct characteristics of the country. The very arrogant claim that "we all know such a rosy picture isn't the w a y things are" falls absymally short of char- acterizing the horrid situation that really exists. For America is not simply very poor in' places, but it is deceptively poor. The coun- try's elite are extremely- adept at hiding poverty and disease. "They were going to bring the highway through these parts," Mrs. George Blais- dell of Clarksville, Ga. told me. "But them government men said it'd be best if Clarks- ville wasn't seen, so th e highway never came through here." THE BLAISDELLS run a small S h e 11 service station on old highway 301 in Georgia. Before the mighty interstate was laid, 301 was the m a i n artery through Georgia, but it was too close to the diseased white trash on the south of Clarksville or the darkie colonies outside Macon. So the interstate curves a little now west of Blais- dell, east of Macon, and travels across de- serted marsh and farmfields. "Helena makes spending money by can- ning sorghum. We grow sorghum. Sorghum and beans," Mr. Blaisdell explains. "The station pays for itself. Maybe someday. ., But he didn't know how to finish his sen- tence. The Blaisdells are ninety miles from At- lanta, but none in the family had ever been there. They are poor and their . children gaunt, diseased with afflictions unheard of in most twentieth century cities. Mrs. Blaisdell has to read the gas pump as no one else can read - even numbers. TRAVELING THROUGH the back roads of Kentucky it is nauseating to see the ob- viousness of refuse dumped in the lowest spots so that when'. the rain comes t h e streams of garbage f 1 o w into the valley and not over the town. Only a few miles s o u t h of Lexington children are barefoot in winter. It m a y seem to some trite to say something we may not feel is so unknown, but to see this as the rule and not the exception is;cer- tainly astounding. The roads of Kentucky and lower Ten- nessee are lined with huts around which are draped home-spun blankets and mats. "Oh, yes, they's all done rite heah. It's all the women do," I was told. It is pitiful that these women who wear summer blous- es in the dead of winter must make their living on the happenstance of a car stop- ping during a wayside trip to buy a sou- venir. AND THE MARVELOUS ideals of inte- gration and renovation seem distant hopes in South Carolina and Georgia, Alabama and even parts of Florida. The blacks live on one side of town. They are never seen in the core of the towns and villages - they are a subculture hidden even from the eyes-of those who want to seek them out. Nor is it uncommon to see the plantation in northern Florida and southern Alabama. Near Mariana, northern Florida, small farms of less than 300 acres supply one well-built brick house ivith its rose beds, and supply a dozen or so share-croppers with rotted wooden shacks. THE IMPRESSION that short trip left with me hasn't made me single out the southeast United States as something ut- terly obscene. It has, though, reinforced my cynical conviction that such a dastard- ly condition exists in many places in this country.i And there is something extremely per- verse about this poverty beyond the fact it is sometimes so well-hidden. THE GAP BETWEEN people like the Blaisdells and people like myself is fright- ening. Their knowledge of the world ex-' tends only as far as the service station maps carried to them by the oil trucker. Their books are numbered and few. When I asked them about television they responded weary-eyed as though the tube were a disneyland-a wonderment, a fantasy like an antimated cartoon of slap- stick reality that never really happens. In Perry, Ala. and Oak Ridge, Tenn. I talked with others who had never left their homes, who like the Blaisdells knew very little. The blacks were so far removed from my culture it was impossibile to talk with them. , erstates y jim heck I AM STILL illiterate enough I can iden- tify with the Blaisdell. But I am literate enough to envision the day when the dif- ference between me and them is so great it will be impossible to identify with them. When this day arives we will no longer be squabbling over the capabilities or in- tellects of men, nor even their equality, but rather their humanness. As we separate the ape from man because man can think, someday we might separate the Blaisdells from us because we can operate digital computers and they can't' or because we understand Keats and they don't know even know who he is. The rapidity by which we are extending our knowledge is not astounding in itself. What is frightening is the fact that we are leaving others behind. And the gap of knowledge and language is certain to be- come insurmountable until there will be at least two distinct and irreconciable classes of society. AND THE EXTENSIONS of our intel- lect - our machines - will have more identification with ourselves than the Blaisdells so when the time arrives that we need more space for memory banks or moon terminals, the Blaisdells will have to go. We will be unable to educate them quickly enough, they will not have even the basic understandings. Thus, it is very difficult to it in a class- room and discuss Hume or thermodynamics knowing all the while such thoughts are beyond the comprehension of the Blaisdells and knowing also such thoughts are the cornerstones of what appears to be the conscious future erradication of the 'bar- barian, inferior Blaisdells. PERHAPS I AM too sentimental. Per- haps it is the mind and even better the thoughts that are'important and not the men. But such a conclusion is tenuous at best, based on the idea that progressive intellectualism means more than the process of making sorghum syrup - and I'm just not sure it does.. 1 s Ugly words are in, the ears of the listener *1 The ABM: Presidential indecisiveness JT WAS PRESIDENT Richard Nixon who, assuming the mantle of office, pleaded with the nation to lower its voice. Now at the end of his honeymoon, Nix- on's stalling on the ABM decision causes us to wonder if the new President is hard of hearing and that perhaps we should resume shouting. Colonel tGriffin NQRTH CAROLINA SENATOR Sam Er- vin and a host of Southern and other conservative Senators were beaten back in their attempts to attach a crippling rider to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Many felt that the amendment would have forced renegotiation of the treaty. Unfortunately, it must be noted that voting with such forward looking Sena- tors as Russell, Talmadge, Stennis, Thur- mond and Goldwater was Michigan Sen- ator Robert Griffin.' Senator Griffin has again demonstrat- ed that his presence in the"Senate-will re- sult only in continued embarrassment for the people of Michigan. -S. A. Agitator AN ASSOCIATED PRESS story featured in yesterday's Daily revealed that the Justice Department plans to prosecute "roving campus agitators" under a sec- tion of the 1968 Civil Rights Act which makes it illegal to cross state lines for the purpose of inciting a riot. One such agitator was so ubiquitous in his rabble-rousing last year that it is the Attorney-General's duty to make an ex- ample of him by bringing him to trial im- mediately. Wherever he spoke - Wash- ington, New York, Los Angeles, and es- pecially Chicago -civil disturbances fol- lowed. Surely the free sneech nrovisinns nf the Nixon had announced that his decision about proceeding with the highly contro- versial ABM system would come early this week. Now, the decision will not be an- nounced until later in the week. With such vociferous opposition to the ABM being voiced by'scientists, journal- ists, and key Senators why would Nixon postpone making the long-awaited decis- ion on the missile system? PERHAPS NIXON JUST has not had the time to come to a decision because of the exhaustive amount of time that he is spending on his legislative program. Af- ter his first two months in office, he has already sent an unprecedented two pieces of legislation to Congress - one, a much- needed mine safety bill and the other, his watered-down proposal for electoral re- form. Or, equally possible, Nixon the enter- tainer might be delaying to heighten sus- pense. His g a 1 a cabinet announcement television special a n d his well-choreo- graphed press conferences show that Nix- on certainly is not above rehearsing de- cisions or timing them for theatrical ef- fect. Probably, Nixon really is, like he says, waiting to explore the problem further since he undoubtedly is aware of the im- minence of his first political battle. And like most frightened men 'going into bat- tle he, does not want to go it alone. So again he is probably telling the t r u t h when he says that he is waiting for de- fense chief Mel Laird to, r e t u r n from Vietnam. This is the most alarming excuse of all. For, it is certain that Laird will urge Nix- on to continue with deployment of the ABM system. It is also likely that Laird's voice will weigh heavier with the Presi- dent than those of opposing Senators and scientists. AT THE VERY LEAST, it might h a v e been hoped that Nixon would by now have reacted to the opposition to the ABM, made a decision sensitive to that (EDITOR'S NOTE: The following two-part article was written by Prof. Leonard Green- baum, Asst. Director of the Phoenix Project. Tie'article, copyrighted by the National Council of English Teachers, was written last year when Prof. Greenbaum taught in the engineering English department.) By LEONARD GREENBAUM RECENTLY, MY WIFE and I were in- vited to a friend's home for dinner. The hostess told us that a couple from Vienna would be joining us. When they ar- rived, they came into the living room, smiled, introduced themselves, and shook hands all around. We smiled back, straining with great effort to understand their in- comprehensible Viennese accent. For about a minute it was very difficult, almost imposible, to communicate. We could not even understand their names until suddenly a chance remark revealed that the new guests were not from Vienna at all. They were from London and their accent, far from being Viennese, was Brit- ish. From that moment on, there was no difficult in understanding them or that the;T names were John and Mary Roberts. What this encounter illustrated was that the difficulty posed by accent, and by dialect, is not in the tongue of the speaker but in the ear of the listener. That' night our set, our fix, was to hear English with a Viennese accent. We tuned out everything else, including. English with a British ac- cent. SIMILARLY, WE-that is all of us- have a set to hear an English that is a standard, unaccented central dialect, and we have difficulty understanding any varia- tion, be it regional, cultural, or national. We have a perceptual handicap and, ironic- ally, instead of trying to overcome our handicap, we propose to establish "normal" standards, i.e., to bring the dialect speaker to the level of the more powerful user of English.- Dialect has positive aspects-an expres- siveness, a wit, a separateness of its own making that are not part of standardized English. Most of all whether a person is from Korea, Israel, or, Mississippi, if he possesses a strong dialect, he works with language as an expressive tool-forming new words,) new phrases, and giving new meanings to old words. Dialect at its best is style. The desire to eliminate dialect is an egocentric solution proposed out "of power and out of traditional modes of education that have always shunned the experimental in favor of the pragmatic. This was how the "system" dealt with immigrants at the turn of the century and just prior to and during World War II, and it is how, simi- larly, some propose it should deal with rural or inner-city dialects in the 1960's. This desire, no doubt, will win out. I can predict what lies in our future-a uniform society, most likely in uniform. _ THOUGH WE ARE hastening to our meeting with Orwell-on his terms-the possibility of changing dialect arises out of the good motives of some-where it expresses a desire to allow people with strona dialpetto + h'avP aerps* +o +henpr- the white. The new assumption is gaining credibilty. It is identified in the Kerner Report at one end of its spectrum as "white racism." It is identified at the other end of its spectrum in the Coleman Report,'a 700-page statisticalstudy by the Department of Health, Education and Wel- fare entitled, "Equality of Educational Op- portunity." "WE SUSPECT, without proof," write the authors for the Coleman Report, "that thox forces that decrease the proportion of minority group members, especially Negroes, in the collegiate population result from practices and conditions, including history and attitude, that have not the intent but only the effect of discrimina- tion." This is a polite way of speaking. It is certainly a safe way; it may prove to be an accurate way. As I look at and listen to my colleagues, who have no Negro graduate students, who have-no Negro col- leagues in their departments, I hear them say: "There are so very few Negroes in my field, and there seems to be no particular avenues of reaching prospective students." Or, "So far we have not succeeded in at- tracting any new students of the minimum standard required in my department." Or, "We have and will continue to accept stu- dents solely on the basis of merit, without prejudice either way because of race." Or, "Our recruitment efforts are aimed at all promising students." Or, "I consider the matter of color one to which no attention should be paid.' I can only admire their idealism and suspect their perceptual abili- ty. What the Coleman Report says, without rancor, is that the problemis with the listener. IT IS NOT THE BLACK who has been operating a university-college system that decreases the proportion of whites. It is rather the white who runs a system that decreases the proportion of Negroes, in undergraduate schools, in graduate and professional schools, and on faculties. Within faculties, white atitudes toward solving the white problem are poor. They are not motivated to solve it. More often, they do not see that they have a problem. At best, they see society as having a problem, and for reasons nat- ural to universities, they are not inclined: to solve society's problems. Even when their attitudes change and they agree to seek solutions, their skills are often inadequate. They are, to put it bluntly, culturally de- prived. And this deprivation, like most long-term deprivations, has damaged their perceptual system in very real ways. AT A PTA MEETING of our neighbor- hood school, a school where approximately 22 per cent of the students, like the neigh- borhood in which they live, are Negro, white parents and white teachers, in com- ments throughout the evening, pictured the Negro students at the school as poor, un- dernourished, ill-clothed, rowdy, the source of obscenities, and as having poor intel- lectual potential. But the fact iq that tha aavn rninie At THEODORE SIZER, Dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education in a recent reference to that host of books by Jonathan Kozol, John Holt, Herbert Kohl, Edgar Friedenberg and Robert Coles, the new critics of'education, said: , The complaints of' the Non-Estab- lishment and the urban communities are often justified . . . Racial and class prejudices is no less pronounced in our school systems than elsewhere in our society, but it is doulIy vicious there as young children are its victims. Bureaucratic rigidity and political timidity abound. Most critically, much of what many schools do is irrelevant to any particular need of most chil- dren. What I think he is saying, and what I believe is true in universities as well as in elementary schools, is that the educational establishment is often irrelevant to the life In the physical and biological sciences, the mission-oriented needs have been rec- ognized and institutionally served by unI- versities since World War II. The social needs are not as well recognized. We are, in limited ways, beginning to serve them, but withgreat reluctance and uncertainty, afraid for some strange reason of losing an intellectual identity' we did not lose in weapons development or even in the development of less controversial but more pervasive computer technology. And when the universities are confronted with human problems the natural inclina- tion of the university is to solve them in a laboratory away from, rather than as an integral part of, the university cqmmunity. THE MISSION-ORIENTED needs of so- ciety. where race is concerned are gross. I know no other word to describe the fears and anticipations that are articulated ev- ery day. The narrowest, and what ought to be the simplest, need to satisfy is to de- segrate the higher education. In 1965 there were 4,491,269 college stu- dents in America. Only 207,316 were Ne- gro. By most estimates, more than half the Negro students attend Negro colleges. This leaves 100,000 Negro students scattered among nearly four and a h a I f million whites or a ratio of one to 43 in a country where every tenth man is a Negro. These 100,000 Negrb students who got in inte- grated schools are not faring as they should. The Coleman Report shows that in every ,region of the country, Negroes are more likely to enter the state college sys- tems rather than the state university sys- tems. Negroes are a smaller part of the student body in universities than in any other type of public institution. The im portance of this is that the state univer- sity is expected to be the best public in- stitution of higher learning within t he state."r The Coleman Report poses the propo- sition this way: If Negroes are less common in the state's best educational unit, it is irrel- evant whether choice, academic readi- ness, finances, recruitment practices, or, blind prejudice kept them away;, the pertinent observation is t h a t a larger proportion of Negroes than of, whites receive their college training In institutions that are inferior, i.e., that are less than the best the area intends to offer. T h e Coleman Report statistically an- swers that Negroes are 1 e s s common in state universities. Certainly this is true at this University where in the 1967-68 aca- demic year there were approximately, we think, 800 students who were Negro out of a student body of approximately 35,000. That figure may be as low as 500; it is no higher than 900. Three years ago its ceil- ing was 300. In 1966, out of 10,894 reported students in graduate and professional schools at the University, 105 were Negro. In 1968, -out of approximately 2,200 faculty, approximately 19 were Negrnoe T Iuse my own sehool be- *1 pi of its. students. Rather, it is responsive to itself. In 'higher education, it is possible to identify the source of this irrelevance as a conscious policy 'stemming from self'- definition. Alvin- Weinberg, Director of the Atomic Energy Commission's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, viewing higher education as a scientist and an administrator, defines the conflict as one that arises because the uni- versity is "discipline-oriented" and exists in a soceity that is "mission-oriented." The discipline-oriented university has as its purpose the creation and encourage- ment f +ha intllwtia1lif a a .nnrnm' that 1.